Finding lost pensions and the Pension Tracing Service

Pensions go missing more often than almost any other financial product. The Pensions Policy Institute estimates that 3.3 million pension pots are lost or unclaimed in the UK¹, and around £26.6 billion is sat in lost pensions across the country, according to the Pensions Policy Institute and the Association of British Insurers². Since 2018, the total number of lost pensions has risen by 75%³. People move jobs, forget about small pots built up over a year or two, and lose touch with providers that have since merged or changed name.

The good news is that tracing a lost pension is usually straightforward and free. The government's Pension Tracing Service, run by the Department for Work and Pensions, searches a database of over 200,000 pension schemes and gives you the contact details of the scheme that holds your pension⁴. You then contact the scheme yourself and it will confirm whether you have a pension and what it is worth. In the coming years, pensions dashboards should make much of this unnecessary by showing all your pensions, including the State Pension, in one place online⁵.

How pensions get lost and what you need to start looking

A pension becomes "lost" when the provider no longer has up-to-date contact details for the person who owns it. This happens for ordinary reasons: changing jobs, moving house without telling every pension company, throwing away old paperwork, or simply forgetting that a short period of work came with a pension at all. With automatic enrolment, most people who have worked since 2012 have been enrolled into a workplace pension, often into a new pot each time they changed employer, so the number of pots a person can lose track of has grown⁷.

The scale of the problem has grown sharply. The Pensions Policy Institute estimated in 2023 that around 2.8 million pensions were considered lost, an increase of 75% over the previous four years⁷, and that the total value of lost pensions had reached £37 billion⁸. Later estimates put the figure at 3.3 million pots¹ and £26.6 billion², so the numbers vary between studies and years, but every source agrees the problem is large and getting larger.

Before starting a search, gather what you can:

• The name of the employer you worked for, and roughly when you worked there
• The name of the pension provider, if you have any old paperwork
• Your National Insurance number
• Old payslips, P60s, pension statements or letters about the scheme

Your National Insurance number can be found on your P60, on letters about your tax, pension or benefits, or in the National Insurance section of your personal tax account⁹. You do not need all of these things to begin, but the more you have, the easier the search. The one item that is close to essential is the name of an employer or pension provider: the Pension Tracing Service needs this to get started⁶. If you cannot remember it, there are still routes open to you, covered later in this page.

The Pension Tracing Service: a free search of over 200,000 schemes

The Pension Tracing Service is the government's own tool for finding lost pensions. It is provided by the Department for Work and Pensions¹⁰ and helps people find contact details for workplace and personal pension schemes¹⁰. It searches a database of over 200,000 pension schemes to find contact details for your provider⁴, and it is completely free to use⁸.

The service exists because pension schemes close, merge and change administrators over the years. A scheme you paid into in the 1990s may now be run by a completely different company, under a different name, possibly as a closed book of business. The Tracing Service keeps a register of these changes, so a search under the name of your old employer can lead you to whoever runs the scheme today. The same applies to personal pensions: providers have been bought, sold and rebranded repeatedly, and the database tracks where old schemes ended up.

Because it is a government service, there is no charge and no cut of your pension taken if you find one. This matters, because lost pensions are also a target for firms that charge for tracing or for "reviewing" what is found. The free route gives you the same starting point: a name and a set of contact details for the scheme's administrator.

What the Pension Tracing Service will not tell you

The Tracing Service has one clear limitation: it doesn't tell you whether you have a pension or what its value is³. It will only tell you the contact details of the pension's administrator⁶. The same point is made in independent guidance: the service won't tell you whether you have a pension, or what its value is¹¹.

This means the search is a two-step process. The first step, the Tracing Service itself, confirms who now runs the scheme connected to your old employer or provider. The second step is yours: you contact that administrator, identify yourself, and ask whether you are a member and what your pension is worth. The scheme will check its records against your details, such as your name, date of birth and National Insurance number, and should then send you confirmation of any pension it holds for you, along with a current value.

It is worth being prepared for either answer. Some searches end with the discovery that no pension exists, perhaps because you were never enrolled, because you opted out at the time, or because a very short period of employment fell below the scheme's eligibility rules. Others end with a small pot you had entirely forgotten. Either way, the Tracing Service itself stops at the contact details; the value only comes from the scheme.

How to use the Pension Tracing Service online or by phone

The service can be used online or by phone. GOV.UK directs people to use the Pension Tracing Service to find details of a person's personal or workplace pension¹². The online search asks for the name of an employer or a pension provider, together with your own details: your full name, home address and other information such as a National Insurance number, phone number and email address³. The service is free, and you can also phone it and ask for a tracing request form¹³.

You can search for your own pension, or for someone else's scheme with their permission¹¹, which is useful if you are helping a relative or handling the affairs of someone who has died. When you search, the database returns matching schemes with their current contact details. You may find more than one match, particularly if your old employer ran separate schemes for different groups of staff, so it can be worth contacting each one.

The process from start to finish looks like this:

Once you have the contact details, write or call the administrator, give your identifying details, and ask for confirmation of membership and a current value. Keep a note of who you contacted and when. If the scheme says it has no record of you, ask what information it searched on: a misspelled name or an old address is often the reason a record does not surface at first.

Contacting old employers and pension providers directly

The Tracing Service is not the only route. You can contact your former employer for details, or use the government's free service¹⁶. A former employer's HR or payroll department may be able to tell you which scheme it used during the period you worked there, even if the scheme has since changed administrator. This can be quicker than a database search if you know exactly where you worked and when.

Pension providers themselves also run tracing help. Some providers, including AJ Bell, Standard Life and Aviva, offer free pension tracing services to help you track down old pensions¹⁷. Standard Life, for example, offers a "track down your lost pensions" service for free⁴. These are worth trying if you think you know roughly who the provider was but have lost the account details.

There are also free tracing services that cover more than pensions. Gretel is a free service to help you find lost accounts, pensions and investments¹⁸, and can be used to search for lost bank accounts, pensions, life insurance policies and child trust funds¹⁹. Independent guidance suggests trying tracing services such as Gretel alongside the government service²⁰.

Tracing a pension when you cannot remember the employer or scheme

The hardest searches start when you cannot remember the employer or the scheme at all. The Pension Tracing Service needs the name of your previous employer or pension service to get started⁶, so with nothing to search on, the first job is to reconstruct your work history.

One route is to contact HMRC if you cannot remember the name of your personal or workplace pension scheme or schemes; once you have the names, you can use the Pension Tracing Service¹⁸. Old paperwork is the other main source: P60s, payslips, employment contracts and leaving letters often name the scheme. If you have lost your own records, a former employer may still hold them, and payroll or HR departments can sometimes confirm the scheme used during your employment.

Private tracing services can also help with the harder cases, though they ask for more from you. They will need your name and National Insurance number, as well as details and dates of your previous employers³. Most advertise tracing as free³, but check the terms before proceeding, and remember the government service is free throughout.

Even a partial memory helps. A rough date range, the town you worked in, or the industry can narrow things down, and the Tracing Service database can be searched by employer name, so variants of a company name, such as the name before a takeover, are worth trying. If an employer has gone out of business, its pension scheme usually lives on independently, often with a trustee or administrator that the Tracing Service can identify.

Pensions dashboards: seeing all your pensions in one place

Pensions dashboards are intended to solve the lost pension problem permanently. A dashboard is an online tool where people can access their pension information⁵, described in official policy as online services which will allow people to access their pension information in a clear and simple form²². In the UK, dashboards will show information about pensions from different providers and the State Pension securely and in one place⁵, and all dashboards will connect to a single digital ecosystem developed by the Pensions Dashboards Programme⁵. The Money and Pensions Service will also provide a non-commercial dashboard service²³.

The programme has a long history. Dashboards were announced in 2016²⁴, but the project has been hit by repeated delays. In July 2022 the Infrastructure and Projects Authority awarded the programme a "red" delivery confidence rating, indicating that successful delivery appeared unachievable²⁵. In March 2023 the Minister for Pensions announced that the programme would be reset²⁵, and in June 2023 amending regulations replaced the original staged timeline, which had 23 separate staging deadlines, with a single mandatory connection deadline of 31 October 2026²⁵.

Progress since the reset has been steady. The first participant connected in March 2025, and by December 2025 the programme had been working with a group of around 20 industry participants and the State Pension, with 16 participants having completed the connection process and 18 having passed integration testing²⁶. That brought the programme to 60 million, or three-quarters, of workplace and personal pension records being connected²⁶. By mid-2026, over 70 million pension records were connected to the programme²⁴. The Pensions Regulator has urged schemes to act now to get their data ready for dashboards as the connection deadline approaches²⁷.

As for when the public can use one, the dates have shifted repeatedly. The National Audit Office reported in May 2024 that it was not yet decided when pensions dashboards would be available to the public²⁵. The government has confirmed that the MoneyHelper Pensions Dashboard will be made available to the public before private sector dashboards²⁶. The Money and Pensions Service expects the MoneyHelper Pensions Dashboard to be available in 2027/28⁵, and reporting suggests the launch could come in early 2027 at the earliest²⁴. Until then, dashboards are not available to the public⁵: the regulations state that before the official launch point, dashboard services are only available for use by individuals invited by or on behalf of the Money and Pensions Service to support testing²⁸.

The programme has not been cheap. The National Audit Office put the estimated cost at £289 million in cash terms to the Money and Pensions Service from 2019-20 to 2031-32, an increase of £54 million, and estimated gross discounted benefits of £413 million from 2022-23 to 2031-32²⁵.

Which pensions a dashboard will and will not show

When dashboards launch, they are intended to show your pensions from different providers together with your State Pension. A former consultation run by the Department for Work and Pensions confirmed that people will be able to view their State Pension from day one². Legislation is also planned to enable the government-backed dashboard service, provided by the Money and Pensions Service, to display Pension Protection Fund and Financial Assistance Scheme information²⁹, which matters for people whose old employers went bust.

Not everything will appear. The consultation on the regulations proposed that pensioner members, as defined in the Pensions Act 1995, are out of scope of pensions dashboards³⁰, so some people already drawing a pension may not see it. Members who have taken uncrystallised funds pension lump sums (UFPLS) and remain active or deferred members stay in scope, and would be shown the remaining value of their pension³⁰.

The values shown will have limits too. For money purchase schemes, the pot value must be no more historic than the accrued value provided on a benefit statement in the last 12 months, or from a calculation done in the last 12 months³⁰. Projected values come with exemptions: trustees would not be obliged to provide projected information if the member is within two years of retirement, or in certain small pot cases, including where accrued rights were less than £5,000 on the last illustration date³⁰. State Pension information will use the terms "current amount" and "forecast amount" rather than "accrued" and "projected"³⁰.

Privacy rules are strict. A dashboard service must display the view data provided by a pension scheme to the individual as soon as it is received and without charge, and must not store that data other than as temporary caching for the sole purpose of displaying it in a single session³¹. The same rules apply in Northern Ireland under its own regulations³¹. No information about State Pensions, other than that provided by the Department for Work and Pensions, should be presented on dashboards³⁰.

There is also a time limit built into the matching process. When a possible match is found, the individual must contact the pension scheme within 30 days of receiving the limited administrative data, or the find request information is deleted and the pension identifier de-registered³¹. So a dashboard find, like a Tracing Service find, still needs you to act: the dashboard reunites you with the scheme's details, but confirming membership and value remains a conversation with the scheme.

Who can help if a lost pension cannot be found or claimed

If the trail goes cold, several bodies can help, each with a different role. The Pensions Ombudsman is clear about what it cannot do: tracing a lost pension is not something it can help with, and it points people to the Pension Tracing Service on GOV.UK, which is set up specifically to help people track down lost pensions³². What the Ombudsman can do is investigate complaints about how occupational or personal pension schemes are run, where the dispute cannot be resolved between the parties³². It provides a free and impartial service³³, and where it upholds a complaint it will try to put you back in the position you would have been in if everything had been handled correctly³². In some cases it may direct that funds be reinstated into the scheme or comparable benefits provided in another scheme²¹.

The Financial Ombudsman Service covers complaints about personal pensions and pensions organised through employers, and if it thinks you lost money, or may lose retirement income, because you received the wrong pensions advice, it can tell the financial adviser or pensions provider to put things right³⁴. If it cannot investigate a pensions complaint, it will tell you about an organisation that might be able to help³⁵. Complaints about the State Pension itself go to the Pension Service rather than the Financial Ombudsman Service³⁶.

For guidance rather than complaints, the Money and Pensions Service already provides a "Pension Loss" service: one-to-one appointments delivered by technical specialists³⁷. Free guidance on what to do with a pension once found is also available through Pension Wise, and general help with pensions is on the pensions section of this site.

A few special cases have their own routes. The Financial Assistance Scheme helps people who lost pensions when employers went bust before the Pension Protection Fund existed, and the Pension Tracing Service acts as a contact point for it³⁸. More on that is in the Pension Protection Fund. Where the person whose pension is being traced has died, GOV.UK directs those reporting a death to use the Pension Tracing Service to find details of the person's personal or workplace pension¹², and the page on what happens to your pension when you die covers what happens next.

Finally, be alert to scams at every stage of a search. The Pensions Ombudsman publishes a factsheet on common pension scam topics²¹, and unexpected offers to "find" or "unlock" a lost pension, especially with pressure to transfer it quickly, are classic warning signs covered in more detail in pension scams.