Public Funeral Home/Cemetery company stock prices have dropped. Why?

June 5, 2026/Finance/

A friend of mine reached out via text message the other day and asked if I had any idea why the stocks of public company funeral home and cemetery operators Service Corporation International (SCI) and Carriage Services had dropped in the past month or so. It didn’t take me by surprise because since their reports of the 1st Quarter of 2026 I had noticed that the stocks were moving down many days.

What did surprise me as I took a closer look was the level that they had dropped in value. Both stocks are off roughly 20% since their highs for the 2nd Quarter which both reached about the 3rd week in April. Those highs, for both companies were reached before their 1Q26 reports were made to the public.

Both companies reported in their 1Q26 report that Comparable Funeral Contracts (for Carriage Services) and Total Comparable Services Performed (SCI) were down when referenced to their numbers for the 1st Quarter of 2025. SCI made a point to reference unusually high flu deaths for 2025 as one reason for 2026 1st Quarter comparable numbers to be shy of the 2025 numbers.

Here’s a chart that shows the high point of each stock for the 2nd Quarter of 2026 and the price of the stock as of closing of the market on Tuesday, June 2, 2026.

Editor’s Note: On Thursday while preparing this article for email distribution on Friday I noticed that as of the close of business on Wednesday, June 3, both SCI and Carriage Services reached their 52-week low for the price of their stock. SCi closed at a price of $68.77 per share and Carriage Services closed at a price of $37.32 per share.

Daniel Jones, opining in a Seeking Alpha article of May 18, 2026 titled “Service Corporation International: Still a ‘Buy’ for long-term stability”, made the following comments about Service Corporation International that might answer some of my friend’s questions:

“Recently, financial performance for the business has been a bit mixed. In the first quarter of 2026, revenue came in just a hair under $1.10 billion. That was 2.1% above the $1.07 billion that the business reported a year earlier. Unfortunately, net profits contracted from $142.9 million to $135.8 million. And even on an adjusted basis, net income dropped from $139.6 million to $135.3 million. This does not imply that every metric worsened. Yes, we also saw EBITDA pull back from $327.3 million to $325.5 million. But operating cash flow jumped from $311.1 million to $333.8 million, while adjusted operating cash flow grew from $229.6 million to $233.1 million.

The rise in revenue for the company came even though funeral sales dropped from $639.5 million to $630.6 million. This was because of a decline in the number of services performed. Management does not provide a count of the total number of services. But they do provide data regarding comparable funeral locations. Those services dropped 6% because, last year, the flu season was particularly nasty. The number of comparable services performed by the company declined from 97,475 to 91,603. However, comparable average revenue per service expanded from $5,754 to $5,947.

Meanwhile, the company saw nice growth when it came to its cemetery operations. Those sales jumped from $434.7 million to $465.9 million in the course of a year. This jump, according to management, was mostly because of higher property revenue and from a $7.8 million jump associated with merchandise and service activities. Pre-need revenues surged 9.7% year over year, with management attributing that to an increase in endowment care trust fund income as total return distributions grew. This part of the company was also the big driver of the profit growth that the business saw. And that was solely because fixed costs remained even as revenue for the business increased.”

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take: First of all, that both companies are trading in a tandem-like fashion indicates to me that the issue with investors is more industry-wide than it is individual company. And, to investors, the loss of value may be more “consolidator”-based rather than individual funeral home or company based.

Specifically to these two companies, I’m a big believer in the management team of CEO Thomas Ryan and Jay Waring at SCI and also of CEO Carlos Quezada and President Steve Metzger at Carriage Services. Ryan and Waring have a track record of delivering consistent solid gains to SCI shareholders over time which is testified to by the, according to Seeking Alpha, historical rise of 161% in the SCI stock price over the past decade.

Quezada and Metzger, while newer at the helm of Carriage Services, seem to have put that company on a sustainable and patient path for solid growth in the years to come as well.

My point of view on the stock prices of the companies at this time is, yes, there are some questions as to the number of comparable services each is doing in their establishments and a question among some investors is, “Is it truly because of less flu-related deaths for the quarter or is it signaling a trend that independent operators are getting better at moving market share away from the consolidators?” That’s a question I hear in the profession. I think that is a question that will be answered in future quarterly reports of the operators.

I also come to think that there is a thought process that funeral and cemetery services are simply being left behind in the investing world as much of the financial resources available for investing have been moved into the high-flying Artificial Intelligence sectors making less money available to be invested in the public companies of Death Care. . . . . which historically move their profit margins up at a slower, predictable pace.

Investing in high-flying AI and slow-growth Death Care — I’m one who wonders why one can’t do both.

Disclaimer — The author of this article for Funeral Director Daily is a shareholder of both Service Corporation International and Carriage Services.

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