Cremation Services

Get this right before anyone tells you otherwise: Portland has two adult Level I trauma centers, not one. OHSU Hospital at 3181 SW Sam Jackson Park Road, and Legacy Emanuel at 501 North Graham Street, 554 beds, which also runs the burn center. Randall Children’s at Emanuel holds Level 1 pediatric verification, the first children’s hospital in the Northwest to earn it.

The rest of the map: Legacy Good Samaritan on NW 22nd Avenue, Providence Portland on NE Glisan, Providence St. Vincent on SW Barnes Road, Adventist Health Portland at 10123 SE Market Street with 302 beds, and the Portland VA Medical Center on SW US Veterans Hospital Road.

One correction for anything you may have read. The OHSU and Legacy merger was terminated on May 5, 2025, by agreement of both. Legacy remains an independent local non-profit system. Any page saying Legacy is being absorbed by OHSU is more than a year out of date.

Twelve Medicare-certified hospice agencies have Portland addresses, more than any other city we serve. Note that Providence Hospice on NE Halsey is now half owned by a for-profit: Oregon approved a joint venture with Compassus in a final order dated July 15, 2026, with Compassus running daily operations. It is still the agency most families are referred to. We collect from all of them at any hour.

There is, and it is the single thing families here most often misunderstand, so it is worth being exact. Hopewell House, 6171 SW Capitol Highway, on 503-894-7560, has twelve private bedrooms and is run by Friends of Hopewell House, a non-profit that bought the building from Legacy Health in 2021.

Here is the part that catches people. It is licensed as a residential care home for people receiving hospice care, not as a Medicare inpatient hospice unit. Medicare and most private insurance do not cover the room, the board or the care there. Families are asked to contribute what they can, and Medicaid may apply in some cases.

People arrive expecting a covered benefit and discover a donation-supported house. It is a good place and it is not free. Ask about the cost on the first call rather than the last.

Multnomah County Vital Records is at 847 NE 19th Avenue, Suite 350, on 503-988-3745. It processes in one to three business days, the fastest turnaround of any county we deal with and the only one that publishes a figure at all. Certified copies are $25.00 each, with no discount for ordering several.

Oregon works on a clock that Washington does not. The county can only issue for about six months after the death. After that the record moves to the Oregon Center for Health Statistics at 971-673-1190, where postal orders run three to five weeks. If you think you may want more copies later, order them early rather than discovering the deadline afterward.

We order certificates for the families we serve at $30 each and file the record for you, so the clock is our concern rather than yours.

The Oregonian is the paper of record, in its 176th year, and obituaries go through oregon.obituaries.com. It starts at $264 through the obituary desk and includes a permanent online memorial page, though the submission site itself quotes only flexible pricing by length and photographs.

Two corrections to what most local funeral home pages still say. The Portland Tribune stopped printing in June 2025, so a print Tribune obituary is no longer a thing that can be bought, but the site is very much alive and still accepts obituaries. And neither Willamette Week nor the Portland Mercury offers an obituary product at all, despite both still printing, the Mercury having returned to monthly print in February 2026.

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

Portland is the one city we serve where the cemeteries are run by an elected regional government. Metro owns and operates fourteen historic cemeteries, eight of them inside Portland, including Lone Fir at SE 26th and Morrison, where the Chestnut Grove Memorial Garden offers several ways to bury or memorialize cremated remains. Metro publishes a cemeteries price guide, which almost nothing else in this market does. The same agency runs the zoo and the landfill, which surprises everyone who learns it.

Among the private grounds, Riverview Abbey at 319 South Taylors Ferry Road is family owned and publishes a figure, cremation niches from $1,100, which makes it the most transparent option in the city. River View Cemetery next door at 300 South Taylors Ferry Road is a non-profit association and offers something unusual: memorial walls and cenotaphs for people whose ashes were scattered somewhere else entirely.

Two ownership notes. Wilhelm’s Portland Memorial in Sellwood, the largest mausoleum complex in the metro, now trades as Altogether and is owned by Foundation Partners Group. It is not a Dignity Memorial property, whatever you may read. Mount Calvary on SW Skyline is the Archdiocese of Portland’s and does publish price lists including one for cremation interment.

We do not sell cemetery property and take no commission on it.

A surprising amount of this goes unclaimed, simply because no one is required to tell you it exists. Here is what to check, in roughly the order it applies.

Start with the $255 lump-sum death payment from Social Security. Small, but nobody sends it to you unprompted. A surviving spouse is first in line, then a child aged 17 or under, 18 or 19 and in full-time school, or disabled before 21. The deadline is two years from the death. Call 1-800-772-1213 on a weekday between 8:00 and 7:00. Some claims start online through a my Social Security account, and if you prefer in person, book first and use ssa.gov/locator for the current offices.

If the person was a veteran, start here before anything else. Willamette National Cemetery, 11800 SE Mount Scott Boulevard, at 503-273-5250, is the VA national cemetery for this metro, with space for both casketed and cremated remains. The office is open weekdays 8:00 to 4:30 and the grounds daily from 7:00. It is the largest national cemetery in the Pacific Northwest and it sits inside the city, which surprises families who assume a drive.

We quote the VA directly here because paraphrasing it misleads people. Covered “at no cost to the family”: a gravesite where there is space, opening and closing of the grave, perpetual care, a Government headstone or marker, a burial flag, and a Presidential Memorial Certificate. On cremation the VA says 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, with the name inscribed on the veteran’s headstone rather than a separate marker, and remarriage does not disqualify a surviving spouse. The cemetery cannot book it for you. The National Cemetery Scheduling Office handles that on 1-800-535-1117, with the DD-214 faxed to 866-900-6417.

Separately from the cemetery, the VA pays cash. For a death not connected to service that is a $1,002 burial allowance and a $1,002 plot allowance as of October 1, 2025, on VA Form 21P-530EZ within two years of burial. Understand how they interact before you plan around them: the plot allowance is not payable when the interment is in a national cemetery. The free niche and the plot allowance are alternatives, not a pair. 1-800-827-1000.

Your county veteran service office will file the VA paperwork for you, free, and file it correctly, which is worth more than it sounds. Multnomah County Veterans’ Services is at 209 SW 4th Avenue, Suite 510, on 503-988-8387, by appointment. They are a claims office rather than a fund: they do not hand out money for a funeral, they make sure the VA pays what it owes. The Oregon Department of Veterans’ Affairs is on 1-800-692-9666.

For an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, the tribe is the first call and often the largest sum on this page. Two Oregon tribes publish real benefits and both keep Portland offices. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde pay the funeral home up to $7,000, plus $400 toward a reception, for enrolled members and their spouses, parents and children under 25, and tribal cemetery plots cost members nothing; Member Services is 1-800-422-0232 extension 2253, and the Portland office at 4445 SW Barbur Boulevard is 503-879-1881. The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians pay up to $6,000 plus a $1,000 death benefit and require no application form, only that the family notify Enrollment; 541-444-2532, or 503-238-1512 for the Portland office at 3220 SW 1st Avenue.

The nine federally recognized tribes of Oregon: Burns Paiute Tribe, 541-573-2088. Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, 541-888-9577. Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, 503-879-5211. Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, 541-444-2532. Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, 541-276-3165. Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, 541-553-1161. Coquille Indian Tribe, 541-756-0904. Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, 541-672-9405. The Klamath Tribes, 541-783-2219. For a tribe outside Oregon, contact it directly. Bureau of Indian Affairs burial assistance of up to $3,500 is separately available to indigent enrolled members, through the Northwest Regional Office at 911 NE 11th Avenue in Portland.

If the death was a homicide, Oregon pays toward the funeral. Crime Victims’ Compensation at the Department of Justice sends up to $5,000 straight to the funeral provider, considers more case by case, and separately funds crime scene clean-up and grief counseling. The two deadlines are short and unforgiving: the crime reported to police within 72 hours, and the application filed within one year. Call 1-800-503-7983 or apply through your county district attorney’s victim assistance office.

Oregon runs this at state level, not county level, and the difference traps people. No Oregon county here operates an indigent cremation program. The Oregon Indigent Disposition Program at the Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board, under ORS 97.170, is the whole of it, on 971-673-1504. Two features decide whether it can help you. The money reimburses the funeral establishment, not the family, so there is no family application. And it reaches only the unclaimed: once anyone signs a contract accepting responsibility for the disposition, the person is no longer indigent in law and the door closes. If cost is the barrier, tell us before you sign anything.

Two Portland organizations worth naming accurately. NARA Northwest and the Native American Youth and Family Center are substantial culturally specific services, at 503-224-1044 and 503-288-8177, and neither publishes funeral assistance. We would rather point you at them as a starting place for referrals than let you call expecting money that is not there.

If you have read all that and nothing fits, call us. We would rather spend ten minutes working out what you qualify for than have you borrow money you did not need to borrow.