By Guillermo Chaves, CEO, La Ascensión S.A, Colombia

In Colombia, death does not occur in a single way; it occurs across many territories at once. In major cities, funeral service relies on infrastructure, pre-need plans, digitalization, and an increasingly segmented offer. In rural, remote, or difficult-to-access areas, it also depends on community networks, complex distances and deeply rooted cultural practices.

This diversity makes Colombia a relevant case study for international funeral markets. As in other markets, the industry combines tradition, adaptation, and modernization; but in Colombia, this transformation unfolds across a diverse geography, a strong religious and community dimension, and a growing need for reliable and structured information to understand how the funeral ecosystem actually operates.

For a long time, one of the main limitations to analysing the sector was the absence of consolidated, comparable information specifically designed for its operational reality. Although the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE, Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística), Colombia’s official statistics authority, produces vital information on mortality and population, this data was not always integrated with institutional records, business directories, religious information, or territorial variables specific to funeral service delivery.

In this context, the Centro de Investigación y Estadística Exequial (CIEX, Funeral Research and Statistics Centre), a private research, knowledge and data initiative created by La Ascensión S.A., has developed a process of collecting, refining and technically interpreting information to provide a more structured view of Colombia’s funeral ecosystem. CIEX identified approximately 1,851 funeral homes, 1,448 cemeteries, 96 cremation facilities and 4,308 churches linked to the country’s funeral and religious ecosystem. These figures reveal a broad sector, but also a highly fragmented one: scale exists; the challenge lies in traceability, actor classification, data comparability, and territorial interpretation of installed capacity.

A broad and fragmented market structure

The Colombian funeral market is composed of multiple types of actors. It includes funeral companies, cemeteries, cremation operators, religious institutions, complementary suppliers, public authorities, insurers, pre-need funeral service providers, and community organizations. The sector operates as a network of services whose prices vary by territory.

Direct funeral service provision is mainly carried out by private operators, particularly funeral homes, business networks, and pre-need organizations. Cemeteries, however, may follow different administration models, including private, community, religious or municipal structures. Public institutions participate mainly through statistical production, sanitary regulation, territorial management, civil registration and, in some cases, the administration of local infrastructure.

Although information exists on the number and distribution of the sector’s main actors, there is still no fully consolidated national classification that precisely establishes what proportion of funeral homes, cemeteries and operators corresponds to public, private, religious, or mixed entities. The lack of a uniform taxonomy shows the sector still needs clearer classification standards.

The sectoral characterization developed by CIEX moves in that direction by taking dispersed sources, organizing them under comparable criteria, and turning them into useful inputs for understanding the sector as a system. This work does not replace official sources or seek to regulate the market, but it does help close a historic gap in sectoral knowledge.

Demographics and demand: a necessary reference

The recent evolution of mortality in Colombia provides important context, although it should not dominate the analysis. After the extraordinary impact of the pandemic, the country entered a phase of relative normalization, with demand once again associated with population growth, progressive aging, and urban concentration.

For 2025, CIEX technical estimates, built from available official DANE records and projection exercises, place non-foetal deaths at around 286,316, with a mortality rate close to 5.4 per thousand inhabitants. This figure should be read as a preliminary planning reference rather than a definitive official year-end figure. The trend confirms the need for better planning based on updated data. Installed capacity, territorial coverage and operational readiness require periodic analysis, especially in a country where demand is not evenly distributed.

>> Read the whole article in THANOS Magazine 2/2026 — see page 14.
Discover:

• Territorial diversity and operating conditions
• Tariff oscillation and the nature of funeral services
• Tradition, religion, and cultural change
• Sectoral information and knowledge management
• Main trends and challenges