Chris Jones here. I still get calls from people who think a newspaper obituary is fifty or a hundred dollars. In 2026, that might cover a tiny death notice in a small-town weekly – name, dates, funeral time. That’s it. A real write-up in a local paper is more like $200 to $400 for one day, and that’s often without a photo. Some weeklies will still run a few lines cheap, or free if you keep it short. That’s the low end. That’s also not Los Angeles.
The L.A. Times starts you at $205. Five lines, one column. Their average for a regular obituary is $1,000 to $1,500. Add a photo or a second day and it climbs. New York is worse. The Times there bills by the line. A few hundred bucks buys you almost nothing. A decent tribute can clear a thousand without even trying, and the long ones – the ones that actually sound like the person – can run into the thousands. I’ve seen numbers that would buy a used car. Same deal at a lot of big-city papers. They treat it like a classified because, at this point, that’s what it is.
Print has been shrinking for years, so the leftover space costs more. Families trim the story to fit the bill. That’s what bothers me. If you still want it in the paper for the folks in town who read it, that’s fine – just know what 2026 looks like, from a small town on up to L.A. and New York. If you want the whole story, with room to tell it, that’s why we built Obits Online.
