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Newspaper notice cost calculator
See how much cash advance money runs through your firm for paid death notices, and what placing them costs you in staff wages.
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Obituary production time calculator
Add up the drafting, photo handling, proof rounds, and late service changes behind each obituary to see the real hours behind your published pages.
Obituary production is invisible labor at most independent firms. It happens between the arrangement conference and the visitation, usually by a director who is also confirming the clergy, the cemetery opening, and the death certificate signature. Because it is never scheduled, it never appears in a staffing plan, and it is the first thing that slips in a heavy week.
This calculator makes it visible. Enter your monthly call volume and the four kinds of minutes an obituary really takes: writing the copy from family notes, handling the photographs, running proof rounds with the family, and making the late edits when a service time moves. The result shows your monthly hours, your annual days, and how many obituaries one director could realistically finish in an eight hour day.
Your result
Staff minutes per obituary
115
Total minutes one obituary takes from family notes to a correct published page.
Hours per month on obituaries
23.0
Staff hours your firm gives to obituary production in an average month.
Obituaries one director can finish in a day
4
How many an on duty director could complete in eight uninterrupted hours.
Full work days per year
34.5
Eight hour days a year your firm spends producing obituary pages.
Time the next three obituaries with a phone timer and put the real minutes in, because most directors underestimate the proof rounds.
Where the minutes actually go
Directors usually guess the drafting time correctly and miss everything after it. The photographs are the classic example: a shoebox of prints from 1962 and a phone album from last Christmas both have to become a gallery that looks respectful on a phone screen. That is scanning, straightening, cropping, and choosing an order, and it is rarely under fifteen minutes.
Proof rounds are the second surprise. A survivor list with a stepdaughter, a predeceased sibling, and a former spouse can go back and forth three times before the family agrees on wording. Each round is short but it interrupts something else, and the interruption costs more than the minutes suggest.
Using the capacity number in a heavy week
The day capacity figure is the one to keep in mind when four calls land in thirty six hours. If one obituary takes two hours end to end, a director covering removals, arrangement conferences, and the clergy cannot produce four pages that day no matter how willing they are. Knowing that number is what lets you decide in advance who drafts and who publishes.
It is also a useful test of any change you make. Cut the photo handling with direct family uploads, cut a proof round with a clean approval step, and watch the capacity figure move. If a change does not move it, it is not saving your staff anything on a hard week.
Questions about this calculator
Should the family write the obituary or should the director?
Both approaches work and both take staff time. Families who write their own still send copy that needs formatting, fact checking against the death certificate worksheet, and a proof round or two. Enter whatever your firm actually does, including the time spent waiting on copy that has not arrived.
Why include late service changes in obituary time?
Because the change is nearly always the most urgent edit of the week. A visitation that moves an hour has to reach the page before relatives leave home, and a director on the road makes that edit under pressure. It belongs in the total because it belongs in the workload.
What is a reasonable target for minutes per obituary?
Firms that use a structured intake form and let families upload photographs directly commonly land under an hour of staff time per obituary. That is a target rather than a promise, since heavy proofing and complicated family structures will always take longer. Measure your own baseline first.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The obituary intake and publication checklist
A working checklist that takes an obituary from the arrangement conference table to a correct, shared, and archived service page.
Hold that number against one hour of publishing
You now have a figure built from your own call count, your own staff rate, and the way your firm really works. Set it beside a live page: arrangement notes typed in, photographs uploaded by the family from the table, visitation and committal times set, one share link out the door. Ask for twenty minutes and we will run one of your past cases so you can see exactly where that number moves.