Funeral Program Printing: Where to Print and What It Costs

For most families the fastest route is a same-day print counter at Staples, FedEx Office, Office Depot or a local print shop — upload a print-ready PDF, choose card stock, and collect within a few hours. Expect roughly $0.50 to $2.00 per copy depending on paper, color and folding.

Below are all the realistic options with their trade-offs, the file settings printers actually need, and how many copies to order so you neither run out nor throw half of them away.

Same-day retail print counters

Staples, FedEx Office and Office Depot all offer in-store printing from an uploaded file, usually same day and often within a couple of hours. This is what most families use, because the timeline is short and the locations are everywhere. FedEx Office printing lets you upload online and collect in store.

• Cost — roughly $0.50–$1.50 per copy for color on card stock
• Speed — same day, sometimes within an hour or two
• Watch for — folding is often a separate charge, and sometimes not offered at all; ask before you assume you are collecting finished booklets

A local print shop

• Cost — often comparable to retail, sometimes cheaper at higher quantities
• Quality — usually noticeably better paper choice and folding, and a real person who will check the file before it runs
• Speed — same or next day if you call first and explain it is for a funeral. They will nearly always prioritize it

The funeral home

Most funeral homes will print programs, and it is the least effort of any option. It is also usually the most expensive per copy, and the design templates tend to be limited. Printed materials sit inside the funeral home's service and merchandise charges, the category the National Funeral Directors Association tracks in its published median costs.

Two things worth knowing. First, you are never obliged to use them — under the FTC's Funeral Rule a funeral home must give you an itemized price list and cannot require you to buy a package to get the parts you want. Second, bringing your own print-ready PDF and asking them to print it is a normal request that most will accommodate.

Printing at home

Viable for a small service, and genuinely fine for 20 or 30 copies. Beyond that, home printers struggle: color drifts between pages, heavy card stock jams, and you will spend the evening feeding paper instead of being with your family.

• Use 65–80 lb cover stock or 32 lb text weight — heavier than standard 20 lb paper
• Print one test copy first and look at it in daylight before running the rest
• Set the printer to its highest quality and to "borderless" if your design runs to the edge
• Fold with a bone folder or the back of a spoon along a ruler for a clean crease

• Single flat card, color, card stock — about $0.40–$0.90 per copy
• Bifold (one folded sheet, four panels) — about $0.75–$1.75 per copy, plus folding if charged separately
• Booklet, 8 pages, folded and stapled — about $2.00–$4.00 per copy
• Funeral home printing — commonly $2.00–$5.00 per copy, sometimes bundled into a service package
• At home — paper and ink only, roughly $0.20–$0.50 per copy, plus your evening

For 100 bifold programs, that puts most families somewhere between $75 and $175 at a print counter. Design is a separate cost from printing, and our breakdown of what funeral programs cost separates the two.

Print one per expected household, plus about 20%. Programs are shared between couples and families sitting together, so one per head is usually too many — but running out is a real regret, and the marginal cost of twenty more is small.

• Small service, 30–50 guests — 40 copies
• Typical service, 75–120 guests — 100 copies
• Large service, 200+ guests — 200 copies, and keep a box at the reception
• Always add 10–15 extra for the family to keep, and for relatives who could not attend

Order the extras in the same run. A second print run later will not color-match the first, and per-copy cost rises sharply at small quantities.

• Standard size — 8.5 × 11 inches folded once to 5.5 × 8.5. This is what every print counter handles without questions
• Paper weight — 65–100 lb cover stock. Anything lighter feels flimsy in the hand and shows print through from the other side
• Finish — matte, not gloss. Photographs read better and there is no glare when someone holds it under chapel lighting
• Color — full color if there are photographs, which there almost always are
• Folding — bifold for most services; a booklet needs saddle-stitching, which retail counters sometimes cannot do in-house

If you are still deciding on the format itself rather than the printing, our sample funeral programs show six complete layouts panel by panel, from a single card to an eight-page booklet.

Nearly every printing problem is a file problem, and all of them are avoidable:

1. 1.PDF, not Word or Canva link. Word documents reflow on someone else's machine and fonts substitute. Export a PDF
2. 2.Fonts embedded, or the printer will substitute them and your layout will shift
3. 3.300 DPI images. A photo pulled from Facebook is often 72 DPI and will look soft in print even though it looked fine on screen
4. 4.CMYK color if the shop asks for it; otherwise RGB is usually fine for digital printing
5. 5.Bleed of 0.125 inches if any color or photograph runs to the edge of the page
6. 6.Correct page order for folding. For a bifold, the panels are not in reading order on the flat sheet — page 4 and page 1 sit side by side on the back. Let the design file handle this, or ask the printer to impose it

Print shops print. They do not write the obituary, choose the photographs, lay out the order of service, or fix a blurry picture of your father — and that is the part that actually takes the time when the service is in two days.

That is the step we handle. You send the details and the photographs; we send back a print-ready PDF laid out properly, imposed correctly for folding, at 300 DPI, ready to hand to any print counter. If the service is imminent, our guide to getting a same-day funeral program sets out the realistic timings, and who makes funeral programs compares the options if you would rather not do it yourself.

If you are building the program from scratch, start with how to make a funeral program. And if you are printing prayer cards in the same run — most families do — our guide to funeral prayer cards covers their sizes and stock.