Finding old pensions

Lost pensions are not a sign of carelessness; they are a side effect of how modern working lives are structured. Since automatic enrolment was introduced in the UK in 2012, most employees are signed up to a workplace pension by default. Start five jobs and you may well have five separate pots, each with a different provider, each sending paperwork to whichever address you lived at when you worked there.

Then life happens. You move house and forget to tell an old provider. A pension company is bought by another and changes its name. A workplace scheme is moved to a new administrator. None of these are dramatic events, but each one quietly loosens the thread between you and your money. Across the UK, the value sitting in lost and forgotten pension pots has been estimated in the tens of billions of pounds, spread across millions of individual pots. A meaningful share of that belongs to people who simply do not know it is there.

Before you start searching, it helps to know what you are looking for, because the trail is different for each.

The most common is the workplace pension: one set up through an employer, often with both you and the employer paying in. If you have had several jobs, this is where most of your missing pots will be.

Next is the personal or private pension: one you set up yourself, perhaps during a period of self-employment or to top up a workplace scheme. These are easy to forget if you stopped paying in years ago.

Finally there is the State Pension, which is different in kind. It is not a pot with a provider but an entitlement built up through your National Insurance record. You do not trace it so much as check it, and it is worth checking, because gaps in your record can affect what you will eventually receive.

Tracing is far easier if you start with a little detective work at home. Pull together anything that points to past pensions: old payslips, P60s, contracts or offer letters, and any pension statements that may have arrived in the post and gone straight in a drawer. Make a simple list of every employer you have worked for, with rough dates. Even an incomplete list is enough to begin.

The UK government runs a free Pension Tracing Service, available through gov.uk, and it is the natural place to start. It searches a database of workplace and personal pension schemes and gives you the current contact details for the scheme or provider you are looking for. You search using the name of your former employer or pension provider, and the service returns an address or phone number so you can get in touch.

One thing to be clear about: the Pension Tracing Service tells you how to contact the scheme, but it does not tell you whether you have a pension there or how much it is worth. It hands you the thread; you then follow it. Be wary of lookalike services that charge a fee for what the official service does for nothing. The genuine tool is free and sits on gov.uk.

Once you have the contact details, get in touch with each scheme and ask whether they hold a pension in your name. This is where your National Insurance number, dates of employment and any old reference numbers earn their keep. Ask them to confirm whether you have a pot, its current value, and the type of pension it is, and make sure they have your up-to-date address so future statements actually reach you.

It is also worth going back to former employers directly. Their HR or payroll team can often tell you which provider ran the scheme during your time there, which is especially useful if the company has since changed the arrangement or the provider has been renamed.

Separately from any workplace or personal pensions, check your State Pension. Through gov.uk you can request a State Pension forecast, which shows what you are currently on track to receive and the age from which you can claim it. The same service lets you view your National Insurance record and see whether there are any gaps, for example from years spent abroad, caring or self-employed. Knowing where you stand on the State Pension gives you the foundation that your other pensions build on top of.

The UK is in the process of introducing pensions dashboards, a government-backed programme designed to let people see all of their pensions, including the State Pension, in one place online. The aim is exactly the problem this guide describes: making it far easier to find and view everything you have. The dashboards are being rolled out in stages as providers connect to the system. Until they are fully available to the public, the tracing steps above remain the reliable way to find what you have. It is a development worth keeping an eye on.

• Do keep your address up to date with every pension provider so future statements and dashboard data actually reach you.
• Don't wait for the dashboards before tracing - coverage will keep growing, but the tracing steps above already work today.

When people finish tracing several pensions, a natural next thought is whether to bring them together into one. Combining pots, sometimes called consolidation, can make pensions easier to keep track of and, in some cases, simpler to manage. It is an option many people consider. It is also one to approach with real care, because the right answer genuinely depends on the individual pensions involved, and moving a pension is not always in your interest.

Some older pensions carry features that are valuable and would be lost if you transferred out. These can include guaranteed annuity rates, protected pension ages, or other safeguarded benefits, as well as life cover attached to the scheme. Some schemes also apply exit charges. There is also an important distinction between a defined contribution pension, which is a pot of money whose value rises and falls with investments, and a defined benefit pension, often called a final salary scheme, which promises a set income for life and is typically very valuable. Defined benefit pensions in particular come with strong protections, and in the UK you are generally required by law to take regulated financial advice before transferring one above a certain value.

This is the point in the journey where general information stops being enough. Whether to combine pensions, and which to combine, is a decision with long-term consequences that turns on the specific terms of your specific pensions. It is exactly the kind of question where speaking to a regulated financial adviser, who can look at your actual schemes, is the sensible route. The purpose of tracing is to give you a complete picture; what you then do with that picture is a personal decision worth taking properly.

• Do ask each provider for the scheme's key features document and any guaranteed benefits before considering a transfer.
• Don't transfer a defined benefit (final salary) pension without regulated financial advice - for transfers above £30,000 this is required by UK law.

Most people who sit down and trace their pensions come away having found at least one pot they had genuinely forgotten, and sometimes several. Even if you decide to leave everything exactly where it is, you end up with something valuable in its own right: a clear, current list of what you have and who holds it, with your correct address attached to each. That alone means future you, and one day your family, will be able to find it all without a treasure hunt.