Let’s be honest about something the industry doesn’t always say out loud: we are losing the next generation of funeral directors, and the legislation currently moving through Albany, while well-intentioned in many respects, is not going to stop it.
New York State has proposed more than two dozen bills this session touching on funeral service. Some of them are genuinely good. The hospice death certificate fix is long overdue. The HOV lane access and license plate badges are nice. The enforcement authority for the Bureau of Funeral Directing is a welcome and needed development, particularly in light of recent headlines about unlicensed operators preying on grieving families.
But if you step back and look at the full picture, you’ll notice something conspicuous in its absence: almost none of this legislation meaningfully addresses why people are leaving funeral service , or why so many promising students never make it to licensure in the first place.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
The funeral service workforce is in trouble. Nationally, the average male funeral director is 55 years old. The average female funeral director is 43. The profession skews older, and it’s getting older every year, because the pipeline feeding new professionals into the industry is leaking badly at both ends.
Turnover is rampant. Industry estimates suggest a significant portion of new funeral directors leave the profession within five years of licensure. They didn’t make it through mortuary school, a licensing exam, a residency, and their first years on the job just to walk away for fun. They left because the math stopped making sense.
And here is the math that no one in a legislative hearing room seems to want to say: a new funeral director, someone who completed two to four years of college, passed a licensing exam, and served a one-year residency, can earn less per hour than a barista. A job at Starbucks does not require a degree. It does not require a residency. It does not require you to be on call at 2 a.m. on Thanksgiving. It comes with health benefits, stock options, and a schedule you can actually plan around.
That’s not a knock on Starbucks. That’s an indictment of an industry that has not reckoned with what it is asking of early-career professionals in exchange for what it is offering them. Is this the life that many older funeral directors lived, in order to get to where they are today? Of course. But does that mean the next generation is required to work for less than a living wage and sacrifice their own work/life balance?
The Residency Bottleneck Nobody Talks About
There’s another piece of this that gets less attention than it deserves, and it starts before anyone ever gets licensed.
Students complete their mortuary science education and then hit a wall: they cannot find a residency. Not because there aren’t funeral homes. Not because there isn’t need. But because established funeral homes— many of whom are stretched thin and exhausted themselves — aren’t offering them.
The reasons are understandable. Taking on a resident means time, attention, paperwork, and liability. It means slowing down to teach someone who might leave in three years anyway. When you’re already running on fumes, adding that responsibility often feels like more than you can carry.
But the result is a generation of trained, credentialed, genuinely motivated young people sitting in limbo: licensed on paper but unable to practice, their student loans accruing interest while they wait for someone to give them a chance.
What the Legislature Is Proposing, and What It Won’t Fix
To be fair, the apprenticeship bills (S8152 and A5172) and the residency strengthening bills (S7690 / A7630) show that some legislators are thinking about the pipeline. The idea of an apprenticeship pathway that allows people to earn while they learn has genuine merit. The formalized preceptor requirements in the residency bills could, theoretically, improve the quality and accountability of the residency experience for residents who are lucky enough to get one.
But here’s what no bill on the current list addresses:
Compensation. There is no proposed legislation that would establish minimum pay standards for funeral director residents or newly licensed directors. None. The industry can continue to pay early-career professionals poverty wages, and the law will have nothing to say about it.
Work/life balance. The “kids these days don’t want to work” complaint is one of the oldest refrains in any profession facing a generational shift, and it is nearly always wrong. What younger professionals are rejecting is not work. It is an expectation of unlimited availability for wages that don’t reflect the sacrifice. No proposed legislation addresses call schedules, mandatory rest periods, or staffing ratios that would make the workload survivable. None of these bills explain how there’s potential financial reward in extending the residency from one year to four, or how requiring 100 hours of ‘discernment’ when students are already paying to study, will result in substantive change.
Residency access. The apprenticeship bills create a new pathway. But they don’t resolve the fundamental problem that established practitioners aren’t making themselves available as preceptors or residency supervisors at the scale the profession needs. There are no incentives, financial or otherwise, proposed for funeral homes that take on residents or apprentices. No tax credits. No stipend programs. No liability protections beyond what already exists.
Retention. Once someone makes it through licensure and into their first years of practice, what keeps them? No proposed legislation addresses mentorship structures, continuing education funding, professional development pipelines, or any of the other mechanisms that help people build careers rather than just jobs. What can the legislature do about the frequent complaints of inhumanely long hours, sexism and toxic work environments?
The Licensed Funeral Arranger Act (S9112) is perhaps the most telling example of the gap between legislative ambition and workforce reality. Creating a new, lower-barrier licensure category might expand the pool of people who can provide funeral services. But if those individuals are paid the same wages as current early-career directors, subject to the same on-call expectations, and afforded the same lack of institutional support — we will simply have more people burning out faster in a broader category of roles. When the big corporations pushing this legislation are already blatantly posting job ads for these titles, why is a change in the law even needed?
Expanding who can work in funeral service is not the same as making funeral service worth working in.
The Conversation That Actually Needs to Happen
The funeral service profession has a culture problem that preexists the workforce shortage and will outlast any legislation designed to address it. It is a culture that has long prized sacrifice over sustainability, self-reliance over mentorship, and a kind of stoic endurance that many entering the field — particularly those who came to it because they genuinely care about serving families — find at odds with how they want to live and work.
The younger professionals who are leaving, or who never arrived, are not lazy. Many of them are deeply committed to the work. They are simply declining to accept terms that no other licensed profession would ask them to accept without pushback.
Changing that requires something legislatures cannot mandate: established funeral directors willing to look honestly at the conditions they are offering, and at the role they play in either perpetuating or breaking the cycle.
That means taking on residents even when it’s inconvenient. It means paying entry-level directors enough that they can afford rent without a second job. It means building practices that allow for days off, for predictable schedules, for the kind of professional life that a person can sustain for decades rather than endure for a few years before burning out.
It means deciding that growing the next generation of this profession is not somebody else’s problem.
We Want to Hear From You
If you’re an established funeral director reading this, you have lived the reality described above. You may have benefited from a mentor who made time for you, or you may have made your own way without one. You may have wrestled with whether to take on residents, struggled to offer competitive pay, or watched talented colleagues walk out the door.
What do you think it will actually take to stop the bleeding?
Leave a comment below, or reach out directly. The profession is having this conversation in funeral home break rooms and conference hallways — it’s time to have it publicly, where it can do some good.
The legislation is moving. The workforce crisis is deepening. And the only people who can tell us what will actually work are the ones who have been doing this work for decades and still believe it’s worth doing.
We’re listening.