Funeral homes
Your funeral home does three jobs in one building. Depreciate each one right.
A funeral home is part clinical space, part gathering space, and part parking lot. The default schedule treats it as one building. A study looks at what each part actually is.
The baseline
39 years for the whole building. Not for every part of it.
A funeral home is nonresidential commercial property, so the default depreciation life is 39 years. There is no dedicated funeral home row in the standard classification tables, so a study starts from the general office and commercial baseline and works room by room from there: the preparation room, the chapel, and the site around the building.
How much of your building moves to shorter lives depends on your specific property, so we would rather show you a real number than quote a percentage here.The free estimate does exactly that.
What reclassifies
Where the short-life parts hide in a funeral home.
Preparation room plumbing and ventilation
The water lines, drains, and ventilation that exist to serve embalming and preparation equipment can move to a short life under the same rule used everywhere else: does the run serve a specific machine, or does it serve the building generally?
Chapel AV and seating
Sound systems, screens, and chapel seating are furnishings and equipment built for a service, analyzed separately from the walls and roof around them.
Parking and site work
Paving, curbs, walkways, and landscaping are classic 15-year land improvements. A funeral home's parking lot often carries real weight on a site-heavy property.
The hookups rule behind the preparation room comes straight from the case law. InDuaine v. Commissioner, the plumbing, gas lines, and electrical conduits that served specific equipment qualified as personal property, while the slab and the surrounding surfaces stayed with the building. The IRS's own audit guide cites the case for this functional approach, and it applies to any room built around equipment, not just a kitchen.
The honest part
Chapel built-ins and casework: to the evidence, not to a wish list.
Some funeral homes have extensive built-in casework: display alcoves, casket rooms, reception desks. The courts are careful about calls like these. InMetro National v. Commissioner, removable cabinets and hardware qualified as personal property when the buildout was analyzed part by part. ButMallinckrodt v. Commissioner shows the other side: parts built in place generally stay with the building.
We classify each piece to the evidence: how it is built, how it is attached, and what it serves.See what makes a study audit-defensible.
- What our funeral home studies document:
- Preparation room hookups tied to specific equipment
- Chapel AV and seating classified as furnishings
- Casework calls supported by how they are built
- Site work like parking and landscaping at 15 years
One more thing
Renovating? Qualified improvement property can help.
Funeral homes often update their space as needs change: a new preparation room layout, a refreshed chapel, updated finishes throughout. Any work you do to the interior of the building after it was first placed in service can bequalified improvement property, or QIP. QIP carries a 15-year life instead of 39, and it can qualify for100% bonus depreciation. Every renovation is worth checking against it.
Find out what your building is hiding.
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