Many of the former owners and staff of our acquired funeral home and cemetery businesses have provided high quality service to families for generations, which often represents a substantial portion of the value of a business. The excess of the purchase price over the fair value of identifiable net assets of acquired funeral home and cemetery businesses is recorded as goodwill.

The following table presents changes in goodwill in the accompanying Consolidated Balance Sheets (in thousands):


	December 31, 2025		December 31, 2024
Goodwill at the beginning of the year	$	414,859	$	423,643
Increase in goodwill related to acquisitions	37,746		—
Decrease in goodwill related to divestitures	(24,708)		(8,784)

Goodwill at the end of the year	$	427,897	$	414,859

During the year ended December 31, 2025, we allocated $24.7 million of goodwill to the sale of thirteen funeral homes and four cemeteries which was recorded in Net loss on divestitures and impairment charges on our Consolidated Statements of Operations, of which $23.0 million was allocated to our funeral home segment and $1.7 million was allocated to our cemetery segment.

During the year ended December 31, 2024, we allocated $8.8 million of goodwill to the sale of six funeral homes and one cemetery which was recorded in Net loss on divestitures and impairment charges on our Consolidated Statements of Operations, of which $7.8 million was allocated to our funeral homes segment and $1.0 million was allocated to our cemetery segment.

As a result of our 2025 and 2024 annual qualitative impairment assessments, we determined that there were no factors that would indicate the need to perform an additional quantitative goodwill impairment test. We concluded that it is more-likely-than-not that the fair value of our reporting units is greater than their carrying value and thus there was no impairment to goodwill.