Forgotten Funeral and Long-Term Care Contracts: The Little-Known Service That Recovers Your Funds
More than 8 million funeral contracts are currently listed in the AGIRA database, which allows families to verify within 24 hours whether a deceased loved one had purchased such a product. With 16,000 requests in 2025 regarding this aspect, the service has a success rate of 22 percent. The long-term care component, however, remains largely underutilized.
When organizing a funeral, families rarely have more than a few days to make major financial decisions. Whether it’s the casket, the ceremony, burial, or cremation, the average cost of a funeral in France ranges from 3,500 to 6,000 euros, depending on the region and the services chosen. Discovering, several months later, that the deceased had taken out a funeral plan specifically designed to cover these expenses is a common source of frustration. AGIRA, the Association for the Management of Insurance Risk Information, has been offering a service for several years to prevent this from happening.
The service is free and available to both individuals and professionals in the funeral and long-term care sectors. It is based on a centralized database maintained by insurance companies, which aggregates more than 8 million funeral plans in France. The process can be completed either online, via the “search for a funeral contract” section of the agira-vie.fr portal, or by mail. In both cases, the applicant must provide a death certificate and the contact information of the potential beneficiary. The database is then cross-referenced within 24 hours.
A free platform, with a 24-hour window to identify the policy:
. If a policy is identified, AGIRA forwards the information to the relevant insurer, which then has 72 hours to contact the requester. The entire process thus takes less than a week, whereas the lack of a centralized mechanism could previously leave a family in limbo for months. “To arrange for funeral expenses, it is essential that families be able to find out, within a very short time, whether a policy exists,” emphasizes Aurélien Cressely, director of AGIRA, in an article in Ouest-France.
The figures confirm the service’s growing popularity. In 2025, the service received 16,000 requests for funeral contracts, with a success rate of 22 percent. In other words, one in five requests actually results in the identification of a contract. Over the past five years, the number of requests has increased by 70%, reflecting both greater awareness of the service and an aging population, which automatically leads to more cases of estate settlement.
The funeral contract is part of a well-established market. Taken out while the insured is still alive—typically between the ages of 60 and 75—it allows the insured to pre-fund their own funeral, either through a lump-sum payment or through services negotiated with a partner funeral home. For families, the benefit is twofold: immediate financial relief and a reduction in the organizational burden, since the deceased’s wishes are, in principle, specified in the contract. However, the heirs must be aware of these wishes.
Long-Term Care: 2.4 million policies issued, only 1,300 claims per year
The long-term care segment, however, remains significantly underutilized. AGIRA records approximately 1,300 claims annually in this segment, whereas the market saw 2.4 million long-term care policies issued in France in 2024, according to data from France Assureurs. The discrepancy is striking. There are several reasons for this. First, the service is less well-known than its funeral insurance counterpart. Second, the very nature of the product: a long-term care policy is triggered during the insured person’s lifetime, in the event of a certified loss of autonomy, rather than upon death. Consequently, the process is more often initiated by the insured person themselves or their close family and friends, without going through AGIRA.
The fact remains that many long-term care insurance policies have never been activated because they were never identified. An elderly person living in a nursing home or receiving in-home care may very well have an active policy but no longer remember it—either due to cognitive impairment or because the policy was taken out several decades ago. For family members, checking whether such a policy exists through AGIRA can therefore unlock a substantial monthly annuity—often ranging from 500 to 2,500 euros—intended to help cover the costs of in-home care or a nursing home.
The practical lesson applies equally to funeral arrangements and long-term care: these policies only function properly if the insured person informs their loved ones that they have taken out the policy. Keeping a written record of the insurer’s name, the policy number, and the date the policy was taken out in a file accessible to loved ones remains the simplest way to avoid having to rely on AGIRA.
Failing that, the service serves as an effective safety net—provided the heirs are aware of its existence. For French households that hold one of these policies, informing a loved one of its existence is part of the same estate planning process as sharing a list of bank accounts: a small piece of information that radically changes the speed and efficiency of the procedures following a death or a loss of autonomy.
