After Loss Guide exists because dealing with bereavement in the UK is harder than it needs to be. When someone dies, you're expected to navigate a maze of phone calls, paperwork and processes – often while grieving, often with no idea where to start.
Most of the information online is either generic ("funeral costs range from X to Y"), hidden behind sales funnels, or buried in government websites that assume you already know what you're looking for.
We wanted to build something better: a single, comprehensive resource with specific, practical information. Real phone numbers. Real costs. Real processes – not vague ranges and disclaimers.
That means covering the practical detail most sites skip: current fees at 344 UK cemeteries and 239 verified crematoriums, step-by-step bereavement guides for 227 companies and organisations, and dedicated coverage of what happens to accounts, subscriptions and contracts after someone dies.
How we research
Every piece of information on this site is researched from primary sources. We do not rely on secondary summaries or other websites. See our editorial policy for full details.
- Company bereavement guides: researched directly from each company's own published bereavement or deceased customer page. Phone numbers are confirmed from the live source at time of writing. We describe how processes work in practice, not as companies present them in promotional material.
- Funeral and cremation fees: scraped from each council or crematorium's own published fee schedule – the PDF or webpage they update at the start of each financial year. Every figure that reaches this site is checked line by line against that source document by a member of our editorial team before publication – not just accepted from an automated extraction. We record the source URL and verification date for every figure, and each fee table shows a "last verified" date.
- Probate, inheritance tax, and wills: sourced from GOV.UK, HMRC guidance, and legislation.gov.uk. We link to the specific guidance page, not just the homepage.
- Bereavement benefits and entitlements: verified against current GOV.UK eligibility criteria and payment rates, updated each April when benefit rates change.
Fee data goes through an additional verification step because it is the area most prone to error: council and crematorium fee schedules are often long, multi-page PDFs where costs for cremation, burial and ancillary services sit close together and are easy to mislabel. Where we have found and corrected a mislabelled or outdated figure, we replace it and update the "last verified" date rather than leave a stale number live. If a fee cannot be confirmed against its source – for example because a council has taken a document offline – we remove the figure rather than publish an unverified one.
This checking process regularly finds real problems, not just confirms figures are correct. During our rolling programme of re-checking published cemetery and crematorium pages against their live sources, we have found and corrected dozens of genuine cases of fee-year drift or stale source data – councils rolling over to a new financial year's fee schedule without any notice to us, source documents moving or being renamed, or a figure that turns out to have been mislabelled at the point it was first recorded. Each correction is made on the live page and, where relevant, in our underlying fee registry, with the source and verification date updated to match.
What this site is not
We are not a legal firm and we do not give legal advice. We are not financial advisers and we do not give financial advice. We explain processes and point you to the right resources and authorities.
We are not affiliated with any funeral director, insurer, solicitor, or probate provider. We do not receive commission from any service we mention. If that ever changes, we will disclose it clearly on the relevant page.
We do not speculate on legal or financial matters. If the rules are clear, we state them with a source. If they are not, we say so and direct you to a qualified professional.
Where we cover
This site covers England and Wales. In most cases the rules are the same across both nations, but we note where they differ. Where the law or process in Scotland or Northern Ireland differs materially – for example, on intestacy rules, the Scottish confirmation process (equivalent to probate), or benefit eligibility – we say so in the relevant page.
Who's behind this
After Loss Guide is produced by an in-house editorial team rather than individual freelance contributors. You'll see "Reviewed by the After Loss Guide editorial team" on most guides – this means the page has been through our research-and-verification process described above, not that a single named person wrote it unaided. We've chosen team-level attribution deliberately: it's an honest reflection of how the site is really produced, and we'd rather be plain about that than invent individual bylines with fabricated credentials, which is unfortunately common practice on comparable sites. If that changes – for example, if we bring in named subject-matter reviewers with published credentials – we'll update this page and the site's attribution to reflect it accurately.
Keeping information current
Fees, processes and regulations change. Council crematorium fees are typically updated in April each year. Government benefit rates change annually. Company processes are updated without notice.
We review and update our content regularly. Every page shows when it was last updated, and every fee table shows when the data was last verified. If you spot something that's out of date or incorrect, please let us know – see our correction policy for how we handle reports.
Get in touch
If you have a question, correction, or suggestion, use our contact form and we'll get back to you as quickly as we can.
This page's content was last written on 2026-07-17. This copy of the site was built on 2026-07-17 – every page rebuilds and redeploys automatically whenever content changes, so this date reflects when the site you're reading was last generated.