Formats: the notices page
What an obituary costs, and why length is the whole bill
A hard page to shop calmly. Here is the meter, plainly, so the arithmetic is one less thing.
A paid obituary is priced like a classified: per line or per column inch, per day, at the paper’s own rate, plus a flat fee for a photograph. Length drives everything. The same notice costs several times more in a metro daily than in the local weekly, and every added day of publication re-runs the meter.
Source: Chicago Tribune self-serve ad portal (placeanad.chicagotribune.com), retrieved Jul 31, 2026. Metro obituary portals price in-flow from text length; no open card published.
The three ways to place one
Through the funeral home: they submit your text and pass the paper’s charge through their invoice, sometimes with a handling fee, so ask whether the line item is at cost. Through the paper’s portal: metro dailies route obituaries through self-serve flows (the Chicago Tribune’s placeanad portal is typical) that show the price as you type, which is the clearest view of the meter you will get. Through the classified desk by phone: the traditional route, and still the right one for unusual requests like multi-paper placement or specific run dates.
National aggregation runs through Legacy.com, which hosts obituary pages for most large US papers; the print notice and the online memorial are usually bundled by the portal.
Source: Legacy.com obituary placement network, retrieved Jul 31, 2026. Network coverage per Legacy.com; pricing flows through each paper's placement channel.
What the desk says
What it means
“It's priced per line, and the average runs about 20 lines.”
Averages are upsell framing. Count your own text: words divided by roughly six or seven per line. Cutting ten words can cut a line, and a line is money every day it runs.
“The photo is a flat fee.”
True, and usually per photo per day. Two photos across three days is six photo fees.
“Most families run it through the weekend.”
Each day re-runs the meter. One well-chosen day, often the day of the service announcement, does the notice's practical work.
Craft
Keeping a dignified notice affordable
Write the full tribute for the online memorial, which is typically flat-priced or bundled, and run a shorter print notice carrying the facts: name, dates, family, service details. Print length is where the bill lives; the online page holds unlimited words. If several papers matter (hometown plus current city), price the local weekly for the longer notice and the metro for a short one, not the reverse.
Buying craft, not a published rate: meter structure (lines, days, photo fees) is standard practice across US papers; each paper sets the rates.
The classified meter, which obituaries share.
Deadlines: obituary desks hold the latest cutoffs in the building.
The Tribune’s portal, the exemplar self-serve flow.