The U.S. cremation rate reached 62.8% in 2025. According to a new national survey from Wake Forest Law School, only 33% of Americans rank cremation as their first choice for disposition.
The gap between preference and practice is roughly 30 percentage points. The survey data points to a specific cause. Families are choosing cremation because the alternatives they do want are too expensive, not legally available where they live, or both.
The Wake Forest Law Survey on Consumer Preferences in Death Care, published in February 2026, polled 1,510 U.S. adults on six methods of disposition: cremation, casket burial, green burial, body donation, human composting (natural organic reduction), and water cremation (alkaline hydrolysis). It is the largest academic consumer preference study in deathcare published this year.
Professor Tanya Marsh, who led the research, identified the core finding. If you add respondents who ranked cremation as their first choice to those who ranked it as their second choice, you get the actual national cremation rate. The people who chose casket burial as their first choice, by contrast, largely end up getting casket burial.
"In other words, people who said overall 'I want casket burial,' they're getting it. But you have to add first and second choice together to get the cremation rate, which says to me, there are a bunch of folks who want something else and see cremation as a solid second choice." (Professor Tanya Marsh, Wake Forest Law School)
The implication: cremation is functioning as a fallback. Families whose first choice is unavailable or unaffordable default to it.
The Gen Z surprise
Among respondents aged 18 to 27, 52% selected casket burial as their first choice. Only 17% chose cremation. This is a significant shift from the 2024 version of the same survey, where Gen Z leaned more toward burial but not by a majority.
For context, the national cremation rate in 2025 was 62.8%, per CANA data. The burial rate was roughly 30%. Gen Z respondents preferred burial at nearly double the national rate.
Marsh identified a complication within the Gen Z data. While 52% want a casket, only 43% would consider embalming. Nearly 60% would consider an open-casket viewing, yet less than half accept the chemical preservation that makes an extended viewing possible. Twenty-five percent of Gen Z respondents paired casket burial with green burial as their top two choices. Marsh characterized these as the "just put me in the ground" cohort, people who want earth burial but may not distinguish between conventional and green burial methods.
The education gap is stark. A generation that overwhelmingly wants a casket does not understand, or does not want, the embalming process that the current funeral industry is built around.
Green burial interest is not matching legal availability
Over half of all survey respondents said they would consider green burial. NFDA's 2025 Consumer Awareness and Preferences Report found 61.4% of consumers interested in exploring green funeral options, up from 55.7% in 2021.
Legal availability tells a different story. Natural organic reduction is legal in 14 states. Alkaline hydrolysis is legal in roughly 24 states but available in far fewer. In the Wake Forest survey, 6% of respondents selected natural organic reduction as their first choice. Only 2% selected alkaline hydrolysis.
The gap between stated interest and actual access comes down to state law. What a family can choose depends on where they live. A family in a state without NOR or alkaline hydrolysis cannot choose either one, regardless of what the survey says they want. Green burial options remain limited, concentrated in specific regions, and often more expensive than direct cremation despite the lower service overhead.
Caitlin Doughty, founder of the Order of the Good Death, framed the finding in direct terms. "The broader public wants to pursue green death options but the current regulations and laws in the funeral industry do not support the will of the people."
The cost filter
The median funeral with viewing and burial cost $8,300 in 2023, according to NFDA. The median funeral with cremation cost $6,280. The difference is $2,020 per case.
For a family whose first choice is casket burial, that $2,020 gap is a hurdle. For a family whose first choice is green burial or natural organic reduction, the hurdle is higher: those options either do not exist locally or carry premium pricing because the supply is thin.
The Wake Forest data reframes the cremation rate. It measures what consumers settle for when their preferred option is out of reach. Marsh noted that consumers who prefer casket burial or emerging alternatives may default to cremation because of cost, logistics, or local regulatory restrictions.
The cremation deceleration
CANA's own projections confirm that the cremation growth rate is reaching its peak velocity and will begin to slow. The U.S. cremation rate went from 57.2% in 2021 to 62.8% in 2025, a gain of 5.6 percentage points over four years. CANA projects 69.1% by 2030, a gain of 6.3 percentage points over five years. The annual rate of increase is flattening.
If Gen Z preferences hold as that cohort ages into the deathcare market over the next several decades, the deceleration could accelerate. A generation that prefers casket burial by a two-to-one margin over cremation will not sustain a 62.8% cremation rate without a dramatic shift in cost structure or availability.
What the industry is not measuring
The Wake Forest survey exposes a data problem that has been hiding in plain sight. For two decades, the deathcare industry has tracked the cremation rate as the primary consumer behavior metric. That metric reports what happened. It does not report what people wanted to happen.
The gap between the two, roughly 30 percentage points, represents families who wanted something else and could not get it. Some wanted casket burial and could not afford it. Others wanted green burial or human composting and could not find either option in their state.
No industry dataset tracks how many families chose cremation as a compromise. No regulator requires funeral homes to record a family's first preference alongside the final disposition method. The Wake Forest survey is the first academic attempt to measure that gap directly, and it is a one-time snapshot of 1,510 people. Marsh called for annual surveys to track the trend.
For an industry that sells preneed contracts based on projected disposition rates, the gap between preference and behavior is a planning risk. For regulators, it is evidence that the legal framework for disposition options is not keeping pace with what the public wants. For consumers, the cremation rate is a tally of compromises, not a referendum on cremation itself.
*Sources: Wake Forest Law Survey on Consumer Preferences in Death Care, February 2026 (1,510 participants, Professor Tanya Marsh); CANA Industry Statistics, 2026 Annual Statistics Report; NFDA 2025 Cremation and Burial Report; NFDA 2025 Consumer Awareness and Preferences Report; Wake Forest Law Review, "Maybe It's Time to Let the Old Ways Die" (February 2026); On Death Care podcast interview with Professor Tanya Marsh.*
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