Cremation Services

Harborview Medical Center, 325 9th Avenue, is the one to understand first. It is licensed for 540 beds and it is the only Level I adult and pediatric trauma and burn center for Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho. A sudden or violent death anywhere in this region can end there. It is owned by King County and managed by UW Medicine, which is why it is not a UW hospital in the ordinary sense.

The others: UW Medical Center at Montlake and Northwest, which since 2020 have been one licensed hospital of 910 beds rather than two; Providence Swedish at First Hill, Cherry Hill and Ballard; and Virginia Mason Medical Center at 1100 9th Avenue, now part of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health.

Hospice is where Seattle surprises people. Only two Medicare-certified hospice agencies have a Seattle street address: Kaiser Permanente Washington Hospice at 201 16th Avenue East, and Kline Galland Hospice Services on Sixth Avenue South. The agency most families still call Providence Hospice of Seattle is now certified as Providence at Home with Compassus and works from Tukwila. Kline Galland opened a hospice unit at its Seward Park campus in 2023, and the nearest free-standing hospice house is EvergreenHealth Wockner Center in Kirkland.

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.

It is worth knowing before it happens, because the phrase frightens people more than it should. The King County Medical Examiner investigates sudden, unexpected and unnatural deaths in the county. The office is at 908 Jefferson Street, on the Harborview campus, and investigations are staffed around the clock on 206-731-3232, extension 5.

Two things families are relieved to hear. The investigation and examination cost you nothing, because the county does them as a public service. And remains are usually releasable to us within twenty-four to forty-eight hours of the examination, so this is rarely the delay people fear.

What the county does charge is a $100 disposition authorization fee, in place since January 1, 2024, billed to us rather than to you. It is part of the $110.80 in King County fees we itemize on this page, alongside the $10.80 Washington State filing fee. We handle the paperwork through the state electronic system either way.

King County Vital Records is at 201 South Jackson Street, Suite 220, on 206-837-0719, weekdays 8:30 to 4:30 except the first Wednesday of the month when it opens at 9:00. For once, being in Seattle is the advantage: this is the only counter in the county and everyone else drives to it.

Certified copies are $25.00 each, first and every additional alike. At the kiosk it is $28.50 and takes ten to fifteen minutes. By mail, $25.00 plus $4.00, two to three weeks. Online or by phone, $25.00 plus $6.00 and $11.50 handling, four to five business days.

Two things that are not widely known. There is no deadline: the county holds every Seattle death of any year, every King County death from 1944 and every Washington death from 2015, so a copy ordered years later comes from the same place. And while a certified copy is limited to close family and legal representatives, anyone at all may order a noncertified informational copy. We order certificates at $30 each and file the record for you.

The Seattle Times is the only paid metro obituary of any consequence, and its own desk starts at $366.45, covering one day in print at one inch, an optional photograph, an online obituary and a perpetual guest book. In Memoriam notices start at $266.95. There is no cheaper stand-alone death notice tier. Lower figures for the Times circulate on third-party placement sites and are not the paper’s own rate.

One local option almost nobody outside West Seattle knows about. The West Seattle Blog publishes obituaries free of charge, and says so in writing on every one: it has published close to five hundred at no cost, because charging a grieving family hundreds of dollars struck them as wrong. Email the text and a photograph to westseattleblog@gmail.com, in the body rather than as an attachment, with a few days’ notice.

The Seattle Medium, the Queen Anne and Magnolia News and the Ballard News-Tribune all still publish and all run obituaries, though none posts a rate. The Post-Intelligencer has not printed since 2009. A complete obituary on this site, with photographs, is included in our price at no charge.

Washington has a statute, RCW 68.50.130, and the Department of Licensing publishes a list of where scattering is permitted. It is more generous than families expect. Named on that list: the state’s public navigable waters, including Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, rivers, streams and lakes; private land with the owner’s permission; national parks with the chief park ranger’s permission; and state trust uplands with the Department of Natural Resources region manager’s permission.

The Department’s one practical instruction is easy to miss. Scatter only the contents. Pour the ashes from the container and dispose of the container separately, along with the identification disc or second label inside it.

The Pacific Ocean has its own rule: beyond the mean lower low water mark, under the federal general permit for burial at sea, reported to EPA Region 10 within thirty days. Mount Rainier and Olympic each require a park permit; North Cascades requires a letter of authorization and charges a $50 application fee. City parks are the one gap, since Seattle publishes no policy and the state list does not cover municipal parks, so ask the city before planning anything in one. Scattering at sea is available through us for $195.

Start with something no other large city in this region has to say. Seattle has no municipal cemetery. The only burial ground the city owns is the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery beside Volunteer Park, 526 Civil War graves that Parks maintains as a park. It sells nothing and publishes no rates. Every option here is private.

Evergreen Washelli, 11111 Aurora Avenue North, on 206-362-5200, is the largest, at 144 acres, with indoor and outdoor columbaria, cremation gardens, benches and urn burial. Acacia Memorial Park at 14951 Bothell Way NE is the other of any size. Both are owned by Service Corporation International and trade as Dignity Memorial. Their published cemetery figures start around $2,500 for a niche at Acacia and $5,995 at Washelli, but those are undated marketing numbers, so confirm before you rely on them.

The Catholic cemeteries are the ones that publish properly. On the Archdiocese of Seattle price list effective January 1, 2026, Calvary Cemetery at 5041 35th Avenue NE has columbarium niches from $1,515 and cremation ground burial from $700, with opening and closing at $725, endowment care included. Holyrood in Shoreline runs higher. Both are far more transparent than anything else in the city.

Lake View Cemetery on Capitol Hill is independent and non-profit, and one practical warning is worth more than a brochure: the grounds are open seven days but the office is only open weekdays 9:00 to 3:00, so a family calling at the weekend reaches nobody. We do not sell cemetery property and take no commission on it.

Most of what follows goes unclaimed, not because families are careless but because nobody is obliged to mention it. They are listed in the order we would work through them with you on the phone.

Social Security pays a $255 lump-sum death payment, and it is the one piece of money on this page that nobody will send you unasked. A surviving spouse claims it first; failing that a child who is 17 or younger, 18 or 19 and still in school, or disabled before 21. The window is two years from the date of death. Call 1-800-772-1213 on a weekday between 8:00 and 7:00. A my Social Security account may let you start it online, in-person visits now need an appointment, and the current office list is at ssa.gov/locator rather than on any funeral home page, ours included.

If the person was a veteran, start here before anything else. There is a national cemetery inside Seattle, and it cannot help you. Fort Lawton Post Cemetery in Discovery Park is closed to new interments; the VA accepts only subsequent interments in existing gravesites there. The nearest one open is Tahoma National Cemetery, 18600 SE 240th Street near Kent, at 425-413-9614, which the VA lists as having space for both casketed and cremated remains.

Quote the VA rather than paraphrase it. The benefit covers “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.” On cremation the VA is equally plain: 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 as well, with the name added to the veteran’s headstone rather than given a separate marker, and a surviving spouse who remarried after the veteran died is still eligible. Interments are booked centrally rather than by the cemetery: the National Cemetery Scheduling Office at 1-800-535-1117, weekdays, with discharge papers faxed to 866-900-6417.

There is cash as well as ground. For a death not connected to service the VA pays a $1,002 burial allowance and a $1,002 plot allowance under the rates effective October 1, 2025, claimed on VA Form 21P-530EZ within two years of the burial. The part that costs families money if they miss it: the plot allowance is not paid when the interment is in a national cemetery, because there is no plot expense to reimburse. It is the free niche or the plot allowance, never both. The VA benefits line is 1-800-827-1000.

The King County Veterans Program helps with burial costs. Eligibility is unusually broad: a single day of service, any discharge type, and the veteran’s family members count too, though some help is income tested. Take identification, proof of service and proof of income. The number is 206-263-8387, with offices at 9725 3rd Avenue NE in Seattle and 645 Andover Park West in Tukwila. Behind the program sits RCW 73.08.070, which obliges every Washington county to bear the disposition cost for an indigent veteran or an indigent veteran’s family member, at not less than $300.

If the person was an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, call the tribe before anything else on this list. In this county that means the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, whose Vital Statistics office handles funeral assistance and headstone funds at 253-876-3151, or the Snoqualmie Indian Tribe at 425-888-6551 option 3. The Puyallup Tribe of Indians publishes the largest benefit in this region, $6,000 toward a member’s funeral, through its Funeral Department at 253-573-7884. Bureau of Indian Affairs burial assistance of up to $3,500 is available to indigent enrolled members through the Puget Sound Agency in Everett, 425-622-9158. Stated plainly because it matters here: the Duwamish Tribe is not federally recognized, so federal tribal benefits do not run through it.

If the death was a homicide, Washington pays toward the funeral. The Crime Victims Compensation Program at Labor and Industries covers up to $7,990 for a death occurring on or after July 1, 2023, plus up to twelve grief counseling sessions for immediate family. The crime must be reported to law enforcement within a year, and the claim filed within three years of that report. Call 1-800-762-3716. Very few providers in this market mention it and it is real money.

Where there is genuinely nothing, the county has a statutory duty under RCW 36.39.030 and it discharges it through the King County Medical Examiner’s Indigent Remains Program. It funds cremation for people who die in the county without resources and without family able to arrange it. Expect about ninety days, and a decision that turns on a next-of-kin search and a review of the person’s finances rather than a published income line. The number is 206-731-3232, extension 5. Those cremated are interred in individual containers in shared plots at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Renton, with a public ceremony held periodically, so there is somewhere to visit.

If nothing here fits your circumstances, call us before you borrow money or put a cremation on a credit card. Working out what a family actually qualifies for is part of this job, not a favor, and it takes about ten minutes.