Cremation Services

Overlake Medical Center at 1035 116th Avenue NE is the only acute-care hospital inside the city limits, licensed for 349 beds, and it is where most Bellevue residents who die in the hospital die. One thing worth updating if you have read otherwise: Overlake affiliated with MultiCare Health System in 2024 and is no longer the independent hospital it was described as for decades.

The alternatives are Swedish Issaquah at 751 NE Blakely Drive and EvergreenHealth at 12040 NE 128th Street in Kirkland, which is a public hospital district rather than part of a system.

No licensed hospice keeps a Bellevue street address. The nearest inpatient facility is EvergreenHealth’s Wockner Hospice Care Center at 12822 124th Lane NE in Kirkland, fifteen beds, which EvergreenHealth describes as the only free-standing inpatient hospice center in western Washington. The number is 425-899-1070. Providence and several home-hospice agencies cover Bellevue from Seattle.

We collect from all of these, and from private homes and care facilities, at any hour. If your person is on hospice service, their nurse can call us directly.

Start with the part almost nobody is told. A Washington death certificate can be ordered from any local health department in the state, not only from the county where the death happened. If another county’s counter fits your day better, use it. Each office sets its own service charge and its own in-person hours, so call before you drive.

That said, the nearest counter to Bellevue is still King County’s, and there is none on the Eastside. It is at 201 South Jackson Street, Suite 220, Seattle, WA 98104, at 206-837-0719, weekdays 8:30 to 4:30, except the first Wednesday of each month when it opens at 9:00.

Certified copies are $25.00 each, first copy and every additional copy alike, with no discount for ordering several. In person at the kiosk it is $28.50 and takes ten to fifteen minutes. By mail it is $25.00 plus a $4.00 fee and takes two to three weeks. Online or by phone it is $25.00 plus $6.00 and $11.50 in handling, with delivery in four to five business days.

Two things that are true here and not in the Oregon counties we serve. There is no deadline. King County holds every Seattle death of any year, every King County death from 1944, and every Washington death from 2015, so a certificate ordered years later still comes from the same office. And while a certified copy is limited to close family and legal representatives, anyone at all may order a noncertified informational copy, which is enough for a good many purposes and almost never mentioned.

We order certificates for the families we serve at $30 each and file the record for you, which saves the trip into Seattle.

The Bellevue Reporter is still publishing, which is worth saying because a good many of its sister papers around the region are not. It is now owned by Carpenter Media Group rather than Sound Publishing, so older references you may find are out of date. Obituaries are submitted at bellevuereporter.com or at 360-802-8212. They publish no rate card and quote by phone once they have seen the notice.

The Seattle Times is the regional paper of record. Its own obituary desk currently starts at $366.45, which covers one day in print at one inch, an optional print photograph, an online obituary and a perpetual guest book. In Memoriam notices start at $266.95. If you find a lower figure quoted for the Times on a third-party placement site, it is not the Times’ own rate.

A complete obituary on this site, with photographs, is included in our price at no charge.

Washington does have a statute on this, RCW 68.50.130, and it is more permissive than the wording first suggests. After cremation, ashes may be scattered on private property with the owner’s consent, and on public land or water with the approval of the agency that controls it. Keeping ashes at home, dividing them among family members, or burying them is not restricted at all.

The Department of Licensing lists the state’s navigable waters among the permitted places, which covers Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish, and asks that the container be disposed of separately from the ashes rather than put in the water. Scattering from a city shoreline park is a different question, because that is public land under Bellevue’s jurisdiction and needs the city’s approval, so a boat is usually the simpler route.

Scattering at sea is available through us for $195.

Sunset Hills Memorial Park at 1575 145th Place SE is the city’s cemetery and the only one inside Bellevue. It offers columbaria, indoor and outdoor cremation niches, glass-front niches that families personalize with photographs and small objects, and cremation benches. There is also a Memorial Golf Park section with niche walls and family columbaria set among granite golfer figures, which is either exactly right or exactly wrong depending on the person. The number is 425-746-1400.

Sunset Hills is owned by Service Corporation International and trades as Dignity Memorial. Its funeral home publishes a direct cremation price, $4,940. The cemetery publishes no niche or interment prices, so the ground itself you will have to ask about. If published rates matter to you, the City of Kirkland runs its own cemetery about ten miles north and posts a full schedule, down to the interment fee and the cost of lettering.

We do not sell cemetery property and we take no commission on it, so you are free to arrange this directly with whichever cemetery you choose.

More money is left unclaimed here than in almost any other part of settling a death, usually because nobody tells the family it exists. These are the sources worth checking, in the order most likely to apply.

Social Security pays a one-time $255 lump-sum death payment to a surviving spouse, or failing that to a child who is 17 or younger, 18 or 19 and still in school, or disabled before 21. It is not automatic. You have two years from the death to claim it and after that it is gone. Call 1-800-772-1213, weekdays 8:00 to 7:00, and say “I want to apply for a lump-sum death payment.” Some people can now start the claim through a my Social Security account. If you would rather go in person, note that Social Security now requires an appointment, and the current list of offices is at ssa.gov/locator. We do not print office addresses here because they change and a wasted trip is the last thing you need.

If the person was a veteran, start here before anything else. Tahoma National Cemetery, 18600 SE 240th Street near Kent, is the nearest VA national cemetery accepting new interments, at 425-413-9614. Fort Lawton in Seattle is closer to Bellevue but has been closed to new interments for years, which catches families out.

The VA’s own wording is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing. Burial benefits include “a gravesite in any of our national cemeteries with available space, opening and closing of the grave, perpetual care, a Government headstone or marker, a burial flag, and a Presidential Memorial Certificate, at no cost to the family.” The VA adds that cremated remains are inurned “in the same manner and with the same honors as casketed remains.” A spouse or dependent child is interred at no cost too, though their name is inscribed on the veteran’s headstone rather than given a separate marker. A surviving spouse who remarried after the veteran’s death remains eligible, which is the point people most often get wrong. To arrange an interment at need, the National Cemetery Scheduling Office is 1-800-535-1117, with discharge papers faxed to 1-866-900-6417. That is faster than calling the cemetery.

Separately, for a death not connected to service, the VA pays a $1,002 burial allowance and a $1,002 plot allowance as of October 1, 2025, claimed on VA Form 21P-530EZ within two years of the burial. One catch that costs families money: the plot allowance is not payable if the interment is in a national cemetery, because there is no plot cost to reimburse. You get the niche free, or you get the plot allowance. Not both. The VA benefits line is 1-800-827-1000.

The King County Veterans Program helps with burial expenses. It is the county’s program under RCW 73.08, open to anyone who served a single day, whatever the discharge type, and to their family members living in King County. Some services are income dependent, so bring identification, proof of service and proof of income. The number is 206-263-8387, with offices in Tukwila and Seattle. If you are turned away, RCW 73.08.070 obliges the county to bear disposition costs for an indigent veteran or an indigent veteran’s family member, with a statutory floor of $300.

If the person was an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, ask the tribe first, because many administer their own funds. Nearest to here: Muckleshoot Indian Tribe enrollment, (253) 876-3141, in Auburn; Snoqualmie Indian Tribe, (425) 888-6551 option 3; Puyallup Tribe of Indians, (253) 573-7849; Suquamish Tribe, (360) 394-8437; Tulalip Tribes, 360-716-4300. The Bureau of Indian Affairs also runs burial assistance of up to $3,500 for indigent enrolled members, through the Puget Sound Agency in Everett at 425-622-9158. One correction worth making here: the Duwamish Tribe is a real and active community but it is not federally recognized, so federal tribal benefits do not run through it.

If the death was a homicide, Washington pays funeral costs. Almost nobody in this industry tells families this. The Crime Victims Compensation Program at Labor and Industries pays up to $7,990 toward funeral and burial expenses, plus up to twelve grief counseling sessions for immediate family. The crime must have been reported to police, and the application must reach the program within three years of that report. Call 1-800-762-3716.

If there is genuinely no money, King County has an Indigent Remains Program run by the Medical Examiner. It provides cremation for people who die in King County without the resources or the family to arrange it. Eligibility follows a next-of-kin search and a review of the person’s finances, and it takes around ninety days. There is no published income threshold. The number is 206-731-3232, extension 5. The county is required to do this by RCW 36.39.030.

One Bellevue note. Sunset Hills Memorial Park is the only cemetery in the city, and although the funeral home on that campus publishes a cremation price, the cemetery side publishes no niche or interment price at all. If cost is what decides it, the City of Kirkland runs a municipal cemetery ten miles north with a published rate schedule, where a resident urn garden plot is $1,330.

If none of this fits, tell us anyway. We would rather spend ten minutes working out what you qualify for than have you borrow money you did not need to borrow.