How to find your lost pension

A study by the Pensions Policy Institute estimates that £31.1bn in pension funds is considered to be lost among the UK population, with nearly 1 in 10 workers believing they could have lost a pension pot worth more than £10,000.

Have you lost one or more pensions? You can track them down. Start by contacting previous employers, look up old paperwork, do an online search, and use the government’s free pension tracing service to help you find your old pensions.

It's free to recover an old pension as the pension pot is legally yours.

If one of your family members dies before collating a list of any of their pensions, their heirs may be unaware of them too.

Here’s how you do it

Make a list of all your employers

Do you think you might have lost a pension along the way? If so, first make a list of all your employers. Contact each of them for details of the pension scheme at the time of your employment. You won't need to do this if you received a pension payout when you left the job.

Find the name of the pension provider

You can do this by checking old paperwork – most pension schemes would have sent you a statement annually. If you can’t find their details, use the list of providers available from the Association of British Insurers (Opens in new window)

Check if your old pension scheme might have undergone any changes, including mergers.

Use the pension tracing service

The government's free pension tracing service (Opens in new window) is useful. You'll need the name of your employer or your pension provider, then follow the links provided. You can also share your details by phoning 0800 731 0175 or by post at:

The Pension Service
Post Handling Site A
Wolverhampton
WV98 1AF

Once you have the pension provider’s name, the next step is to contact them directly with the following information:

• Your National Insurance number
• Any previous names and addresses
• The dates you worked for the company

If you'd like advice on what to do with your pension, including whether to consolidate it with any others, you could start by reading the MoneyHelper guide Making the most of your pensions. (Opens in new window) Either way, now that you know about your missing pension, it's a good idea to keep track of its performance.

Janice's story

I have workplace pensions that have started paying out – with the exception of one. My husband and I started working at a local newspaper in Sussex. We were there for almost five years; then I moved on to a regional paper followed by national papers in London.

Decades passed, and my husband got a letter from a pension provider informing him that he had a small pension due to him from the local paper. It wasn’t huge – we didn’t earn very much then – but I couldn’t work out why I wasn’t also receiving it.

I contacted the pensions provider, but was told there was no information about a pension for me. Contacting the paper itself turned out to be difficult. It had been sold to another company and then another.

We have identical first initials and surnames, something that used to annoy me when I wrote an in-depth feature, only to find the sub-editors had given my husband my byline. Could the accounts department have made an error and only given the pension to one of us, I wondered? I’m hoping to follow the trail to its conclusion. Watch this space!

There's one way to avoid this problem ever arising: keep close records of every pension offered at every workplace, particularly when you change jobs. But if you haven’t done so, don’t despair. There is help out there.

Introducing Nutmeg

Introducing Nutmeg, the digital wealth manager that's part of the Chase family. You can now open a pension with Nutmeg (Opens in new window) and keep an eye on your investments through the Chase app – so you can see everything in one place.

Nutmeg is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in relation to certain investment services and restricted advice only. Chase is a trading name of J.P. Morgan Europe Limited. Nutmeg and J.P. Morgan Europe Limited are J.P. Morgan companies. Investments are provided by Nutmeg and are not guaranteed by Chase. Chase current account required. Eligibility applies. Before applying, you should consider if a Nutmeg account and its features are suitable for you and your investment needs.

Recommended reading

• What's pension consolidation?
• Ways to make your pension last longer
• Two things to do for future you