MemorialSuite guide
What US newspapers charge for an obituary
Families are rarely told what a newspaper obituary costs until the notice is written and the form is nearly finished. Across the 30 metro dailies below, published starting prices run from $20.65 to $654 — and a starting price is the floor, not the bill.
How to read this table
A starting price is the floor, not the bill. It buys the shortest notice the paper will run, usually on a weekday, with no photo. What families actually pay is driven by length.
Every figure below is quoted from that newspaper's own placement page and carries the date a person checked it. Nothing here is an average, an estimate, or a number carried over from a price-comparison blog. Where a paper publishes no rate card — which is most of them — the page for that paper says so rather than filling the gap with a guess.
Philadelphia, PA $654
Washington, DC $475
San Francisco, CA $399
Kansas City, MO $267.14
Portland, OR $264
New York, NY $263
San Antonio, TX $250
Seattle, WA $249
Miami, FL $240.25
Sacramento, CA $221.15
Los Angeles, CA $205
Charlotte, NC $196.15
Indianapolis, IN $185
Dallas, TX $175
Boston, MA $168.85
St. Louis, MO $153
Baltimore, MD $121.60
Des Moines, IA $95
Phoenix, AZ $85
Columbus, OH $82.80
Oklahoma City, OK $70.15
Milwaukee, WI $61
Atlanta, GA $60
Nashville, TN $55
Fort Worth, TX $55
Detroit, MI $50
Houston, TX $36.50
Honolulu, HI $33.70
Austin, TX $24.95
Minneapolis, MN $20.65
Checked 2026-08-28. Newspapers change their rates without notice; confirm the figure in the placement form before you pay. MemorialSuite is not affiliated with any newspaper or placement desk listed here, and we do not submit obituaries on your behalf.
Why the spread is so wide
The lowest and highest figures on this page are not measuring the same thing. Some papers quote the price of a bare death notice — a few lines confirming a death and naming a service. Others quote a package that already includes a photograph, several days in print, and a permanent online memorial. Two papers of similar size can differ by a factor of ten on the published number and end up close on the final one.
What they share is the mechanism. Nearly all of them charge by the printed line, so the length of what you write is the lever you actually control.
What this means if you are writing one this week
Decide the length before you write, not after. A 200-word obituary occupies roughly 41 printed lines; a 450-word tribute occupies roughly 92. Cutting between those two after the fact means removing about 51 lines of type from something a family has already read and approved, which is a far harder conversation than agreeing a length at the start.
Then write two versions. The newspaper version carries the facts that must appear in print. The longer life story belongs on a memorial page, in the order of service, or on the funeral home's website, where no one is charging by the line.
If the writing is the part you are dreading
MemorialSuite asks the questions a funeral director would ask, then prepares a newspaper-length obituary written to a word count you set, a fuller web version, a printable funeral program, and a eulogy with delivery notes. One guided intake, $79 for the bundle, with a free preview before you decide anything.
How to write an obituary: a calm, complete guide →
Fake obituary scams, and how to check a memorial page is real →
