The Executor's Guide to Finding Forgotten Pensions

As an executor you have a legal duty to identify all assets in the estate, and pensions are frequently the most overlooked. Here is a practical guide to finding forgotten pensions when you are administering an estate.

## Why Pensions Are Missed

The average person changes jobs 11 times during their career. Each job may have come with a workplace pension. Over decades these pensions accumulate with different providers, under different scheme names, often at addresses the deceased left long ago. When the person dies, their family typically knows about one or two pensions, if any.

Death in service benefits are particularly easy to miss. These are lump sum payments built into many workplace pension schemes, often worth two to four times the annual salary. If no one knows the scheme exists, no one claims the benefit.

## What Documents You Need

To trace pensions for a deceased person you need:

- Death certificate, certified copy - Grant of probate or letters of administration, confirming your legal authority to act - Employment history, as complete as possible, including approximate dates and employer names - National Insurance number, if known - Previous addresses, helps match pension records

Do not worry if the employment history is incomplete. Even approximate information helps, rough dates, partial company names and locations all contribute to a successful search.

## How to Search

Step 1: Check personal records. Look through the deceased's paperwork for pension statements, old payslips, P60s or letters from pension providers. Any company name or scheme name is a valuable lead.

Step 2: Contact known employers. If you know where the deceased worked, contact the HR departments of those companies directly. Ask about pension scheme membership and death in service benefits.

Step 3: Use the Pension Tracing Service. The UK government service can help identify which pension provider holds a specific scheme. But it only covers UK pensions and does not contact anyone for you.

Step 4: Search overseas. If the deceased worked abroad, even briefly, they may have pension entitlements in other countries. Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and the Netherlands all have mandatory employer pension contributions.

## Using a Professional Service

PensionHunter's Estate Search handles all of this. We search every relevant pension registry across all 41 countries we cover, trace employer records, identify successor companies for businesses that have closed, and contact providers directly for information so the estate can act on findings.

Our fee for Global is $799, covers every country you have worked in across all 41 countries. Full refund if we find nothing material. No success fee, no contingent fee, ever.

Estate pension values vary by case. Some individual cases are significantly higher, particularly where death in service benefits or overseas entitlements are involved.

## Protecting Yourself as Executor

Using a professional research and administrative assistance service creates a documented audit trail showing that proper due diligence was performed. This protects you as executor against future claims from beneficiaries that pension assets were overlooked.

For guidance, email hello@pensionhunter.ai. Estate-focused pension research through PensionHunter is currently paused pending legal review.

At PensionHunter, building the World's Trusted Pension Identification Platform, we help people across 41 countries find pension records they had forgotten about.