Writing obituaries without spending money on templates you don't need
I spend a lot of time helping people draft obituaries, and the number of families who try to pay for something they can absolutely get for free never stops surprising me. A newspaper wants your obituary. A funeral home wants your business. Neither cares if you spent $40 on a fancy template from a website that probably scraped it from a newspaper archive anyway. The honest version is that most Free Obituary Templates you'll find online are basically fill-in-the-blank documents with slightly better formatting than a blank Word file. Some are decent. Most are overproduced for what the task actually requires. The trick isn't finding the most elaborate template — it's finding one that doesn't fight you when you try to customize it.
Where to actually find usable Free Obituary Templates
Legacy.com has a solid free builder that pushes you through the sections in order. It's not glamorous but it covers every base a major newspaper would expect. The Funeral Source offers straightforward templates that tend to work well with regional publication requirements. Many local funeral homes host their own free templates on their websites, and these are often the most practical because they're built around what the newspapers in your area actually accept without edits. I keep a folder of three or four I've tested across different publications. Legacy.com for national papers, a template from a Midwest funeral home for smaller regional outlets, and a bare-bones one I wrote myself that strips everything down to the facts. The custom one usually saves the most time because I already know which fields matter and which ones I can skip.
The structure that actually works
Most bad obituaries happen because people treat them like creative writing assignments. They aren't. Newspapers and memorials have an informal but real checklist, and if you hit those points in roughly the right order, you're already ahead of most submissions. Start with the basics: full name, age, city of residence, date of death. That's it. Three sentences. Everything after that is detail, and details can wait. Then the biography section: where they lived, what they did for work, organizations they belonged to, military service if applicable. This is where most templates overcomplicate things by forcing you into elaborate subsections. You don't need subsections. You need a paragraph that reads like a person rather than a resume.
Get the Full Details
Surviving family: spouse, children, grandchildren, siblings. Predeceased family members go here too if the family wants that listed. Some templates separate these into two blocks. I've never seen a publication require that separation, and splitting it up usually just makes the obituary harder to scan. Closing details: service information, donation preferences, and a closing line if the family wants one. Keep the closing line short. Anything longer than two sentences at the end tends to get trimmed by the newspaper anyway.
One specific problem I ran into and how I solved it
Last fall I was helping a family publish an obituary in a small Tennessee newspaper. The template we were using from a national site had a field labeled "Hobbies and Interests" that was formatted as a comma-separated tag list. The newspaper's submission guidelines explicitly said they preferred narrative form, not lists. The template designer had clearly never submitted to a regional paper. It forced the family into a format that would have gotten their obituary sent back for reformatting, which delays publication and adds stress at the worst possible time. The workaround was simple. I took the same content from that template field and rewrote it as a single sentence woven into the biography paragraph. Instead of listing fishing, gardening, and church attendance as tags, it became: "He spent his weekends fishing on the Tennessee River, tending his vegetable garden, and volunteering at First Baptist." Same facts. Proper format. Published on the first submission. This is the real value of having your own working templates instead of relying on whatever random generator you found. You already know which fields are traps.
Things that will cost you more than you expect
Even when you use a genuinely free template, the costs creep in through the publishing side. Most local newspapers charge by the line or by the inch, not by the template you used to write it. A 150-word obituary in a daily paper can run anywhere from $150 to $400 depending on the market. Memorial websites and funeral home pages are usually free to publish on, which is why I recommend running the obituary through a free site first and then submitting a trimmed version to the newspaper if budget is a concern. The character limit trap: some free template generators don't show you the character count until you've finished writing. A few major publication portals have hard limits around 500 to 800 characters for their free submission tiers. I've watched people finish a full draft only to have it cut off mid-sentence. Always check the character or word limit before you write more than a paragraph. The photo formatting issue: many template sites make it easy to upload a photo but don't tell you the required resolution or file size until after the fact. Newspapers typically want 300 DPI minimum for print. A template that accepts any JPEG from your phone will look fine on screen and terrible in print. If you're submitting to a print publication, ask about their image specs before you upload. It takes two minutes and saves a resubmission.
When free templates fall apart
I need to be straight about this: free obituary templates are not a universal solution. If the person you're writing about has a complicated family structure — blended families, multiple spouses across different time periods, estranged relatives the family doesn't want named — most free templates will push you toward a binary surviving/predeceased framework that doesn't fit. You'll spend more time fighting the template than writing the obituary. In those cases, start with a blank document and build it yourself. Use a free template only as a reference for structure, not as a container. The same goes for military honors, long organizational histories, or multilingual requirements. The free template market assumes a fairly narrow demographic, and when your situation falls outside that assumption the template becomes a liability rather than a help. A paid template from a specialized memorial site sometimes handles these edge cases better because the designers anticipated them. But paid doesn't automatically mean better. I've seen expensive templates with worse field organization than a free Google Doc. Judge the layout, not the price tag.
What I actually do when someone asks me for help
I don't hand them a template link. I ask them three questions first: which newspapers are running the obituary, what's the deadline, and who needs to approve the final text. The answers change everything. A newspaper with a tight deadline needs a different approach than one with a weekly feature slot. A family with five people who need to approve the text needs a document they can edit together, not a locked-in template form. Then I pull whichever Free Obituary Templates fit the situation and strip out the fields nobody needs. The result is usually shorter and cleaner than what the template generator would produce on its own. Shorter obituaries also tend to cost less at publication, which matters more than people realize when they're already dealing with funeral expenses. There's no perfect template out there. There's just the one that gets you to publication with the least amount of friction, and that changes depending on where you're publishing and who's in the family. The ones I use most often are the ones I've edited down to the absolute minimum. Everything else is noise.
