How do you trace a pension you have lost track of?
The government's Pension Tracing Service finds the current contact details for a pension scheme from the name of the employer or the provider. It is free and it works — but it locates the scheme, not your money, and you then have to write to the administrator with enough detail to be identified.
- What it does: returns the current contact details for a scheme from an employer or provider name.
- What it does not do: confirm you have a pension, or tell you its value.
- What you need: employer name, dates worked, National Insurance number, and any old paperwork.
- The successor: pensions dashboards, which will show pots against your National Insurance record.
01 What the service actually returns
The Pension Tracing Service is a database of pension schemes and their current administrators. You give it an employer's name or a provider's name and it returns an address, a phone number and often an email. That is the whole of its function.
It does not know whether you were a member, and it holds nothing about individuals. Schemes change administrator, merge and wind up, and the value of the service is that it tracks those changes — a scheme run by one insurer in 1994 may be administered by a completely different company now.
For a pot with a provider rather than an employer scheme — an old personal pension — the provider's name is the search term, and mergers in that industry make the current name hard to guess.
Source: Find pension contact details
02 What you then have to do
Write to the administrator with your full name, any former names, date of birth, National Insurance number, the employer, and the dates you worked there. The National Insurance number is what links you to a record, and a former name is what most often blocks a match.
Old paperwork helps enormously. A payslip showing a pension deduction, a P60, or a leaving statement establishes membership and dates in a way that memory does not. Anyone clearing out papers should keep the pension-related ones whatever else goes.
Expect it to take weeks rather than days, and expect to chase. Administrators handle these requests routinely and not quickly.
Source: Find pension contact details
03 Dashboards, and what changes
Pensions dashboards are being introduced to show an individual's pensions in one place, matched against their National Insurance record, including the State Pension. When fully populated they will do what people currently expect the tracing service to do.
Until then, the tracing service and your own records are the tools. It is worth doing the search now rather than waiting, because a pot found today can have its address updated and its charges checked, and one found in a decade has spent that decade in a default fund nobody chose.
Once found, the decisions are the ordinary ones: check the charge, check the investment, check whether any guarantee is attached, and only then consider whether to consolidate.
Shows: what a forgotten pot is likely to be worth now, and what finding it is worth against the effort. Ignores: charges, the actual funds it is invested in, and whether the pot exists at all.
On the defaults above, the worked example shows £20,318. A £6,000 pot left for 25 years at 5% is worth £20,318 — which is what an afternoon of tracing is competing against.
Source: Workplace pensions
People assume the tracing service searches for their pensions and it does not — it is a phone book for schemes. You still have to write to the administrator and prove you were there, which is why the single most useful thing you can do is find any old payslip showing a pension deduction before you start. Do it now rather than waiting for dashboards. A pot from a job you had at 27 has had thirty years of compounding by the time you retire, and it has spent all of them in whatever default fund the scheme used in the nineties.
FAQ
Will the Pension Tracing Service tell me if I have a pension?
No. It returns the current contact details for a scheme from an employer or provider name. It holds no information about individuals, so you then have to write to the administrator and be identified from your own details.
What information do I need?
Full name and any former names, date of birth, National Insurance number, the employer's name and the dates you worked there. Old payslips or P60s showing a pension deduction make the match far easier.
Should I wait for pensions dashboards?
No. Dashboards will eventually show pots matched to your National Insurance record, but a pot found today can have its address corrected and its charges checked, and one found later has spent the intervening years in a fund nobody chose.
Sources
Regulator references
- Find pension contact details · GOV.UK · 2025The tracing service for pots the reader has lost track of.Last verified: 2026-09-07
- Workplace pensions · GOV.UK · 2025The statutory auto-enrolment framework and who it covers.Last verified: 2026-09-07
Calculator unit tests · the assertions this page's worked example is checked against, and their last result
Changelog
- 2026-09-07 — initial publish (new format)
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Jordan Reeves
Founder of Talk Through Wealth. A software engineer for over a decade before turning to retirement planning, Jordan built the projection engine after watching family members get fragmented, country-by-country advice that never reconciled. He writes about retirement the way the engine computes it: month-by-month, lifetime-long, and skeptical of any rule of thumb that hasn't been run through the math.