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.
A short stint, overseas posting or graduate-scheme job is worth checking, but a pension was not necessarily opened. In the UK, automatic enrolment depends on age, annual earnings, ordinarily working in the UK, dates and any postponement or opt-out. See https://www.gov.uk/workplace-pensions/joining-a-workplace-pension for the eligibility rules.
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.