DD Form 1375 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is DD Form 1375, Request for Payment of Funeral and/or Interment Expenses, October 2003, and it exists to Request for Payment of Funeral and/or Interment Expenses. What the DD prefix records is an administrative judgment made long before your copy was printed: this transaction was determined to be common to the whole Department rather than peculiar to one service, and so the documentation of it was standardized at Department level.
This is why the arrangement matters to you rather than only to the archivists. not stated governs the form throughout the Department, with not stated as the responsible office, so the record you create is legible outside your own component. Joint assignments, agency details and cross-service transactions all depend on that: the paperwork does not have to be reconstructed each time it crosses a boundary.
You are looking for edition not stated, listed as not stated. Department-wide supersession is a single event rather than a rollout, which is what distinguishes edition currency on a DD form from the same question on a service publication: nobody anywhere is still accepting the previous version out of habit.
The sequence printed on the form is the sequence in which a reviewer will read it, and the two should agree. Header data frames every entry below it; the substantive fields depend on that frame; the certification stands at the end because its whole function is to vouch for what came before. Entries made out of sequence commonly contradict entries made earlier.
Verify the printed edition against not stated first. Field structure shifts between editions, and the office that receives your record is reading the current one. That office may sit outside your service, which removes even the informal accommodation you might expect from a colleague who used the old version last month.
Leave nothing empty. Where an item genuinely does not apply, N/A is the correct entry, because the record must distinguish between a question that was answered in the negative and a question that was never reached. An empty box carries no information about which happened. Date fields deserve particular care on a Department form, since the reviewer may write dates by a convention different from yours; use the format the form itself specifies.
Understand what the Privacy Act Statement is doing on the page. It exists because collecting personal data from an individual triggers a duty to explain the collection: under what authority, for what purpose, to whom the information may routinely go, and whether you are obliged to answer. That explanation precedes the fields for the obvious reason — afterwards it is merely a notice, beforehand it is a basis for deciding.
The signature converts entries into an attestation, and that is why its form is prescribed. Ink, or a digital signature carrying a credential that identifies the signer — commonly issued on a Common Access Card. Typed characters in the box satisfy neither standard, because the whole value of a signature lies in being difficult to produce on someone else's behalf. Date it as you sign; an undated attestation cannot be placed in the sequence of events.
The defects that return forms are the same ones year after year: a superseded edition, required fields left blank, handwriting that fails on reproduction, dates in a convention the form did not ask for, and certification without a signature or without a date. Where a specific field is genuinely unclear, the instructions printed on the form come first and not stated governs where the two do not agree.
Download the form
The set published here is PDF, covering 1 pages with roughly 31 fields. More than one format survives because the Department serves users under very different conditions, from a desk with current software to a location where a printer is the only reliable output.
Two states of the same page circulate, and the reason is worth knowing. In the fillable pdf, the boxes are real fields holding real data; in the printable pdf, the boxes are drawings. Where a record will cross components — as Department records regularly do — the typed version is the safer artifact. Each scan, each forwarding, each reproduction costs handwriting a little legibility, and the office that finally files the record is rarely the office that received it first.
What the form asks for
- 1. Military Activity preparing this form. a. Name.
- 1.b. Address. Street, City, State and ZIP Code.
- 2. Military activity form is to be mailed to for payment. a. Name.
- 2.b. Address. Street, City, State and ZIP Code.
- 3. Name of Decedent. Last Name, First Name, Middle Initial.
- 4. Pay Grade and/or Rank.
- 5. Service Number and/or Social Security Number.
- 6. Place of death. City, State, Country.
- 7. Date of Death. 4 digit year, 2 digit month, 2 digit day.
- 8. Name of Claimant. Last Name, First Name, Middle Initial.
- 9. Relationship.
- 10. Funeral Home and/or National Cemetery. a. Name.
- 10.b. Address. Street, City, State and ZIP Code.
- 11. If Yes, enter name of contracting activity.
- 12. Cemetery, Mausoleum or other Disposition. a. Name.
- 12.b. Address. Street, City, State and ZIP Code.
- 14. Interment Costs. Amount claimed.
- 15. Funeral arrangement costs. Amount claimed.
- 16. Shipping cost of remains. Amount claimed.
- 17. Shipment of remains. a. Shipped from (City and State).
- 17.b. Shipped To. City and State.
- 18.a. Name of Payee (print or type).
- 18.b. Taxpayer ID number or SSN.
- 18.c. Address of Payee. Street, City, State and ZIP Code.
The completed form goes to the office named in not stated or in local implementing procedure, and it is worth keeping a copy before it goes. On a Department form the destination is frequently outside your own chain — another service, a defense agency, a joint staff — and recovering a document that has crossed an organizational boundary is a slower business than retrieving one from a file down the hall.
Forms referenced inside this one are located by number alone, and that simplicity is a direct product of Department-level numbering. Because the DD sequence is maintained centrally and not duplicated by service, a number is a complete address: one number, one document, throughout the Defense establishment.
It helps to see the DA and DD sequences as what they are: separate registries with separate custodians. One serves a single service under a service proponent, the other serves the Department under not stated or an equivalent office, and neither was ever indexed against the other. A number that appears in both systems points to two unrelated documents, which is why reading the prefix comes before reading the digits.
Editions change for reasons that originate above the form itself. The prescribing directive is reissued and the form follows; the information the Department needs to collect changes and the fields change with it; the statutory notice language is amended and every form carrying that notice is republished. None of these events announces itself to the person who downloaded a copy last year, which is why confirming not stated at the moment of download is the only reliable check available to you.
What you have here is the document and a description of it, which is a different thing from guidance. This page is not an organ of the Department, gives no legal or procedural advice, and makes no representation about the outcome of any filing; the offices that administer the requirement are the only ones positioned to answer that. Applicability, eligibility and procedural questions belong to not stated, to your servicing personnel office, or to the office designated in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 1375?
- DD Form 1375, Request for Payment of Funeral and/or Interment Expenses, October 2003
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?