Cremation Services

MultiCare Good Samaritan Hospital at 401 15th Avenue SE, on 253-697-4000, has served this valley since 1952. The state designates it a Level III trauma center, and unusually its trauma designation includes rehabilitation, which few hospitals in Washington carry. Certificate of Need filings put it at 375 acute care beds, with a new patient tower approved to add 160 more. A city council member described the expansion as the South Sound equivalent of Harborview, which tells you the direction of travel.

Beyond the hospital there is MultiCare Behavioral Health at 325 East Pioneer, on 253-697-8400, doing same day mental health and substance use assessments. Serious trauma leaves for Tacoma General or St. Joseph, both Level II, and children go to Mary Bridge. North of here the transfer crosses a county line, which the death certificate question below returns to.

No licensed hospice agency has a Puyallup address. The Department of Health’s in-home services list has the hospices serving this county based in Tacoma, University Place, Tukwila and Renton. That is likely to change soon: a Certificate of Need review is open with a decision expected in September 2026, and two of the five applicants propose Puyallup offices. Until then, the agency caring for your person at home is driving in.

What Puyallup does have, in remarkable concentration, is skilled nursing. Linden Grove Center is licensed for 130 beds, Rainier Rehabilitation for 117, Life Care Center of Puyallup for 102, Life Care Center of South Hill for 100 and Puyallup Post Acute for 96. That is 545 skilled nursing beds inside fourteen square miles. Add Brookdale Courtyard at 120, Bonaventure at 109 and Fieldstone Memory Care at 66, and a great many deaths in this city happen in a care building rather than at the hospital.

We collect from all of them at any hour, and a hospice or facility nurse can call us directly.

Most people in this city do not know it, so it is worth stating plainly. The Puyallup Reservation covers roughly 28 square miles across six cities, and Puyallup is one of them. The Tribe told the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs exactly that in 2023.

The reservation was secured under the Treaty of Medicine Creek, signed December 26, 1854, at around twenty thousand acres. Executive orders in 1857 and 1873 drew land along the Puyallup River through what are now Puyallup, Fife, Milton and Tacoma. Most of it was subsequently lost; today about 1,252 acres is held in federal trust. The 1990 Land Claims Settlement, running to roughly $162 million and twelve parties, restored close to a thousand acres and established a permanent trust fund for health and social services.

For an enrolled member, the Tribe pays more toward a funeral than any other government in this region. The Funeral Department publishes a maximum of $6,000 in funeral assistance for a tribal member, their spouse, or a stepchild or adopted child; $750 for a miscarriage or stillbirth; and $750 once toward the funeral of a non-member relative of a member, which reaches a spouse, parent, child, sibling, niece, nephew, aunt, uncle, grandparent or grandchild. Separately there is a hardship program of up to $2,000 for a surviving spouse or head of household facing mortgage, rent or utility costs. The department is at 3507 East McKinley Avenue in Tacoma, on 253-573-7884, weekdays 8:00 to 5:00.

Two practical notes. The Puyallup Tribal Cemetery is at 2002 East 28th Street, administered by the Tribal Community Wellness Division on 253-680-5690, and it is in Tacoma rather than in Puyallup. And every tribal facility we could locate is in Tacoma or Fife, so a Puyallup family will be making calls toward Tacoma.

For an enrolled member of any other federally recognized tribe, Bureau of Indian Affairs burial assistance has been $3,500 since July 2024, raised from $2,500, through the Puget Sound Agency at 2707 Colby Avenue, Suite 1101 in Everett, on 425-622-9158. A great many published guides still quote the old figure.

Pierce County records are held by the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department at 3629 South D Street, Tacoma, weekdays 8:00 to 4:30, no appointment needed. Ask for vital records directly on (253) 649-1401 rather than the department’s main number, which puts you into the general menu.

The three prices are published and worth comparing before you drive: $33.00 by mail, shipped in one to two weeks; $39.00 walking in, with a typical twenty to thirty minute wait; $48.50 online through VitalChek, shipped within three business days. The $25 underneath all three is set by state law; the rest is county processing.

Now the Puyallup-specific problem, and it is eight miles north. The King County line runs past Auburn and Sumner, and Puyallup sits close against it. The record follows the place of death, not the address on the envelope. A Puyallup resident who dies at MultiCare Auburn Medical Center on North Division Street has died in King County. That means King County vital records rather than the D Street counter, and it means $110.80 in county and state fees rather than Pierce County’s $125.80, because King charges no county filing fee where Pierce charges fifteen dollars. The same applies at St. Elizabeth in Enumclaw.

It is not a large sum. It is a different office, a different form and a different answer to the question of where to go, and being sent to the wrong one costs an afternoon.

We order certificates at $30 each and file in whichever county the death actually occurred.

This is the single clearest saving on the page, and it turns on knowing that two newspapers share one obituary desk.

The Puyallup Herald and The Tacoma News Tribune are both McClatchy titles and both place obituaries through the same vendor. The Herald publishes weekly on Thursdays and is one of only three Pierce County newspapers listed by the Washington Secretary of State.

An obituary in the Herald starts at $62.50. The same notice in the News Tribune starts at $298.48. Both figures include newspaper publication plus an online obituary and guest book. A Puyallup family that defaults to the Tacoma paper because it is the bigger one pays roughly two hundred and thirty-six dollars more for a notice most of their neighbors will not see.

Sometimes the News Tribune is the right choice, if the person’s life ran across the whole county. Often it is not. Nobody at either paper is going to raise the comparison with you.

South Hill has no paper of its own, and no Sumner or Bonney Lake title with a published rate could be found, so those are the two real options.

The obituary on this site is included in what you have already paid, takes photographs, and goes up as soon as you approve it.

For about three weeks it affects everything, and it is worth a sentence when you call us.

The Washington State Fair runs at 110 9th Avenue SW, four blocks from downtown and roughly a mile from Good Samaritan Hospital. In 2026 it runs September 4 to 27. It draws over a million visitors, is the largest attended event in the state and one of the largest fairs in the country.

The practical effect is traffic. Meridian, 9th Avenue SW and the SR 512 ramps become genuinely difficult during fair hours, and a transfer that takes twenty minutes in June can take considerably longer in late September.

It does not change our price, it does not change our availability, and we will still come at any hour. It does mean that if we give you an arrival window during the fair, it will be an honest one rather than an optimistic one. Telling us the address is near the fairgrounds helps us plan the route.

Puyallup is one of very few cities we serve where you can read the cemetery’s prices before you telephone anybody, because the City of Puyallup owns Woodbine Cemetery and publishes a dated fee schedule. From the schedule headed February 1, 2025:

Niches for cremated remains, in Sections C and L, run $2,695.00 to $2,995.00, and that figure includes the niche, the opening and closing, the inscription and the service set-up, which is unusual: most cemeteries quote those separately and the total arrives later. An urn garden single grave in Section G, three feet by three, is $700.00. Opening and closing a cremation burial is $750.00. A cremation vault or burial urn is $275.00.

Three cautions from the same document. Washington sales tax is added to columbarium packages, liners, vases and markers, currently 10.1 percent. A Saturday burial carries an extra $500 and must be in the cemetery by 1:00 p.m. There are no Sunday burials, and a holiday or holiday weekend adds $700.

Sumner Cemetery is the other option and its address will confuse you: 12324 Valley Avenue East, Puyallup, on 253-299-5510, but it is owned and run by the City of Sumner. It publishes cremation prices too. An individual urn garden plot with a granite marker is $795; an outdoor granite niche wall runs $1,895 to $2,695; indoor glass front niches start at $1,900; and its Wishing Well community scatter option is $495, which is the cheapest formal place to scatter we have found anywhere in Pierce County.

Woodlawn Abbey Mausoleum at 12421 Valley Avenue East, on 253-848-6816, was founded in 1913 and is one of the oldest chapel mausoleums in the country, with indoor climate controlled niches that hold up to five urns. It publishes no prices.

Worth knowing: no Dignity Memorial or Service Corporation International cemetery operates in Puyallup. Their own location search returns nothing here. The two cemeteries with published prices are both owned by cities.

We sell no cemetery property and take no commission from any of them.

Nearly everything below has a deadline, and the deadlines are the reason families miss out rather than the paperwork. Here they are in order of how quickly they expire.

The tightest clock is a homicide claim, and it is the one almost nobody knows exists. Where a death was a homicide, Washington pays toward the funeral: up to $7,990 through Crime Victims Compensation at Labor and Industries, for a death on or after July 1, 2023, plus up to twelve grief counseling sessions for immediate family. Two separate clocks, and they get quoted backwards constantly. The crime must be reported to police within one year of the crime. Then the application must be filed within three years of that police report, or five in certain circumstances. Miss the first and the second never starts. 1-800-762-3716.

Two years: the Social Security death payment. $255, paid once, to a surviving spouse, or where there is none to a child 17 or under, 18 or 19 and in full-time school, or disabled before 21. It is never sent automatically. Call 1-800-772-1213 on a weekday between 8:00 and 7:00, or begin it through a my Social Security account. If you would rather go in, book first; the current office list is at ssa.gov/locator.

Two years: the VA burial allowance. For a death not connected to service, $1,002 toward burial and $1,002 toward a plot at the rates effective October 1, 2025, on Form 21P-530EZ, within two years of the burial. The catch is not a deadline but a choice: use a national cemetery and the plot allowance does not apply, because there is no plot expense to reimburse. VA benefits, 1-800-827-1000.

One hundred and eighty days, for a tribal member of a tribe other than Puyallup. Bureau of Indian Affairs burial assistance is $3,500, raised from $2,500 in July 2024, and the application must be in within 180 days of the death. Puget Sound Agency, 2707 Colby Avenue, Suite 1101, Everett, on 425-622-9158. For an enrolled Puyallup member the Tribe’s own programme is considerably larger and is set out in its own section above.

No deadline, but a four to five week wait, so start early. Pierce County Veterans Services at 1501 Market Street, Suite 170, Tacoma, on 253-798-7449, weekdays 8:00 to 4:30, is one of the few county offices in this state that names burial expenses among the things it assists with, covering a veteran, a spouse or a dependent child under 18. It issues vouchers rather than cash and publishes no figure. Behind it, RCW 73.08.070 obliges every Washington county to bear an indigent veteran’s disposition cost at not less than $300, and to reimburse a relative who paid it. That three hundred is a legislative floor, not an offer.

Ignore the federal burial figures on the county’s own VA benefits summary page. It still shows $2,000 and $300 and says it is current as of July 2009.

No deadline at all, and no cost: the ground itself. Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent, on 425-413-9614, where about six thousand in-ground cremation sites sit alongside a columbarium of more than twenty-six thousand niches. For an eligible veteran the site, its opening and closing, permanent care, a government marker, a burial flag and a Presidential Memorial Certificate cost nothing, and cremated remains receive the honors a casket receives. A spouse or dependent child is included on the veteran’s marker, and a later remarriage does not remove eligibility. Booking runs through the National Cemetery Scheduling Office on 1-800-535-1117, discharge papers faxed to 866-900-6417 first.

Last, the county’s statutory backstop under Pierce County Code chapter 8.92, administered by the Medical Examiner. It applies to an indigent person whose body is unclaimed, reimburses the funeral home rather than the family, and sets its rates internally. It is not a programme you apply to; it is what remains when nothing else applied.

If money is the problem, tell us that before you sign anything. Every clock above is easier to catch on the first day than the thirtieth.