We study free energetics of nucleation of simple fluids using density functional theory to assess the validity of recently proposed scaling relations, which point to the existence of a common scaling function that spans across fluid phase nucleation of various materials at different values of the temperature. While particular functional forms found in the literature are of moderate success in capturing the quantitative behavior of the model systems we studied, i.e., square-well potential and truncated and shifted Lennard-Jones potential, some of the essential ingredients of the scaling propositions are found to hold quite well. For example, the free energetics of vapor phase condensation can be described by a single scaling function depending only weakly on the temperature and the details of the model potentials. The same holds for bubble nucleation. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.