It's one of the most common questions we get: "Can't HMRC just tell me what pensions I've got?"
It's an understandable assumption. HMRC has your tax records, your National Insurance history, your employment record going back decades — surely they know which pension schemes have been taking contributions from your salary all those years?
The honest answer is no, not really — and the reason is more interesting than you'd expect. HMRC holds a very specific slice of pension information, and it's not the slice most people think it is.
This guide explains exactly what HMRC has, what they don't have, why that's the case, and how to fill in the gaps.
HMRC's pension records are limited to one specific thing: contributions you made while contracted out of SERPS (the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme).
That's it. They don't hold:
A list of every workplace pension you've ever been enrolled in
The current value of any private pension you have
Contact details for your old pension providers
Anything to do with personal pensions you set up yourself
If you're hoping to type your NI number into a HMRC portal and have a list of your pensions pop up, that portal doesn't exist. The data simply isn't aggregated that way.
The records HMRC keeps relate to a specific historical scheme called contracting out. Between 1978 and 2016, employees could choose to opt out of the Additional State Pension (originally SERPS, later the State Second Pension or S2P) and have a portion of their National Insurance contributions redirected into a private or workplace pension instead.
If you were contracted out at any point during those years, HMRC has records of:
The years you were contracted out
The value of the rebates that were redirected
Which scheme administrator received those rebates (held by a third-party administrator on HMRC's behalf)
That last point is the useful bit. It means HMRC can sometimes tell you the name of a scheme you were paying into 20 or 30 years ago — even if you've completely lost track of who the provider was.
Important caveat: these records aren't released directly to you over the phone. They're released to authorised parties only — typically a regulated pensions firm acting on your behalf with your written consent.
For everything outside the contracted-out window, your pension data lives somewhere else entirely. Here's a rough map:
State Pension — DWP (Department for Work and Pensions)
Contracted-out SERPS / S2P — HMRC (held by a third-party administrator)
Workplace pensions (current) — Your provider (Aviva, Nest, Royal London, etc.)
Workplace pensions (former employers) — The scheme trustee or administrator
Personal pensions / SIPPs — The provider you set them up with
Defined benefit (final salary) — The scheme trustee — usually the employer or its successor
Notice that HMRC isn't the central database for any of these, even though they collect tax on your contributions and tax your eventual pension income. The UK pension system was built piecemeal over a century, and each layer holds its own records.
If you want to check whether HMRC has any contracted-out records in your name, there are two routes:
Write to HMRC's NICO (National Insurance Contributions Office), asking for a copy of your contracting-out history. You'll need to include your NI number and verify your identity. This can take several weeks.
Authorise a regulated pensions service to request the records on your behalf. This is faster, because the service can provide the right legal authorisation in the format the third-party administrator needs.
If you'd rather not chase paperwork yourself, the Pension Tracing Service® handles this as part of a standard trace — we'll request your contracted-out records from HMRC, plus search the DWP, providers, trustees and previous employers in parallel. You only need to give us your NI number and a rough work history.
Once you've squeezed everything HMRC knows out of them, you've still got the bigger job ahead — finding the workplace and personal pensions HMRC has no record of. There are three practical approaches:
Old paperwork. Annual statements, joiner packs, and old payslips will name the provider and usually a policy number.
Previous employers. HR or payroll teams can tell you which scheme they enrolled you into, even years later. If the company no longer trades, look it up on Companies House to see who acquired it.
Use a tracing service. A service like ours will contact HMRC, the DWP, providers and former employers on your behalf — joining the dots between the limited records HMRC holds and the actual schemes that hold your money.
For a full walkthrough of all four routes (paperwork, employers, the Gov.UK tool and a tracing service), see our main guide on how to find my pensions.
When you sign up to a trace, your NI number lets us go to HMRC for the contracted-out records and to the DWP for your State Pension history. Those records often surface the name of an old scheme — particularly for anyone who worked in the 1980s, 90s or early 2000s, when contracting out was extremely common.
But that's only a starting point. We then cross-check those names against current administrators (schemes get sold, rebranded and merged constantly), contact each one for an up-to-date valuation, and build you a single picture of every pot you have. Tracing is free, and a one-off fee only applies if you decide to combine your pensions into a new plan afterwards.
No. HMRC sees pension contributions for tax purposes (so they know roughly how much you're paying in each year), but they don't maintain a master list of which schemes you belong to. The detailed scheme records belong to providers and trustees, not HMRC.
You can see your State Pension forecast through your Government Gateway account at gov.uk/check-state-pension. You won't see workplace or personal pensions there — those don't appear in your HMRC account at all.
The DWP runs the State Pension and pays it out. HMRC handles the tax side (relief on contributions, tax on pension income) and holds the historical contracted-out SERPS records. For finding lost private and workplace pensions, neither is a complete answer on its own.
Only for contracted-out SERPS contributions, and even then it's the historical administrator at the time of the rebate — not necessarily the current one (because schemes get sold and rebranded). It's a useful clue rather than a definitive answer.
No — it's run by the DWP, not HMRC. It's a free tool at gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details that lets you look up scheme contact details by employer or scheme name. It doesn't tell you whether you have a pension or what it's worth.
Only if you have time to write letters, wait weeks for replies, and then chase each scheme administrator individually. A tracing service does the same searches plus the follow-ups, and gives you a single document at the end with every pot, its value and what your options are. The trace itself costs nothing.
HMRC is part of the answer to "find my pensions", not the whole answer. They hold contracted-out SERPS records — useful, sometimes the missing piece — but they don't have a central database of every pension you've ever had. To find the rest, you need to combine HMRC's records with searches at the DWP, your old providers, your previous employers and any third-party administrators in between.
If that sounds like a lot of phone calls and paperwork, it is — and we'll do it for you.
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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