Ghosting the dead

Young Filipinos would rather not think about the death-care industry. That is exactly why they should be the ones to rebuild it

On All Saints’ Day the queue outside the Manila North Cemetery is the oldest content in the Philippines, and increasingly some of the most filmed. By 4pm on November 1st last year the Manila police had counted 1,038,993 people through its gates, and the crowds kept coming into the evening.¹ Scroll any Undas feed and you will see who the younger ones were holding their phones up for: a lola in Batangas who could not make the trip, a mother on night shift in Dubai, followers who came for the candlelight rather than the grief. A few kilometres south, at Paco Park, a Spanish-era burial ground of whitewashed niches, the day’s tally was 192.² Undas, the twin observance of All Saints’ and All Souls’ days, falls this year on a Sunday and a Monday. It is the most crowded consumer event in the Philippine calendar. The industry that ought to own it is the one young Filipinos find least interesting.

That indifference is understandable. Death care—memorial parks, funeral chapels, crematoria and the “pre-need” firms that sell funerals in instalments—is a world of hushed showrooms, laminated brochures and salesmen who call your tita. It is about as far from a 23-year-old’s feed as an industry can get. Yet Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, now numbers some 35m Filipinos, about 30% of the population on UN estimates.³ Within two decades they will be the ones signing funeral contracts, settling hospital bills and booking flights home. Many are already the children of overseas workers, lighting the candle while a parent watches on a cracked screen in Riyadh. That contrast is the opportunity. The least-loved industry in the country is crammed with problems this generation is unusually good at solving.

Consider the logistics. Ahead of last year’s long weekend the transport department braced for some 8m air and sea travellers.⁴ Manila’s main airport expected 1.35m passengers over ten days, and the Parañaque bus exchange 2.1m.^5,6 The ports, battered by Super Typhoon Tino, still moved 1.72m people.⁷ Ramon Ang, whose consortium now runs the airport, described Undas as “one of the busiest travel periods for the airport”.⁵ No concert, election or mega-sale mobilises families with such punctuality.

Anthropologists would recognise the occasion for what it is. Undas is less a liturgical feast than a kinship ritual, the one date on which three or four generations reliably stand in the same place, eat from the same pot and reopen the same arguments. The gift to the departed—a candle, a bloom, a fresh coat of white paint—binds the living to one another, much as Marcel Mauss argued gifts always do.⁸ Call it the original group chat.

Yet the money that changes hands on the day is oddly small and oddly scattered. There are candles sold at a government-suggested price, and chrysanthemums whose price at Dangwa, Manila’s flower market, has been seen to jump by ₱30–200 in the week before.⁹ There are bus fares, tins of paint, and ₱500–1,500 paid to the men who scrub and whitewash graves.¹⁰ The organised industry makes its money at a different moment: the death itself. For them, Undas is a billboard opportunity. That is a mistake, and an expensive one.

Paid in advance, mostly by parents

Begin with what works. The pre-need industry, which collapsed into scandal two decades ago when several education-plan providers could not pay out, has quietly reinvented itself as a funeral business. In 2025 its firms sold more than 895,000 plans, up 28% on the year, booking premiums of ₱23.9bn and net income of nearly ₱8bn.¹¹ Life and memorial plans account for more than 99% of everything sold.

“Restoring the trust and confidence of both consumers and investors”Reynaldo Regalado, Insurance Commissioner, on tighter supervision of pre-need firms¹¹

Two features of those numbers deserve more attention than they get. The first is scale relative to mortality. The Philippine Statistics Authority’s provisional count recorded nearly 346,000 deaths in the first half of 2024, implying something close to 700,000 a year.¹² Filipinos now buy more funeral plans each year than there are funerals. That is not really a death-care market. It is a savings market with a casket at the end, competing with time deposits for the household’s spare peso.

The second is who is not buying. A 2024 industry survey of Filipino millennials and Gen Z found that 67% named loss of life as the risk they most wanted protection against. Only 24% had burial assistance in their plans, ranking it tenth of eleven insurance choices.¹³ Young Filipinos fear death in the abstract and ignore its invoice in particular. Insurers have noticed the shift in attitude, if not yet in purchases.

“Life insurance is no longer just for later in life.”Renato Vergel De Dios, president and CEO, BDO Life¹⁴

Meanwhile, look at where the profits come from. In the first half of 2026 plan sales rose by nearly 10% and premiums by 11%, to ₱12.8bn. Net income nonetheless fell by 53%, which the regulator blamed on weaker investment income.¹⁵ The industry’s earnings track the bond and equity markets more closely than the actuarial tables. Some 86% of its ₱183bn of assets sit in trust funds.¹⁵ A business that is really an asset manager in a black tie has every incentive to sell a plan and then go quiet for 20 years. Undas, the week its customers think hardest about the product, passes almost unexploited.

The price of a good send-off

For families who have not prepaid, the arithmetic of a death is brutal. By the ranges commonly cited in congressional bills and press surveys, a bare-bones funeral costs ₱8,000–20,000. A mid-range service with a plot can reach ₱250,000, and a wake in an upmarket chapel ₱300,000–500,000.¹⁶ Prices vary widely by city and provider. Wakes run three to seven nights, sometimes far longer while relatives raise the cash. Insiders are unusually candid about the trade’s habits.

“Has even gained a reputation for using emotional vulnerability to upsell”Meerly Peiyiik Reyes, co-founder, Mont Eden Memorial Chapels, on the funeral industry¹⁷

That reputation is precisely what a generation raised on price-comparison apps and transparent reviews punishes. The state, meanwhile, has stepped in as a buyer. The Free Funeral Services Act (Republic Act 12309), which lapsed into law without the president’s signature in September 2025, obliges accredited funeral homes to offer an indigent package billed to the social-welfare department.¹⁸

“Death comes to all, but dignity should not be reserved for the few.”Duke Frasco, congressman for Cebu’s fifth district and the law’s principal author¹⁹

The law arrived without a budget line of its own; it leans on a crisis-assistance fund that legislators enlarged from ₱27bn to ₱60bn.²⁰ To claim it, a grieving family must assemble an ID, a death certificate, a three-party contract and a social worker’s case study.¹⁸ That is a policy with a software problem. The bottleneck is not caskets but paperwork, and paperwork is the thing Gen Z most expects an app to make disappear.

The data problem runs deeper still. The statistics authority’s provisional figures for the first half of 2025, counting only records processed by October, came in 21% below the previous year’s. That looks less like a miraculous fall in mortality than a lag in processing, and the figures will be revised as late registrations arrive.¹² In a country whose death records arrive months late, every bereavement involves a queue.

Remittances for the departed

Now add the people who are not in the queue at all. The statistics authority counted about 2.19m overseas Filipino workers in 2024, 57% of them women.²¹ Their cash remittances reached a record $35.6bn in 2025, equal to 7.3% of GDP, a climb interrupted only once in a decade, in the pandemic year of 2020.²² Every provincial wake is partly financed from Riyadh, Singapore and San Diego.

The overseas worker is the customer the industry serves worst. She can pay, and frequently does, but she cannot attend. On November 1st she will send money for flowers she will not see, laid on a grave someone else has cleaned, by a cousin whose reliability is a matter of family politics. Often the person holding the phone at the graveside is her Gen Z child. Nobody sells her presence; everyone sells her plots.

She is exposed at the other end of life, too. Shipping a body home is primarily the employer’s responsibility, with the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) stepping in for active members. For everyone else, as the Philippine embassy in Rome advises, the bill falls on the family.²³ About 2% of overseas workers, roughly 46,000 people, work without proper visas, largely beyond that safety net.²¹ This year’s tension in the Gulf made the stakes vivid. By July more than 10,500 Filipinos had been brought home from conflict-affected areas,²⁴ and in April the remains of 20 workers arrived from Kuwait on a single flight.²⁵

Philippine death care sells a service for the moment of death and a place for the body. It sells almost nothing for the long relationship between the living and the dead.

No room at the necropolis

The physical constraint makes the gap worse. Cemeteries occupy a sliver of Metro Manila: by the housing regulator’s figures, just 0.12% of Las Piñas and 0.46% of Quezon City. Even Manila, home to the great North and South cemeteries, devotes barely 3% of its land to the dead.²⁶ The “apartment tombs” stacked along public-cemetery walls are leases, not freeholds. Miss a renewal and a relative’s bones can be moved to an ossuary.

Local governments are responding by building upward and by burning. Pasig opened a 12,000-niche columbarium ahead of last year’s Undas, which its mayor, Vico Sotto, presented as an answer to dwindling space in the city’s cemeteries.²⁷ Navotas runs a municipal crematorium.²⁸ Mandaluyong turned its cramped public cemetery into a park with a crematory, columbaria and a chapel, and its mayor at the time wanted the place rid of its ghostly reputation.²⁹

“A cemetery should always be synonymous with paradise”Benhur Abalos, then mayor of Mandaluyong, on the city’s Garden of Life Park

Catholic bishops have accepted cremation for decades, provided ashes are kept rather than scattered,³⁰ and the faithful have followed. On All Saints’ Day last year police counted nearly 200,000 visitors at columbaria.² When the Villar family’s Golden Haven opened its first crematorium a decade ago, its chief operating officer, Maribeth Tolentino, called it “a steady, continuous, and replicable revenue model”.³¹ The group, renamed Villar Land in 2025, then booked ₱1.33trn in fair-value gains on land south of Manila, dwarfing anything its memorial parks will earn.³² The market’s lesson was that land near a city is worth more to the living than to the dead. For death care the lesson is the converse: when land is this scarce, value must come from services, not square metres.

Six startups waiting to happen

What would those services look like? Six proposals follow, some deliberately heretical. None needs a technological breakthrough. Each needs someone who thinks of the customer as a 25-year-old with a phone rather than a 65-year-old with a cheque book.

1. 1Round up the remittance. Put a memorial micro-premium into the payment rail the diaspora already uses, and ask at the moment of sending, when the sender is most mindful of home. As an illustrative scenario rather than a forecast: a voluntary 1% round-up on 2025’s cash remittances would have raised roughly ₱20.7bn,^22,11 about 86% of the entire pre-need industry’s premium income that year. Even a quarter of one per cent comes to more than ₱5bn. It needs only a licensed pre-need partner and an e-wallet willing to add a toggle.

1. 2Sell presence, not plots. Turn the grave-tending trade into a subscription for families abroad. It would cover scheduled cleaning, plus flowers and candles on November 1st and on death anniversaries. Vetted local caretakers would do the work, proved by time-stamped, geotagged video or a live stream from the graveside. Content-provenance standards now let a photo carry a tamper-evident record of where and when it was taken, which is the trust layer a remote mourner needs. As a hypothetical: if one overseas worker in ten paid ₱3,000 a year, revenues would be about ₱650m, much of it flowing to informal workers who now earn their keep in a single frantic week. China offers a precedent: online “tomb-sweeping” spread during Qingming, its own festival of the dead, when travel became impossible.

1. 3Build the bereavement operating system. A family facing a death deals with the hospital, the civil registry, the parish, social security, OWWA, the pre-need firm, the bank and now the welfare department’s free-funeral desk, each with its own forms. One platform would replace them all: one consent, one identity check, one digital death record, many claims. It would cut days off every wake, make RA 12309 workable and give statisticians timely data. Charge the institutions that save on processing, not the bereaved.
2. 4Run cemeteries 365 days a year. A burial ground that admits a million people on one day and very few on most others is an idle asset in a city starved of open space. Add shaded running loops, solar canopies over apartment-tomb rows, night heritage walks through the Chinese Cemetery and Paco Park, and quiet study corners. None of this is disrespectful in a culture that already picnics among its dead, and it would give younger Filipinos a reason to visit outside the first two days of November.
3. 5Insure the uninsured migrant. Repatriation cover for undocumented workers, emigrants and seafarers between contracts, sold through hometown associations abroad and priced in local currency, would fill the hole OWWA’s membership rules leave. Bundle it with pre-negotiated cold-chain logistics with airlines and funeral homes at both ends. A frantic collection drive becomes an orderly claim.
4. 6Archive the family. If Undas is a census of kinship, it is also the best moment of the year to record lolo’s stories, scan the shoebox of photographs and map the family tree, with the grandchildren holding the microphone. This is a memorial product for the living that can be sold, renewed and handed down. Genealogy is a thriving business in America. In a country where the dead are visited rather than merely remembered, the appetite could be greater still.

The last mile

None of this is fanciful. The money is already moving: $35.6bn a year, a good share of it earmarked, explicitly or not, for obligations to kin living and dead. The people are already travelling, 8m of them at last count. Demand for prepaid dignity is proven by nearly 900,000 plans a year. What is missing is the leap from death as a transaction to remembrance as a relationship, and the engineering to carry that relationship across oceans.

That leap is unlikely to come from the incumbents. It is more likely to come from the generation that would rather ghost the whole subject. They are the ones holding the phones at the graveside, with parents abroad and with the skills to make a grave visible from Dubai. The nurse who cannot kneel at her mother’s tomb this Sunday will still pay for the candle. The young founder who lets her watch it being lit will have found the most loyal customer in the death-care business: one who comes back every year.

Notes and references

1. DZRH News, “Over 1 million visitors flock to Manila North Cemetery,” 1 November 2025 (Manila Police District 4pm count). Link
2. The Philippine Star, “Undas peaceful as 3.8 million visit cemeteries nationwide,” 2 November 2025 (PNP and NCRPO figures). Link
3. UN World Population Prospects 2024, via PopulationPyramids.org, “Philippines generation breakdown 2026” (Gen Z defined as births 1997–2012). Link
4. PortCalls Asia, “Transport agencies gear up for 8M travelers during Undas 2025 weekend,” October 2025 (Department of Transportation). Link
5. GMA News, “Undas 2025: NAIA expects surge of 1.35M passengers, advises early arrival,” October 2025 (New NAIA Infra Corp.). Link
6. DZRH News, “PITX expects 2.1 million passengers for Undas 2025,” 20 October 2025. Link
7. Philippine Ports Authority, “PPA delivers assistance to thousands of stranded passengers; records 1.7M travelers during Undas 2025,” 6 November 2025. Link
8. M. Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925).
9. Senate of the Philippines, “Senator Mark Villar encourages public to price watch Undas goods,” 31 October 2023 (DTI monitoring at Dangwa). Link
10. GMA News, “Manila North, South Cemeteries receive 37K visitors in Sunday before Undas 2025,” October 2025. Link
11. Philippine Daily Inquirer, “Preneed profits up 54.4% in 2025” (Insurance Commission data and remarks by Commissioner Reynaldo Regalado). Link
12. BusinessWorld via MEXC News, “PSA records fewer deaths in 1st half,” 28 December 2025 (Philippine Statistics Authority provisional data, processed as of October 2025). Link
13. InsiderPH, “Young Filipinos seek life protection but overlook burial costs,” 30 October 2025 (2024 PhilLife Meter survey of Gen Y and Z). Link
14. Daily Tribune, “Why Gen Z is thinking beyond savings,” 7 August 2026. Link
15. Philippine Daily Inquirer, “Philippine pre-need industry bottom line plunges 53%,” 2026 (Insurance Commission H1 2026 data). Link
16. House of Representatives, House Bill No. 1346 (Free Funeral Services), explanatory note, July 2025; UCA News, “Free, discounted funerals on the anvil for poor Filipinos.” Bill · UCA News
17. PhilSTAR Life, “‘Mahal mabuhay, mahal din mamatay’: How much does it cost to have a proper funeral in the Philippines today?” 30 October 2025. Link
18. Republic Act No. 12309, the Free Funeral Services Act (2025), via the LawPhil Project. Link
19. The Philippine Star (Cebu), “Free funeral services for indigents now a law,” 18 October 2025. Link
20. Daily Tribune, “Free funeral services to poor now a law,” 13 October 2025. Link
21. Philippine Daily Inquirer, “PSA: OFWs increase by 1.5% in 2024, remittances P262 billion,” 16 December 2025 (2024 Survey on Overseas Filipinos). Link
22. The Philippine Star, “Remittances reach record high $35.6 billion,” 17 February 2026 (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas data). Link
23. Philippine Embassy in Rome, “Death of Filipino nationals, shipment of remains and report of death.” Link
24. GMA News, “Over 10,000 OFWs repatriated as of July amid Middle East tensions — DMW,” 2026. Link
25. SunStar, “20 OFW remains back home from Kuwait,” 15 April 2026. Link
26. GMA News Research, “No space for the dead: four big cities with smallest cemeteries” (Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board data). Link
27. Malaya Business Insight, “New columbarium inaugurated in Pasig,” 2025. Link
28. Daily Tribune, “Valenzuela execs benchmark NavoHimlayan,” 19 September 2022. Link
29. City Government of Mandaluyong, “Garden of Life.” Link
30. Christianity Today, “Philippines Christians warm to cremation,” 6 November 2012 (CBCP position). Link
31. BusinessWorld, “Golden Haven’s first quarter earnings up 24%” (remarks by COO Maribeth Tolentino). Link
32. Daily Tribune, “Villar’s Golden MV nets close to P1T,” 31 March 2025. Link