Cremation Services

Two adult hospitals sit inside the city and both are Level II trauma centers: St. Joseph Medical Center, 1717 South J Street, 385 licensed beds, part of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health; and MultiCare Tacoma General, 315 Martin Luther King Jr Way, 367 beds. Allenmore on South Union Avenue is a 130-bed Level IV hospital with a narrower service line, and St. Clare in Lakewood is Level IV at 106 beds.

A change worth knowing, because older Tacoma families still ask about it. Until November 17, 2024, St. Joseph and Tacoma General alternated trauma call every other day under the Tacoma Trauma Trust, so which hospital a sudden death landed in depended on the date. Both now run Level II every day. Note too that Level I cases leave the county entirely, for Harborview in Seattle, which makes them King County deaths.

Mary Bridge Children’s moved into a new building at 305 South L Street in May 2026. Any page still placing it inside Tacoma General is out of date.

Six Medicare-certified hospices have Tacoma addresses, three of them certified in the last three years. MultiCare Hospice at 1313 Broadway is the oldest, from 1984. The nearest inpatient hospice house is Franciscan Hospice House, 2901 Bridgeport Way West in University Place, on 253-534-7000. We collect from all of these at any hour.

The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department is at 3629 South D Street, and the vital records line is (253) 649-1401. Hours are weekdays 8:00 to 4:30, with a later 9:30 opening on the last Tuesday of each month.

Pierce charges differently from its neighbors and the difference is not small. Walk in and it is $39, being $25 for the certificate plus $14 in processing and expedited fees. By mail it is $33. Online through VitalChek it is $48.50. Compare that with $25 flat at the King County counter and you can see why it is worth knowing which county you are dealing with.

The office publishes its scope as all Tacoma deaths from 1907 and all Pierce County deaths from 1926. A Washington death registered in the statewide electronic system can generally be issued by a local health department wherever it occurred, but the earliest year each office reaches varies, so call before you drive. We order certificates at $30 each and file the record for you.

The News Tribune is still publishing, owned by McClatchy, and takes obituaries through its own portal at tribnet.obituaries.com, which then display on Legacy. It publishes no rate, saying only that pricing is flexible according to length and photographs. Expect to be quoted on a callback.

Here is the piece of local knowledge that matters more, and it is not about the obituary at all. In Pierce County the probate notice to creditors runs in the Tacoma Daily Index, not in the News Tribune. It is a legal daily that has been publishing for more than a century, and every estate attorney in the county uses it. If your lawyer mentions publishing a notice, that is the paper. Oddly, the County itself buys its own legal advertising from the News Tribune.

Neither paper publishes a free death notice. A complete obituary on this site, with photographs, is included in our price at no charge.

Washington’s statute is RCW 68.50.130, and the Department of Licensing publishes the list of permitted places. Public navigable waters are on it by name, including Puget Sound, rivers, streams and lakes. So is private land with the owner’s consent, national parks with the chief ranger’s permission, and state trust uplands with the Department of Natural Resources.

The instruction people miss: scatter only the contents. Pour the ashes out and dispose of the container separately, with the identification disc inside it.

Mount Rainier is the obvious question here and the answer is yes, with a permit. The park maps which areas are approved and which are not, applications go by email to its special use permit coordinator, and winter road closures decide what is reachable. Do not treat the mountain as open ground. Scattering at sea is available through us for $195.

The consolidation picture here is the opposite of what most people assume, and it is worth having straight. Mountain View Memorial Park at 4100 Steilacoom Boulevard SW, the best-known memorial park in the market, is owned by NorthStar Memorial Group, not by Dignity Memorial. We could not find an SCI-owned cemetery inside Tacoma at all, which is unusual for a city this size.

New Tacoma Cemeteries, on 253-564-1311, describes itself as a registered not-for-profit cemetery whose profits are reinvested in the property rather than sent to an out-of-state corporate office. That is their wording and it is a fair distinction to draw in this market. They publish a price list too, which not every firm here does: direct cremation at $1,425 if you bring your own container and urn, or $1,575 with their cardboard sided box, in both cases before tax and in neither case including an urn.

One correction, since families assume otherwise. Calvary Cemetery in Tacoma is not one of the Archdiocese of Seattle’s Associated Catholic Cemeteries. That program covers four grounds, in Seattle, Federal Way, Shoreline and Kent, and Tacoma is not among them. If the Archdiocesan price list is what you were counting on, it does not apply here.

None of the Tacoma cemeteries publishes niche or interment prices, so you will have to ask each one. We do not sell cemetery property and take no commission on it.

Almost every item below is money a family can claim and never hears about. We have put them roughly in the order they apply, most likely first.

Begin with Social Security’s $255 lump-sum death payment. It has been $255 since 1954 so nobody is retiring on it, but it is yours and it does not arrive unless you ask. Surviving spouse first, then a child under 18, or under 20 and still at school, or disabled before 21. Two years to claim it, then it is gone. The number is 1-800-772-1213, weekdays 8:00 to 7:00. Some claims can be started through a my Social Security account. Offices now work by appointment and the live list is at ssa.gov/locator.

If the person was a veteran, start here before anything else. Tahoma National Cemetery, 18600 SE 240th Street near Kent, at 425-413-9614, is the nearest VA national cemetery open to new interments, and the VA lists it as having space for both casketed and cremated remains. Worth clearing up a common mix-up: Mountain View Memorial Park in Lakewood is a private cemetery, not a national one, and its charges are its own. The Washington State Veterans Cemetery at Medical Lake, 509-299-6280, also accepts cremated remains, but it sits outside Spokane, so it is a choice rather than a convenience.

The VA states this in its own words, so here they are. Provided “at no cost to the family” are a gravesite where space allows, the opening and closing of the grave, 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.” A spouse or a dependent child may be interred at no cost too, sharing the veteran’s headstone rather than receiving one of their own. Remarriage after the veteran’s death does not end a surviving spouse’s eligibility. The cemetery does not take the booking. The National Cemetery Scheduling Office does, on 1-800-535-1117, with the discharge paperwork faxed ahead to 866-900-6417.

Money, separately from the cemetery. Where the death was not connected to service the VA pays $1,002 as a burial allowance and $1,002 toward a plot, on the rates effective October 1, 2025, filed on Form 21P-530EZ inside two years of the burial. Here is the interaction to plan around: choosing a national cemetery forfeits the plot allowance, since there is no plot to pay for. Budget for one or the other, never both. Call 1-800-827-1000.

Pierce County runs a Veterans Assistance Fund and it covers burial. Its own page lists “burial expenses for a veteran, spouse or dependent child under 18” among what it pays. You will need a qualifying discharge, ninety days of Washington residency before applying, current Pierce County residency, and household income within their guidelines. Help comes as vouchers rather than cash. Pierce County Veterans Services is at 1501 Market Street, Suite 170, Tacoma, on 253-798-7449, weekdays 8:00 to 4:30. They do not publish the burial maximum, so ask for it directly. What is fixed is the floor: RCW 73.08.070 requires the county to pay not less than $300, and to pay that sum to relatives or friends who handled the disposition themselves.

The Puyallup Tribe of Indians publishes the most substantial funeral benefit of any tribe in this region and it is centered here in Tacoma. The Funeral Expense Assistance Program pays up to $6,000 for an enrolled member, $750 for a miscarriage or stillbirth, and $750 toward a non-member relative of a member, covering casket or urn, travel, funeral dinner, clothing, blankets and flowers against receipts, with a Pendleton blanket donated by Tribal Council. The Funeral Department is at 3507 East McKinley Avenue, Tacoma, on 253-573-7884. The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe also provides funeral assistance, through Vital Statistics at 253-876-3151, without publishing an amount. The Nisqually Indian Tribe at 360-456-5221 and the Squaxin Island Tribe at 360-432-3923 publish no figure, which is not the same as having nothing, so call. Bureau of Indian Affairs burial assistance of up to $3,500 runs through the Puget Sound Agency in Everett, 425-622-9158.

Where a death is a homicide, the state pays toward the funeral. Washington’s Crime Victims Compensation Program, run by Labor and Industries, covers up to $7,990 of funeral and burial costs for a death on or after July 1, 2023, with grief counseling for immediate family on top. Two conditions: the crime reported to law enforcement within a year, and the claim filed within three years of that report. The number is 1-800-762-3716. Almost nobody in this industry mentions it.

Pierce County meets its RCW 36.39.030 duty through Pierce County Code Chapter 8.92, administered by the Medical Examiner at 3619 Pacific Avenue, on 253-798-6494. Read the definitions before you pin hope on it. “Indigent” means the person was on public assistance at death or left an estate worth under $2,500. “Unclaimed” means no relative liable for the costs can be found in the state and nobody else claims the remains. The county reimburses funeral homes rather than paying families, and a family that comes forward is by definition not unclaimed, so this is generally not a route for someone reading this page. Those it does cover are interred at Haven of Rest in Gig Harbor; the 2025 graveside service honored 269 people.

If money is the obstacle and you are not a veteran, say so to us plainly rather than working down this list alone. There are usually two or three things in a given situation that nobody has mentioned.

And if none of it fits, call us anyway before you sign up to pay for this on a card. Ten minutes on the phone has turned something up more often than not.