How to write an obituary (with a template and examples)

By The Yourtale team · Published 20 October 2026 · 15 min read

To write an obituary, open with one sentence carrying the full name, age, town and date of death. Follow with two or three short paragraphs on the life, built from specific details rather than adjectives. Then list the surviving family, the service time and place, and any request for donations. Keep the facts checked and the home address out.

That is the whole shape, and it has not changed much in a century. What makes the task hard is not the form. It is that you are usually writing it within a day or two of the death, often for a funeral home deadline, while someone is asking you about hymns. The pages that rank for this question are mostly funeral homes and template sites, and they hand you a fill-in-the-blanks form. A form is useful. It does not tell you how to find the two details that make the obituary sound like the person, or what to leave out so the notice does not become a gift to a burglar.

This guide gives you a template you can copy, three short worked examples, and the step most guides skip: gathering the life details from the family before you write a word.

Key takeaways

• An obituary and a death notice are different things. A death notice is a short paid announcement with the facts and the service details. An obituary tells the story of the life. Most families publish one paid piece that does a bit of both.
• Gather before you write. Fifteen minutes on the phone with two or three relatives, asking for one specific memory each, gives you better material than an hour alone with a blank page.
• Specific beats generous. "She was kind" says nothing. "She kept a tin of dog biscuits in her car for every dog on the street" says it without the adjective.
• Leave out the full birth date, the home address and the mother's maiden name. AARP warns that criminals harvest exactly these details from obituaries, and that a published funeral time tells a burglar when the house will be empty (AARP).
• Length is set by price as much as by taste. The typical printed obituary runs 250 to 300 words (Legacy), and newspaper prices rise with length, from a starting price of $34.50 at the Albany Times Union to $475 at The Washington Post. Put the long version on the funeral home's website.

What is the difference between an obituary and a death notice?

A death notice is a short announcement that someone has died, usually placed and paid for by the family through the funeral home. It carries the name, age, date of death, the surviving family and the service details, and very little else.

An obituary tells the story of the life. In a newspaper, a news obituary is, in Legacy's words, "typically written by a journalist and published in the newspaper alongside other articles written by journalists" (Legacy). The paper decides who gets one. Legacy's newspaper placement pages put it plainly: an editorial obituary is "not guaranteed" and is "determined entirely by the newspaper's editorial discretion," while a paid notice submitted by the family or funeral home is guaranteed "upon payment" (Legacy).

In practice the line has blurred, and Legacy notes that the two terms "are often used interchangeably, and sometimes their usage is swapped." What most families write and call an obituary is a paid notice with a few paragraphs of life story in the middle, published in the local paper and on the funeral home's website. That is what this guide covers. If you only need the announcement, write the first sentence and the service details from the template below and stop there.

What should an obituary include?

Almost every obituary carries the same elements, in roughly this order. You do not need all of them, but check each one off before you decide to skip it.

1. The announcement. Full name (with any nickname or maiden name the community knew), age, town of residence, and the date and place of death.
2. Birth and early life. Where and when they were born, and to whom. One line is enough.
3. The shape of the life. Education, work, military service, marriage, the places they lived. This is the part that reads like a CV, so keep it brief.
4. What made them themselves. Two or three specific details: a habit, a phrase, a place, a thing they made or fixed or grew. This is the part people read twice.
5. Family. Who survives them (spouse or partner, children, grandchildren, siblings), and who predeceased them.
6. Service details. The time, date and place of the funeral, memorial or celebration of life, and of any visitation. Or a line saying the service will be private.
7. Donations. "In lieu of flowers" and a named organisation, if the family wants that.
8. A photograph, if the publication allows one. A recent one, or the one the family would recognise.

The cause of death is optional. Some families name it, often to raise awareness of an illness or to save themselves from answering the question a hundred times. Others leave it out. Both are normal.

What should you leave out of an obituary?

Leave out the details that help a stranger more than a mourner. This is the section most templates skip, and it is the one with an official warning behind it.

AARP's advice is direct: "leave out details that could be used for identity theft, such as the deceased's date and place of birth, middle name, maiden name and mother's maiden name," and "don't include the deceased's home address" (AARP). The Georgia Attorney General's consumer protection division gives a widow the same advice: thieves "often target" obituaries "to glean personal information," so "do not include his birth date" (Georgia Consumer Protection Division).

The full date of birth. The age alone, or the birth year, is enough for anyone who knew them. A full date of birth next to a full name is most of what someone needs to open an account in a dead person's name.

The mother's maiden name. It is still a common security question. If the mother's family matters to the story, name the parents without labelling which surname was the maiden one.

The home address, and anything that says the house will be empty. AARP spells out the second risk: if the obituary gives the date and time of the funeral, "burglars can break into the presumably empty house during the service." Name the town, not the street, and ask a neighbour or friend to stay in the house during the service.

There is a real trade-off here. An old school friend searches for the name she knew, which may be a maiden name, and the town someone grew up in is how their classmates recognise them. If you include either, drop the exact birth date and the address, which are the details that do the damage in combination.

Anything still in dispute. Estrangements, inheritance fights and the second marriage the children never accepted do not belong in a public notice. An obituary is not the place to settle anything. If a relationship is complicated, list the relationship plainly and say nothing about it.

How do you gather the life details before you write?

Most obituary guides start at the blank page. Start on the phone instead.

The problem with writing an obituary alone is that grief and a deadline flatten memory. You will remember the career, the marriage and the illness. You will not remember the joke he told every Christmas or the year she drove to Cornwall on her own. Other people will, and they will tell you if you ask the right way.

Call or message two or three people who knew the person in different parts of their life: a sibling, an old friend, a colleague. Ask each one for a single specific memory, not a tribute. "What is the story you always tell about him?" or "What did she always say?" gets you material. "Tell me about Mum" gets you adjectives, because a general question can only be answered generally.

A short list of questions that work, for the call or the family group chat:

• What did they do on an ordinary Saturday?
• What did they always say, or say wrong?
• What could they fix, cook, grow or make that nobody else in the family could?
• Where were they happiest?
• What were they stubborn about?
• What is a story about them that still gets told at family gatherings?

Write every answer down in their words, even the ones you will not use. While you are at it, collect the facts you will need to check: the exact spelling of every name in the family list, the order of the grandchildren, the town of birth, the year of the move. Families get these wrong in print more often than anything else, and a misspelt grandchild is the mistake people remember.

This is the part of the work we know best. We make memoir books from voice interviews, and the lesson from every one of them is the same: the life is in the specific details, and the details live in other people's heads until somebody asks. The notes you gather this week will be worth more than the obituary itself. Keep them.

How do you structure an obituary?

Think of it as five short paragraphs.

Two rules keep it readable. Do not attempt a full chronology, because a life told year by year turns into a list that lands nowhere. And put the specific details in the middle paragraph, not saved for the end, because many readers stop after the first few lines.

Obituary template

Copy this and replace everything in square brackets. Delete any line that does not apply.

[Full name], [age], of [town], died [day and date] at [place, or "at home"][, after / following / surrounded by ...].

[He / She / They] [was / were] born in [year] to [parents' names] and grew up in [town], [one concrete detail about where or how].

[Two or three sentences on work and the shape of the life: what they did, where, for how long. Then one specific thing that only they did.]

[One sentence on what they loved, in concrete nouns: the allotment, the Saturday crossword, the 1974 Volvo.]

[He / She / They] [is / are] survived by [spouse or partner], [children and their partners], [grandchildren], and [siblings]. [He / She / They] [was / were] predeceased by [names].

A [funeral / memorial service / celebration of life] will be held at [time] on [day and date] at [place, town]. [Visitation details.] [Or: "The service will be private."]

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to [named organisation].

Obituary examples

The three people below are invented. They show the template at three lengths: a short notice, a standard obituary, and a longer one in a warmer voice. All three follow the advice above: an age or a birth year, never a full birth date, and a town, never a street.

A short notice (about 80 words)

Margaret Hart, 91, of Kendal, died peacefully on Tuesday, 14 October 2026, at Westmorland General Hospital. Born in 1935, she grew up in Sedbergh and taught at Kendal Primary School for 31 years. She is survived by her son, David (Anne), her daughter, Ruth, and five grandchildren. She was predeceased by her husband, Thomas. A funeral will be held at 11 a.m. on Friday, 24 October, at Holy Trinity Church, Kendal. Donations in her memory may be made to the RNLI.

A standard obituary (about 230 words)

Robert "Bob" Lindqvist, 78, of Duluth, Minnesota, died on 9 October 2026 at home, with his wife beside him.

Bob was born in 1948 to Carl and Elsie Lindqvist and grew up in Two Harbors, Minnesota, on the lake, where he learned to fish before he could ride a bicycle.

He worked for 34 years as a machinist at the Duluth shipyards, and for most of those years he was the man people called when a part could not be ordered. He coached Little League for two decades without ever, as far as anyone can remember, keeping score. Every winter he flooded the backyard into a rink, and every winter half the street's children learned to skate on it.

He loved walleye, crossword puzzles done in pen, and his 1979 Ford pickup, which he refused to sell and which still starts.

Bob is survived by his wife of 52 years, Carol; his children, Erik (Jenna) and Kristin Marsh (Daniel); six grandchildren; and his sister, Anne. He was predeceased by his brother, Paul.

A celebration of life will be held at 2 p.m. on Saturday, 25 October, at First Lutheran Church, Duluth, with coffee and cake afterwards, as he would have wanted. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Duluth Youth Hockey Association.

A longer obituary in a personal voice (about 260 words)

Amira Okafor, 64, of Leeds, died on 3 October 2026 after a long illness that she described, to anyone who asked, as "a nuisance."

Amira grew up in Lagos and came to Leeds at nineteen to study pharmacy. She meant to stay three years. She stayed forty-five, ran the pharmacy on Chapel Allerton high street for most of them, and knew the name, the dosage and the grandchildren of nearly everyone who came through the door.

She was the kind of pharmacist who would close for ten minutes to walk a prescription round to a customer who could not get out. She sang while she counted pills. She never once, in four decades, let a child leave the shop without a sticker, and kept a drawer of them for adults who looked like they needed one.

At home she grew tomatoes against all advice about the Yorkshire climate, cooked jollof for every birthday in the extended family, and argued cheerfully about football with anyone who supported the wrong team, which was everyone.

She is survived by her husband, Michael; her daughters, Ada and Grace; her grandson, Tobi; and her brothers, Chidi and Emeka, in Lagos. She was predeceased by her parents, Samuel and Ngozi.

A funeral service will be held at 1 p.m. on Thursday, 23 October, at St Martin's Church, Potternewton, followed by a gathering at the family's church hall. Donations in her memory may be made to Marie Curie, whose nurses cared for her at the end.

Notice what carries each one. Not the adjectives. The ice rink, the stickers, the tomatoes. One specific detail does more work than a paragraph of praise.

What tone should an obituary take?

Plain, warm and factual. Write it the way you would tell someone who did not know them, not the way you would write a tribute.

A few conventions are worth knowing. Newspapers writing news obituaries say "died". The Associated Press style rule, as quoted in a post by NPR's standards editor, is "Don't use euphemisms like passed on or passed away except in a direct quote" (NPR, via WBAA), and many families now prefer the plain word too. "Passed away" and "passed peacefully" are fine in a family notice, and you should use whichever your family says out loud. Humour is welcome if the person was funny. Lines like "he would have hated the fuss" are among the most quoted parts of modern obituaries, because they sound like a real family wrote them. Superlatives are not. "The best father in the world" is true for the family and invisible to everyone else. The ice rink is visible.

Use the name the community knew. If everyone called him Bob, put "Robert 'Bob' Lindqvist" in the first line and "Bob" after that. If she was known by a maiden name for half her life, weigh that against the identity-theft advice above, and if you include it, leave out the birth date.

How long should an obituary be?

Most printed obituaries run 250 to 300 words. Legacy, which places obituaries in newspapers across the United States, gives three bands: short obituaries of 250 to 300 words ("the most common length"), standard ones of 250 to 750 words, and extended ones of up to 1,500 words, "available at some newspapers for higher fees." It adds that the average printed obituary "is around 250–300 words and usually includes one photo" (Legacy). A bare death notice can be well under 100 words.

There is no correct length, but there is usually a price, and the price rises with every line. That is why the long version and the newspaper version are often different texts. Write the full version first, publish it on the funeral home's website, and cut a shorter version for the paper that ends with a line pointing readers to the online one.

Where do you publish an obituary, and what does it cost?

You have three usual places, and most families use more than one.

The funeral home's website. Most funeral homes publish an online obituary with a guestbook where people can leave condolences, and many post it for free or for a small fee as part of the service (Trustworthy). Confirm with yours. There is normally no length limit, so this is where the full version should live.

The local newspaper. Paid obituaries are usually placed through the funeral home, which knows the paper's deadlines and format. Ask for the price before you finalise the length, and ask whether the paper's price includes the online version on its website.

Prices vary more than most families expect. These are the starting prices Legacy lists for placing a paid obituary in five American papers, which it says depend on "the size of the newspaper's readership and the length of the obituary text." They are the floor for a short notice, not the cost of a long one.

Starting prices from each paper's Legacy placement page, retrieved 20 October 2026.

Legacy's own help page says local papers "may charge as little as $100," that large national papers "like The New York Times can cost several thousand dollars or more," and that an online-only obituary on its site has "a fixed price of $159" (Legacy).

One more thing worth knowing if you are in the United States. Under the Federal Trade Commission's Funeral Rule, "obituary notices" are a cash advance item, something the funeral home buys on your behalf, and if it charges you more than it paid, it "must tell the consumer that the price is not the same as your cost" (FTC). You can ask what the paper charges and what the funeral home adds.

Online memorial sites. Many newspapers syndicate their paid obituaries to an online memorial site, where they stay up with a guestbook. Some families also publish directly to these sites or share a link on social media, which now reaches more of the person's friends than the paper does.

Before you send it anywhere, have one other family member read it for names and dates. Then read it aloud once. Reading aloud catches the sentence that looks fine and sounds wrong.

What do you do with what you gathered?

Here is the part that rarely makes it into an obituary guide. The calls you made this week, the stories relatives sent you, the facts you checked against old letters and photographs, are the beginning of a record of the person. The obituary uses perhaps a tenth of it. The rest tends to disappear the week after the funeral, into a notebook and then a drawer.

Keep it. Put the notes, the voice messages and the scanned photographs in one folder and share it with the family. If you are giving a speech at the service as well, the same material is where it starts, and our guide to writing a eulogy from a loved one's life stories shows how to turn it into five to seven minutes. If the death has left you with boxes of letters and diaries, what to do with old letters and journals from a deceased relative covers what to keep. And if you are reading this while someone is still alive, the most useful thing you can do with the lesson of this week is to record them talking now, which is why we wrote about how to interview a relative before it is too late.

Frequently asked questions

How do you start an obituary?

Start with the announcement: full name, age, town of residence, and the date and place of death, in one sentence. For example: "Margaret Hart, 91, of Kendal, died peacefully on Tuesday, 14 October 2026, at Westmorland General Hospital." Everything else follows from that line.

What are the main parts of an obituary?

The announcement of the death, a line on birth and early life, a short account of the life with two or three specific details, the surviving and predeceased family, the service details, and any request for donations in lieu of flowers. A photograph is optional and often costs extra in print.

How long should an obituary be?

The most common printed length is 250 to 300 words, and Legacy lists standard obituaries at 250 to 750 words and extended ones at up to 1,500. Newspaper prices rise with length, so many families publish the full version on the funeral home's website and a shorter one in the paper that points to it.

What should not be included in an obituary?

The full date of birth, the mother's maiden name and the home address, which AARP warns criminals harvest from obituaries, and anything that signals the house will be empty during the service. Leave out family disputes too. A public notice is not the place to settle anything.

Who usually writes the obituary?

A close family member, usually a spouse or adult child, often with help from the funeral home, which supplies the format and handles placing it in the newspaper. Some people write their own in advance and leave it with their will or with a family member.

Do you have to publish an obituary?

No. There is no legal requirement to publish an obituary or death notice. Families publish one to tell the community and to announce the service. Some choose a short online notice only, and some publish nothing and tell people directly.

Is it "died" or "passed away" in an obituary?

Either. News obituaries use "died", because Associated Press style treats "passed away" as a euphemism, and many families prefer its plainness. "Passed away" and "passed peacefully" are common in family notices. Use the words your family would say out loud.

Where to go next

If you are also speaking at the service, how to write a eulogy from a loved one's life stories turns the same material into a five-to-seven-minute speech. If the obituary is for your mother, how to write a eulogy for a mother has a worked example built from the same kind of notes.

If you are the friend rather than the family, memorial gift ideas for a friend who lost a parent covers what actually helps in the weeks after a death, including the gifts with a deadline.

Sources

• Legacy, "What's the Difference Between an Obituary and a Death Notice?", on paid death notices versus journalist-written obituaries, retrieved 20 October 2026.
• Legacy, "Do newspapers have word count limits for obituaries?", on short, standard and extended lengths and the 250 to 300 word average, retrieved 20 October 2026.
• Legacy, "How much does an obituary cost?", on local and national newspaper prices and the $159 online-only price, retrieved 20 October 2026.
• Legacy placement pages for the Times Union, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Washington Post, for starting prices and the editorial versus paid obituary distinction, retrieved 20 October 2026.
• AARP, "Obituary Scams", on the details to leave out and the burglary risk of a published funeral time, retrieved 20 October 2026.
• Georgia Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division, "Preventing identity theft of a deceased spouse", retrieved 20 October 2026.
• Federal Trade Commission, "Complying with the Funeral Rule", on obituary notices as cash advance items, retrieved 20 October 2026.
• Trustworthy, "Where do you post an obituary?", on funeral homes posting obituaries for free or a small fee, retrieved 20 October 2026.
• NPR Standards and Practices, "Remember: People Die, They Don't 'Pass Away'" (via WBAA), quoting the Associated Press rule on euphemisms, retrieved 20 October 2026.