Cremation Services

There is no hospital in Kent. The one that serves the city is Valley Medical Center at 400 South 43rd Street in Renton, 341 beds, and Kent sits inside its taxing district: Valley is a public hospital district covering Kent, Renton, Tukwila and parts of Auburn, Black Diamond, Covington, Federal Way, Maple Valley, Newcastle and Seattle. Most Kent residents who die in the hospital die there.

MultiCare Auburn Medical Center at 202 North Division Street and St. Francis Hospital at 34515 9th Avenue South in Federal Way are the other two within reach.

Wesley Homes Hospice at 18000 72nd Avenue South, Suite 217, is the only Medicare-certified hospice with a Kent address; the number is 206-870-1127 and they serve King and Pierce counties. Heart and Soul Hospice works from South Grady Way in Renton and Providence at Home with Compassus from Tukwila.

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.

Before you plan a trip into Seattle, know this: any local health department in Washington can issue a certified copy of a Washington death record. You are not tied to the county where the death occurred. That is worth real time in Kent, because King County runs a single counter and it is in Seattle, while the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department at 3629 South D Street, at (253) 649-1500, is about the same distance from here. Take whichever suits your day.

The King County office is at 201 South Jackson Street, Suite 220, Seattle, WA 98104, at 206-837-0719, weekdays 8:30 to 4:30, opening at 9:00 on the first Wednesday of the month. Service charges and walk-in hours differ from one health department to the next, so call ahead either way.

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, delivered in four to five business days.

There is no deadline. King County holds every King County death from 1944 and every Washington death from 2015, so a copy ordered years later still comes from the same place. A certified copy is limited to close family and legal representatives, but anyone may order a noncertified informational copy without proving a relationship.

We order certificates for the families we serve at $30 each and file the record for you, so nobody has to drive to Jackson Street.

The Kent Reporter is still publishing, though its newsroom is now at 909 South 336th Street in Federal Way rather than in Kent. It is owned by Carpenter Media Group, which took on the former Sound Publishing weeklies. Obituaries are submitted through kentreporter.com or at 360-802-8212. They publish no rate card and will call you back with a figure once they have seen the notice.

The Seattle Times is the regional paper of record and its own obituary desk 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. Lower figures for the Times circulate on third-party placement sites and are 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 rivers, lakes and navigable waters among the permitted places, which covers the Green River and Puget Sound, and asks that the container be disposed of separately from the ashes. Federal land works differently: Mount Rainier and the national forests east of here need the managing agency’s permission rather than being a matter of personal choice.

Scattering at sea is available through us for $195.

For a veteran’s family it is usually the first thing worth checking, and a good many people never learn they qualify. Tahoma National Cemetery is at 18600 SE 240th Street, Kent, WA 98042, at 425-413-9614. It opened in 1997 with Mount Rainier in view.

One correction, because it matters if you are dealing with any other jurisdiction: despite the Kent mailing address, Tahoma is not inside Kent city limits. It sits in unincorporated King County. The postal address is simply the nearest post office.

It takes cremated remains as well as casketed burials. A later expansion added more than 14,000 columbarium niches and 6,000 in-ground garden cremation sites, so this is not a cemetery running short of space for urns. Eligibility covers veterans who were not dishonorably discharged, their spouses and surviving spouses even if they remarried, and minor children. Burial in a VA national cemetery is provided at no cost to the family, including the niche or gravesite, its opening and closing, and a government marker. Confirm your own eligibility and current availability with the office, which is open weekdays 8:00 to 4:30.

If Tahoma is not the right fit, Washington Memorial Park at 16445 International Boulevard in SeaTac has indoor and outdoor niches, urn gardens, scattering gardens and a boulder garden by the water feature. The number is 206-242-1787. We do not sell cemetery property and take no commission on it, so you are free to arrange this directly.

Several of these are real money and almost none of them arrive unprompted. We have put them in the order we would work through them ourselves.

The first call is Social Security, for the $255 lump-sum death payment. It goes to a surviving spouse, and where there is none, to a child who is under 18, or under 20 and in school, or disabled before 21. Claim it within two years or lose it. The number is 1-800-772-1213, weekdays 8:00 to 7:00. You may be able to begin online through a my Social Security account. If you want to go in, book first: Social Security requires appointments now. Find your office at ssa.gov/locator rather than from a list on a funeral home website, ours included.

If the person was a veteran, start here before anything else. Tahoma National Cemetery is at 18600 SE 240th Street, on a Kent postal address though in fact just outside the city in unincorporated King County, at 425-413-9614. It has space in both columbarium niches and in-ground cremation sites.

We quote the VA directly here because paraphrase causes trouble. Provided “at no cost to the family” are a gravesite where space allows, the opening and closing, perpetual care, a Government headstone or marker, a burial flag and a Presidential Memorial Certificate. Cremated remains, the VA says, are inurned “in the same manner and with the same honors as casketed remains.” The same applies to a spouse or a dependent child, with one difference: their name goes on the veteran’s headstone, not a separate marker. And a surviving spouse who has since remarried is still eligible. That single fact is misstated more often than anything else in this area. Booking is centralised. Call the National Cemetery Scheduling Office, 1-800-535-1117, and fax the DD-214 to 1-866-900-6417.

Money, as distinct from the cemetery itself. Where the death was not service connected the VA pays a $1,002 burial allowance plus $1,002 toward a plot, rates effective October 1, 2025, claimed on Form 21P-530EZ inside two years of the burial. The trap: choosing a national cemetery forfeits the plot allowance, because there is no plot expense to reimburse. Budget for one or the other, never both. Call 1-800-827-1000.

The county runs a veterans program with money in it. King County Veterans Program, 206-263-8387, helps with burial expenses among much else. Eligibility is broad: one day of service, any discharge, and family members count. Walk-in hours are weekdays 8:30 to 11:00 and 1:00 to 3:00 at 645 Andover Park West in Tukwila or 9725 3rd Avenue NE in Seattle. The statute underneath it, RCW 73.08.070, requires the county to cover disposition for an indigent veteran or their indigent family member.

Where the person was an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, the tribe is the first call, not the last. Nearby: Muckleshoot enrollment (253) 876-3141 in Auburn, Snoqualmie (425) 888-6551 option 3, Puyallup (253) 573-7849, Suquamish (360) 394-8437 and Tulalip 360-716-4300. Separately the Bureau of Indian Affairs funds burial assistance up to $3,500 for indigent enrolled members; the office for this area is the Puget Sound Agency, Everett, 425-622-9158. We would rather be accurate about one thing: the Duwamish Tribe is not federally recognized, so those federal benefits are not available through it.

One that is almost never mentioned: Washington pays funeral costs when the death was a homicide. The Crime Victims Compensation Program at Labor and Industries covers up to $7,990 for funeral and burial, and up to twelve grief counseling sessions for immediate family members. It requires that the crime was reported to police, and the claim must be filed within three years of that report. 1-800-762-3716.

For a family with nothing, this is the honest answer rather than the comfortable one. The King County Medical Examiner operates an Indigent Remains Program that pays for cremation where a person dies in the county without means and without family able to claim them. Approval follows a next-of-kin search and a financial review and takes roughly ninety days, and no income threshold is published. 206-731-3232, extension 5. The obligation comes from RCW 36.39.030.

The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe’s enrollment office in Auburn is the nearest tribal office to Kent, about eight miles south.

If you have read all that and nothing fits, call us. Working out what a family actually qualifies for is part of the job, not a favor.