Pension tracing — finding your lost pots
Billions of pounds sit in UK pensions whose owners have lost track of them. If you have changed jobs or moved house, some of it may be yours.
Auto-enrolment means almost every job since 2012 has come with a pension. Add earlier employments, and a typical working life leaves a trail of small pots behind it.
Pensions get lost for ordinary reasons: you moved and never updated the provider, the employer was acquired and the scheme renamed, or the pot was small enough to forget.
Tracing them is usually straightforward, and it is the necessary first step before any sensible decision about consolidation or retirement income. You cannot plan around money you have not found.
What you need to start
- The employer's name, and roughly when you worked there. That is often enough on its own.
- Any old paperwork — annual statements, scheme booklets, or a payslip showing a pension deduction.
- Your National Insurance number, which providers use to match records.
- Previous addresses, since providers may hold you under an old one.
How the search works
- The government's free Pension Tracing Service holds contact details for most workplace and personal schemes, and is the sensible starting point.
- Where an employer has been taken over, wound up or renamed, the trail becomes harder to follow. Our advisers are used to that and know how to pursue it.
- Once a scheme is located, you request a current statement: the value, the charges, the fund it is invested in, and whether it carries any guarantees.
- Only then is there a decision to make — and often the right one is to leave it where it is.
What to do once you have found them
- Get a current value and charge figure for each pot before comparing anything.
- Check for guaranteed annuity rates or protected tax-free cash. These are most common in plans written before the late 1980s and are frequently valuable.
- Update your address and death benefit nomination with every provider, whatever else you decide.
- Then consider whether consolidation improves your position — sometimes it does, sometimes it does not.
Questions we get asked
Talk it through — free, and with no obligation
A short conversation with an FCA-regulated adviser will tell you where you stand. There is no cost and no pressure to proceed.