Security National reports 2Q 2025. Is their Mortuary segment representative of U.S. situation?

August 19, 2025/Finance/

Security National Financial Corporation (SNFC), the Utah-based company that has interests in the pre-planning, insurance assignment, mortuary, and cemetery business reported their 2nd Quarter results of 2025 last week.

To sum up the company’s results, both of the 2nd Quarter 2025 and 6-month 2025 financials show an “overall” increase in revenue but a decrease in Earnings before taxes. Scott M. Quist, President of the company made this comment in prepared remarks from the company press release which you can access here, “Annualizing our first half results we achieved an 8% Return On Equity (ROE) and while that is below our 13.3% 10 year average ROE, I believe that to be a credible performance given that roughly 1/3 of our revenue and equity is in the still very troubled mortgage industry. It demonstrates the financial balance and resiliency of our combined businesses.”

SNFC operates in three divisions — the above mentioned Mortgage Segment is one of those divisions. They also operate a Life Insurance Segment which includes Security National Preneed and C&J Financial, and Cemeteries/Mortuaries Segment which consists of retail Death Care services.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take: I want to concentrate my take today on SNFC’s Cemetery/Mortuary Segment. That portion of the company is pretty concentrated in the state of Utah but also has entities in New Mexico and California. As far as for a public company segment it is fairly small and will probably do under $40 million in annual revenue.

While I mention that that number is small for a public company Death Care operation it is probably more relatable to family funeral homes and cemeteries across the United States than public companies like Service Corporation International (SCI) and Carriage Services. While we can learn from SCI and Carriage Services and compare our funeral home financial operations to those companies they are much larger than the average funeral home in total scope. That probably gives them discounts from suppliers and other advantages to create larger margins than most family-run Death Care operations.

Because of that reality I think a closer look at what has happened to SNFC’s Cemetery and Mortuary Segment in 2025 is relevant. The 2Q25 report shows that SFNC’s Cemetery/Funeral Segment is lagging 2024 numbers in both Revenue and Earnings before Taxes — both for the quarter and half-year.

For the half-year ended June 30, Cemetery and Mortuary Revenue is down from $17.0 Million in 2024 to $16.2 million in 2025 and for the same time period Earnings before Taxes are down from $5.14 million in 2024 to $4.03 million in 2025.

For Revenue that is a 4.7% decline and for Earnings before Taxes it is a 21.6% decline.

I think those numbers show a staple of Death Care business where there are high “Fixed-Costs” to business and once you reach a certain amount of Revenue you can multiply profits. It appears that is what SNFC did in 2024 but not yet in 2025.

Here is a prepared statement from SNFC President Quist on those numbers, “Analyzing the activity beneath the numbers we know that while our total service count is modestly up, our traditional service count is down and cremations are up (although we should note the percentage of cremations with services is up). Nationwide the cremation rate is now above 50%, so some of our results are market influenced since cremation services simply don’t have the same revenue as traditional services.”

I think that there are two factors at play for SNFC’s decline in Cemetery/Mortuary Revenue and Earnings numbers. The first is that as a predominantly Utah-based Death Care operator, cremations and direct cremations are starting to catch up to the national averages as for percentage of disposition choice. While we have seen the national providers such as SCI and Carriage Services report cremation dispositions at or near 60% of cases, the Cremation Association of North America showed Utah’s percentage of cremation in 2023 as 43%. As that number moves toward the U.S. average it is bound to lower revenues per service for Utah providers.

The other number in the equation that would help explain a lowering of Earnings would be the great inflationary increases in the cost of doing business. I think that may be something that is probably under-estimated in the operations of businesses today. It is imperative that prices reflect your cost of doing business or you will lose profitability margin.

And, I think that situation is very representative of the situation of traditional funeral homes in the United States today. Costs have gone up and prices have not kept up. That equation would lead to less margin and less profits and I think that may be a common situation among funeral homes in North America today.

President Quist gives another explanation of the reduction in Revenues and Earnings directly related to SNFC’s Cemetery/Mortuary operations. That is the “lag” of cemetery land sales for 2025. He makes a comment in his prepared statements to that situation, “Our preneed land sales lag 2024, and land sales are arguably the greatest driver of profitability”.

I would opine that that situation may be a reflection of more cremation as most cemeteries have found that when cremation has grown in popularity there is less need by consumers to purchase burial lots. While I have not seen SNFC’s cemeteries, the “lag” in cemetery land sales may be an indication that the company needs to be more aggressive in options for the cremation consumer — such as columbariums and scattering gardens.

Related — Here is the website for Security National Financial Corporations Cemetery/Mortuary Segment

Disclosure — The author of this article for Funeral Director Daily is a shareholder of Security National Financial Corporation.

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