If you've ever changed jobs, moved house, or started saving into a workplace pension without thinking too hard about it, there's a good chance one of yours has gone walkabout. You're not alone — there's now an estimated £31.1 billion sitting in lost UK pensions, spread across roughly 3.3 million forgotten pots. That's around £9,500 per pot on average. The number of missing pots has risen 60% since 2018.
So if you've ever caught yourself thinking "I need to find my pensions" — yes, it's worth doing. And it's more straightforward than most people expect.
This guide walks you through every realistic route, what information you'll need, what to do once you've found your old pots, and where the Pension Tracing Service® can take the work off your hands.
Auto-enrolment, frequent job changes and the move from final-salary to defined-contribution schemes have all quietly created a generation of "pension orphans". The typical UK worker now has around 11 jobs across their career, and each one can come with its own workplace pension. Add in house moves, surname changes, providers being bought and rebranded, and paperwork that ends up in a drawer somewhere — and a pension pot can slip out of sight in a few short years.
Common ways a pension goes missing:
You changed address and never updated your provider — so the annual statements stop arriving
Your old employer was acquired, restructured, or went out of business — and the scheme was passed to a different trustee
Your provider rebranded or merged (Equitable Life, Friends Provident, Eagle Star, Scottish Equitable have all changed hands in the last 20 years)
You contracted out of SERPS at some point — and the rebate sat in a separate scheme you've since forgotten
You changed your surname (often after marriage or divorce) and the provider's records didn't catch up
None of this means the money has disappeared. The pot is still yours — you just need to find it again.
There are four legitimate routes to tracking down an old UK pension. Most people end up using a combination of all four. Start with whichever is easiest given what you can remember.
Before you do anything online, spend an hour with old paperwork. You're looking for:
Annual benefit statements (sent each year by your provider while the pot is active)
Joiner packs from when you started a job — these almost always name the pension provider
P45s and old payslips — payslips list pension deductions and sometimes the scheme name
Old emails — search your inbox for "pension", "Aviva", "Standard Life", "Scottish Widows", "Aegon", "Royal London", "Nest", "The People's Pension", "Now Pensions"
If you can find even one statement, you'll usually have the provider name and a policy or member number, which is enough to call them and reactivate the conversation.
If you remember where you worked but not who your pension was with, the employer is the next port of call. Their HR or payroll department can tell you which scheme they enrolled you into and how to contact the trustee or provider.
A few practical tips:
It doesn't matter if the employer is no longer trading — the scheme still exists somewhere
For very old employers, look up the company on Companies House to see if it was acquired (and by whom)
If the company was a subsidiary, the parent company's pensions team can usually trace it
The UK Government runs a free pension tracing tool at gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details. It's a database of more than 200,000 workplace and personal pension schemes. You search by employer name or pension scheme name and it returns the current contact details for the scheme administrator.
What the Gov.UK tool does:
✅ Gives you contact details (phone, address) for a scheme
✅ Free to use
What it does not do (this is important):
❌ It does not tell you whether you have a pension
❌ It does not tell you how much your pension is worth
❌ It does not contact the provider for you — you still have to do that
❌ It cannot search by your name or NI number — only by employer/scheme
If you remember the employer, this is a perfectly good starting point. If you don't, you'll need help.
This is where we come in. The Pension Tracing Service® has been helping people find lost pensions since 2012 (FCA number 914746).
Once you sign up, our team contacts HMRC, the DWP, pension providers, scheme trustees, previous employers, and anywhere else your old pensions might be hiding. You only need a few personal details — name, NI number, and a rough work history — to get the search started.
Three things that make this route different from the Gov.UK tool:
We do the work, not you. No phoning round, no chasing paperwork, no waiting on hold to scheme administrators.
You find out what each pension is worth. Our pension experts review every pot we locate — value, charges, performance, and whether you'd be better off where you are or in a single consolidated plan.
It's free unless we find and improve something. Tracing costs nothing. There's a one-off 1% fee only if you decide to combine your pensions into a new plan, and an annual management fee of 0.82–0.86% after that. If we can't improve on what you've already got, you pay nothing.
The more you can hand over, the faster a trace runs. Don't worry if you don't have all of this — you can usually get started with just a few details.
Full name (and previous names) — The pension may be in a maiden or former name
Date of birth — Almost every scheme indexes records by DOB
National Insurance number — Unlocks DWP and HMRC records (more on this below)
Current and previous addresses — Helps providers match historical correspondence
Names of previous employers and rough dates — The single most useful piece of information
Any old policy/member numbers — Speeds up scheme-side lookups
A lot of people assume "I can just find my pensions using my NI number" — as if there's a central register somewhere. There isn't. Your NI number unlocks two specific things:
State pension records at the DWP — useful for your State Pension forecast
Contracted-out SERPS contributions at HMRC — for the period you were contracted out of the Additional State Pension
For private and workplace pensions, there is no NI-number-driven master database. You (or someone tracing on your behalf) still need to contact providers individually. This is one of the genuine reasons a tracing service is useful — we do the legwork of joining the dots between HMRC records and the actual scheme administrators.
Finding them is half the battle. The other half is deciding what to do with them — and this is where most generic "how to find a pension" guides leave you stranded.
Request a current valuation from each scheme. For defined-contribution pensions, this is the cash value of your pot. For final-salary (defined benefit) pensions, it's an annual income figure at your scheme's normal retirement age — a totally different beast.
Old pensions can come with eye-watering charges, particularly if the scheme dates back to before 2015. Look for:
Annual management charge (AMC) — anything above 1% on a modern plan is on the high side
Bid/offer spreads on older with-profits funds
Exit penalties for transferring out before a certain age
Trail commission that's still being paid to an adviser you've never spoken to
There are three sensible options, and the right one depends on your pots, your age, and the features of each scheme.
Leave it where it is — sometimes the right call, especially for final-salary schemes or pots with guaranteed annuity rates
Transfer into your current pension — useful if your current scheme has lower charges
Consolidate into a single new plan — the route most people end up choosing for multiple small pots, because it's far easier to manage one pension than five
Important: any transfer worth £30,000+ from a defined-benefit scheme legally requires you to take regulated advice. This is one of the reasons working with a regulated service like ours matters — our advisers are authorised to give that advice, where a free tracing tool alone can't.
Three steps, plain and simple.
Step 1 — Find it. Once you sign up, we contact HMRC, the DWP, your old providers, trustees and employers on your behalf. You don't have to make a single phone call.
Step 2 — Review it. When the pots come back, our regulated advisers check each one — value, performance, charges, and any guarantees you might be giving up if you moved it. We'll tell you what we've found and what our recommendation is, in plain English.
Step 3 — Improve it. If consolidating is the right move, we transfer your pots into a new personalised plan tailored to your goals, choosing funds from the whole of the market. If staying put is better for you, we'll say so.
This is the question most people want answered first, and the answer is pleasantly short.
Tracing your pensions: free. No charge to locate them, no charge for the review.
Combining them into a new plan: a one-off 1% fee (taken from the pension, not out of your pocket) when you transfer.
Ongoing management: 0.82–0.86% a year, depending on the plan chosen for you.
If no pension is found, or if we can't improve on what you've already got — you pay nothing.
Compared to the typical 1.5–2% annual charges on some legacy workplace pensions, the maths often works out in your favour. But we'll show you the numbers either way before anything moves.
Start with the employer, not the provider. Even if the company no longer trades, the scheme still exists — it'll have been passed to a trustee or another administrator. The Gov.UK Find Pension Contact Details tool can help you find current contact details if you remember the employer name. If you don't, the Pension Tracing Service® can search HMRC and DWP records on your behalf.
HMRC holds records for contracted-out SERPS contributions — periods when you opted out of the Additional State Pension. They don't hold a full register of your workplace or personal pensions. As part of our service, we'll contact HMRC for any contracted-out records held in your name; this data is held by a third-party administrator and is only released to authorised parties.
Not directly. Your NI number unlocks DWP state pension records and HMRC contracted-out records, but there is no central NI-indexed database of all your private and workplace pensions. Anyone claiming you can "look up all your pensions by NI number" online is overstating what's possible. What we can do is use your NI number to pull the records HMRC and the DWP do hold, and combine that with employer-based searches to find the rest.
Three options, in order of effort:
Search your email and old paperwork for the provider's name
Contact your previous employer's HR team — they can tell you which scheme you were in
Sign up to the Pension Tracing Service® and let us do the work
Your most recent annual benefit statement will name the provider. If you don't have one, ask the employer who enrolled you. As a last resort, the Gov.UK Find Pension Contact Details tool lets you look up the scheme by employer name.
Yes — the Government runs gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details, which is free. It gives you the contact details of a scheme but doesn't tell you if you have a pension or what it's worth. Our tracing is also free; we only charge if you choose to combine your pensions into a new plan afterwards.
Request a forecast online at gov.uk/check-state-pension (you'll need a Government Gateway account), or by post using HMRC's BR-19 form. This shows what State Pension you're on track to receive and when — separate from your workplace and personal pensions.
The UK Government has been working on a Pensions Dashboard that aims to do exactly this, but at the time of writing it isn't yet available to the general public. Until it launches, the most practical "one place" is to consolidate your pensions into a single plan — which is exactly what we do once we've traced them for you.
Due to data protection rules, you have to sign up yourself. We can't process tracing requests for spouses, family members, or deceased relatives. Once you've signed up, our team handles all the outreach on your behalf.
It depends on how many schemes are involved and how quickly providers respond — anywhere from a few weeks for a single straightforward pot to a few months for a complex history. Our tracing team chases providers and keeps you updated throughout.
If you've spent years half-meaning to look up that old pension, this is the moment. The hardest part of finding a lost pension is starting; once you're signed up, we take care of the searching, the chasing, the checking and the explaining. You get back a clear picture of every pot in your name, and a decision that's actually based on numbers.
The Pension Tracing Service® has been doing this since 2012. We do the search, we provide the regulated advice, and — if it's right for you — we put your pensions into a single, tidier plan you'll actually look at.
You can also request contact details from the Pension Tracing Service by phone or by post.
The Pension Tracing Service
Telephone: 0800 1223 170
From outside the UK: +44 (0) 1782 389134
Monday to Friday, 9:30 am to 5:00 pm
Address
The Pension Tracing Service
The Lantern
High Street
Ilfracombe
EX34 9QB
Copyright 2026 by Pension Tracing Service®
The Pension Tracing Service® is a trading style of Millennial Wealth Ltd. We are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA number 914746). Pinnacle House, 34 Newark Road, Peterborough, PE1 5YD. Registered company number 11557299.
Profile Pensions is a trading name of Profile Financial Solutions Ltd, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA number 596398). Registered office: Norwest Court, Guildhall Street, Preston, PR1 3NU.
This service is not affiliated with the Department for Work and Pensions or any government body. When you click to get started, you'll be taken to Profile Pensions to complete your sign-up and begin the Find, Check & Transfer service. Capital at risk: the value of investments can go down as well as up and you may get back less than you put in. Past performance is not a guide to future performance. Tax treatment depends on your individual circumstances and may change.
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