Pension guides
Pension search questions, answered
Identification-first answers, sourced from the registers and rules that actually govern each country, never financial advice.
Pension guides
Identification-first answers, sourced from the registers and rules that actually govern each country, never financial advice.
Finding an old pension is an identification problem, not a paperwork problem. The work is to identify the scheme, administrator, or fund that holds the entitlement, then contact details follow. Each country has its own access route; the route, not your effort, decides what's possible.
An employer closing does not delete the pension. Workplace pensions are held separately from the employer in trust (UK occupational), with a regulated provider (UK DC, IE PRSAs), or inside a sector fund (NL, AU super). When the employer disappears, the scheme is transferred to a successor administrator or, for defined-benefit failures, a national lifeboat (e.g. UK Pension Protection Fund).
Tracing a pension from abroad is usually two jobs in one: identifying the scheme (public-register work, location-independent) and accessing your personal record (often gated by a national eID like Government Gateway, DigiD, MyGov, or BankID). The hard part is rarely the search, it's the eID wall, and the answers differ by country.
If you ever worked somewhere for more than a few months, especially after auto-enrolment regimes started (UK 2012, IE 1 January 2026), a pension was almost certainly opened in your name. Short stints, overseas postings, and graduate-scheme jobs are the most-forgotten layers because the contribution looked small at the time.
Our standard delivery promise is a full Pension Identification Report within 24 to 48 hours. The Enhanced Pension Identification Report is delivered within five working days of your intake form, and Global within ten working days of your intake form.