×
Two Together: Save £100!
Save £100 when you purchase two funeral plans together. Call us for more details.
Two Together: Save £100!
Save £100 when you purchase two funeral plans together. Call us for more details.
There is an increasingly wide array of funeral options and alternatives in the UK to choose from. And now, more than ever, British people are feeling that the traditional norm doesn’t suit them, preferring something different. In this article, we want to take a closer look at what funeral options are out there, and some of the alternatives to tradition that are growing in popularity.
Key Takeaways
For those searching for a funeral option, there are now far more choices available to them than in recent years. There has been a decline in religion in the UK in recent decades, which means there are fewer people being driven by beliefs on death and funerals in religion when they are organising their own funerals.
As such, aside from the typical options of the traditional cremation or burial, a whole host of other options has started to proliferate. From the now widely popular direct cremation; to water and eco-cremations; to natural burials and burials at sea; and funerals conducted by funeral celebrants, or even DIY funerals, the list is nearly endless.
The wideness of options on the market reflects a growing trend among British people not to simply settle for the traditional model because it’s the ‘done thing’, but instead to search for the option that works best for them. What decision you make for your funeral — one of the most important parts of end-of-life planning — will rest on financial, cultural, and personal considerations.
The traditional funeral options in the UK generally pose the choice of cremation vs burial. In general, despite our declining religiosity, many people still find the idea of a traditional funeral as something comforting, which explains its enduring adoption across the UK.
Cremation services are one of the two main traditional funeral options out there. With this approach, the family and friends of the person who has died normally attend an organised service at the crematorium’s chapel. The content of the ceremony need not be religious, and can be delivered by a funeral celebrant instead of a religious figure if preferred.
Fully attended services last between 30 minutes and 1 hour depending on the crematorium. The person who has died is often brought to the crematorium in a hearse, which may even form a funeral procession; floral tributes to them often adorn their coffin. Pallbearers will then bring the coffin inside the chapel and place it on the catafalque. People like to choose music to play from among the best funeral songs, which can make the ceremony feel more meaningful.
The traditional or standard cremation model is generally more expensive than the direct cremation equivalent. According to SunLife, the average cost of a cremation in the UK last year was £3,980. Aura’s direct cremation prices for funeral plans, by comparison, start at £1,695 — less than half the price.
Burials are the more expensive of the two traditional options. The format is often very similar, usually including hearses, floral tributes, pallbearers and processions. But the way the person is laid to rest is different, seeing them buried in a cemetery or church yard. It’s this element that adds the extra cost, and brings in an element of regional price variation. A funeral at a church is probably more likely than not to have a religious theme, including the use of the most popular UK funeral hymns. With that said, it’s not necessary for a burial to be preceded by a church service, as cemeteries can also be owned and administered by the local council.
A burial plot needs to be rented, and a headstone needs to be commissioned; these can add significant cost to your overall funeral expenses. According to Legal & General, the average cost of a burial in the UK in 2024 was £5,894, but this increases to £8,800 in the Greater London area, where space for burial plots is severely limited and thus more expensive.
There is an increasing array of alternative funeral options to the traditional norm available in the UK. We can now choose from among options like direct cremation; green and eco-friendly funerals; and humanist and celebrant-led services.
Direct cremation is a form of funeral which focuses on the cremation process, stripping back a lot of the extras that make it hard to keep funeral costs down. It is, naturally, quite similar to a standard, traditional cremation, but with a few key differences. With Aura, the person who has died is brought to the crematorium in a private ambulance, rather than a hearse, without floral tributes or pallbearers. They are then brought inside directly to the catafalque in the crematorium chapel. There is not normally an attended service with a direct cremation; instead a crematorium attendant speaks a few words out of respect, and then, as soon as possible afterwards, the cremation occurs. (With that said, Aura does allow the option of attending a direct cremation, if preferred.)
This has the impact of making the process much more concise and affordable. Our direct cremation services are available at less than half of SunLife’s average British funeral cost from last year, starting at £1,695 for our funeral plans, and £1,195 for those requiring our help in the here and now. If you are interested in learning a bit more about how our direct cremation plans work, and the different options that we can offer you, please feel free to download our funeral plan brochure.
Our brochure includes all the details you need surrounding our prepaid direct cremation funeral plans.
Get your free brochure sent by email or First Class post by clicking on the link below.
With the climate crisis becoming an ever more pressing problem, many of us want our last act to be one that does as little harm to the planet as possible. This explains the growing popularity of green and eco-friendly funerals. This can be done with small, eco-conscious practices, like having the funeral in a local place as near as possible to family, whilst allowing loved ones to digitally send love and support from afar. Others like to opt for biodegradable coffins, or to simply be cremated or buried in a shroud of some kind.
There are more impactful choices we can make too, such as having a water cremation, which can use up to 90% less energy than a normal cremation. Normally, they burn the coffin at a cremation, but with this kind, there need not even be a coffin. Alternatively, a natural or green burial can be held in rural locations, such as woodland, which could have the potential positive impact of helping to boost the growth of local flora and fauna. Depending on where you opt for, cost could vary between a few hundred and several thousand pounds.
In conjunction with the growing preference for something like a more personalised and unique celebration of life after a funeral has been conducted, more of us are turning to humanists and celebrants to lead our funeral ceremonies. Rather than the services of a religious figure, who might draw upon a majority of religious material, a celebrant or humanist has a lot more flexibility.
A humanist, in accordance with their principles, will completely forgo religious elements in their services, helping families to design something that avoids this altogether. A celebrant, on the other hand, can incorporate religious wording and music if preferred by the family, at the same time as personalising and theming the service according to their wishes. Celebrants therefore give families the chance to have the best of both worlds. Whereas humanists offer the ability to have the comfort of an ordered service, using material like non-religious funeral poems, but without ideological or spiritual incompatibilities.
For a variety of reasons, some of us turn to DIY funerals as a way of paying our respects to and sending off a loved one. That is to say, funerals in which as many elements as possible are directly organised by the family.
With a more typical funeral, a funeral director like Aura will often fully take on the responsibility of organising your funeral, or one for a loved one. Funerals are complicated affairs, with legal, logistical, administrative, and emotional elements to consider. We can help you to complete cremation forms or other funeral paperwork, as well provide pointers on registering the death and other legal matters. Our fantastic Aura Angels will, on top of this, coordinate with the venue, and organise the transportation of the person who has died, as well as the return of their cremation ashes to the family.
A DIY funeral, though, would involve the family taking on as much of this responsibility as possible, which many opt to do for cost reasons, but also because some find keeping busy an effective way to deal with grief. Organising everything yourself for a lost loved one can also be a powerful act of love and devotion. It’s not against the law to organise a funeral yourself, and it’s not even a requirement to use the services of a funeral director.
Naturally, an all or nothing approach may not suit everyone. If you are interested in taking on some of the responsibilities yourself, but know that you’d like or need extra support in other areas, then one of the questions to ask a funeral director would concern how flexible they can be in helping you.
You can have a funeral for a loved one at home before burying them on their or your property, or on private property from whose owner you have received permission. It is not against the law, but there are certain rules you will need to comply with. For instance, you will have to ensure that any gravesite is away from water sources, drainage, cables or gas supplies. The grave also needs to have at least one metre of earth beneath the coffin, and to have at least one metre of earth above it too. This will prevent the body of the person who has died from being excavated by foraging animals.
You may wish to consult the local council for advice on how to dig a compliant grave, and for the best location on your property. You will also need to handle all the paperwork yourself if you are opting for this approach.
Something people have done for many years is the donation of their body to medical science. Apart from being something that is at once selfless, exemplary of humanist beliefs, and very cost effective, it also has a much-reduced impact on the environment too.
In donating our bodies to medical science, we can help to enhance human knowledge and understanding, training new medics and doctors in anatomy with real bodies, and offering inexperienced surgeons the chance to practice their skills.
In order to donate your body to medical science, you will need to contact your local medical school for further direction and to register your interest, who will provide you with consent and registration forms to fill in. Those living in Scotland can start the process by heading to the Scottish Government website.
If you want to do this, it is essential that you communicate your wishes to your family, loved ones, and executors of your estate, which may require you to talk about death and dying with them, if you haven’t already. When you are writing your will, you may wish to include a section on this, making it clear what your intentions are. They can then organise an end-of-life celebration after your death in order to pay their respects to you.
To put it bluntly, funeral costs are rising. According to the SunLife Cost of Living Report 2025, the average cost of a funeral in the UK last year was £4,285, increasing by £144 on the previous year. The average cost of dying (i.e. of a funeral + professional fees + cost of a send-off) is now ~£9,797. SunLife have also tracked a 134% increase in the cost of dying between 2004 and 2024, stating that, had costs only risen in line with inflation, the increase would only have been 75%.
All of this is having a greater impact on our funeral decision making. Many of us are wondering how to get help with funeral expenses, or whether we can attend a public health funeral. As noted above, the average cost of a cremation in the UK last year, According to SunLife’s 2025 report, was £3,980, whereas direct cremation can be significantly less expensive than this. In fact, Aura’s prices start at less than half of that figure.
It is possible to pay for a direct cremation in advance by using something called a prepaid funeral plan. Aura offers its prepaid funeral plans from £1,695, and it works by letting you lock in today’s prices for your own future funeral, whenever that may be. This is clearly an effective way of combatting the problem of rising funeral costs. We place the money for your funeral and place it into our secure, independently managed trust, where it will stay until the day it is needed. It means that your family won’t have a penny to pay when the time comes.
Our funeral plans are completely safe, as we are fully regulated by the FCA, and all of our plans have FSCS protection. There are many different ways to pay for a funeral, so you will have to decide which one works for you (for instance, by considering funeral plans vs 0ver-50s life insurance).
In order to make sure you are getting the best deal it is important to see what is out there on the market. You can, for instance, compare Aura funeral plans with other leading providers to see how we sit next to other examples. You can also head to objective consumer information websites like Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert for impartial information about prepaid funeral plans. You can also take a look at the below table for more information. The important thing to remember is to make sure you understand what is included in your final quote, and to make sure that there are no hidden fees.
 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fairer Finance | |||||
| Starting Price | £1,695 | £1,995 | £1,700 | £1,785 | £1,595 |
| Trustpilot | 4.9/5 stars | 4.8/5 stars | 4.6/5 stars | 4.6/5 stars | 4.9/5 stars |
All-Inclusive Pricing |  | | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
| Free Cancellation Anytime | | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
| Money-Back Guarantee | | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
| Solvency | 128% | 124.8% | Unknown | 138% | Unknown |
| Transparent Pricing | | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
Ultimately, whatever you decide to do — whether you opt for a traditional burial, a direct cremation, or a burial at sea — your decision will rest on several different factors. Most likely, you will be weighing up a balance of your cost needs, with your spiritual, cultural, ideological or religious preferences. You will also want to consider how you want to pay for things, and whether you’d like an unattended or an attended ceremony.
It can be a lot easier to make the decision by discussing it with your family. Not only will they be able to feed into your ideas, point out matters you may have forgotten to consider, and ask any questions about things which concern them, but it can also help them to remember a loved one and deal with their grief more effectively. Being more aware of your preferences means they will be more ready and able to help put things in place beforehand, and to bring it to fruition when the time comes.
We hope that this article about your funeral options and alternatives in the UK has proved useful for you, and helped you to get started with thinking about the subject. It can be quite daunting, but the first step is always the most difficult.
Aura is the UK’s top-rated national provider of ‘Cremation Services’ on consumer ratings platform Trustpilot, with a score of 4.9/5 stars. We’ve earned this through offering our services with a uniquely compassionate and people-centred approach to our care, and the families who’ve entrusted their funeral arrangements to us have valued this.
We are a family-run company, and that ethos of care runs from top to bottom. We were founded by Paul Jameson, with his son, David (our CEO), and Ben (our COO), after Paul was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Today, he continues to run the company, determined to transfer the knowledge he’s gained about facing mortality to all families in need of our services across mainland Great Britain. Our mission is always only to offer you the quality of service that Paul would expect for his own family – no less.
If you have any questions, would like a brochure or simply would like a chat through our services, our award-winning team is here to help.
Unlike other providers, we won’t hassle you with constant calls. We’ll simply ensure you have the information you need and leave you to come to a decision in your own time. When you’re ready for us, our team will be ready to help.
