How to find your UK pension, and what to do when the public route won't help.

The UK is structurally different from countries like the Netherlands or Sweden because there is no single pension register showing every entitlement you hold. Instead, three separate routes:

State Pension, administered by HMRC and the Department for Work and Pensions. Your contribution record is visible at gov.uk/check-state-pension, which shows National Insurance qualifying years and your forecast State Pension amount. Access requires a Government Gateway account.

Workplace pensions, held by the individual scheme administrators. There is no central register of who holds your workplace pension records. If you remember the employer and roughly when you worked there, you can identify the scheme administrator through the Pension Tracing Service.

Personal pensions, held by individual providers (Aviva, Legal & General, Standard Life, Scottish Widows, Royal London, and many smaller providers). Access requires login credentials with each provider individually.

The Pension Tracing Service at gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details is the free government service that helps you find contact details for workplace and personal pension schemes when you don't know who currently holds them. It does not require login. It does not show your balance or contributions. It tells you which scheme administrator to contact.

If you live in the UK and have an active Government Gateway account, the public route works fine. If you've left the UK, three credential problems appear in sequence.

Government Gateway access from abroad. The Government Gateway login itself can be used from anywhere. The problem is verification. Setting up a new Government Gateway account or regaining access to a dormant one typically requires UK identity verification, a UK passport scan, UK driving licence, or recent UK address. Expats who left more than a few years ago often can't pass these checks.

Two-factor authentication. Government Gateway uses SMS or authenticator app for second-factor authentication. If your registered phone number was a UK number you've since lost, regaining access requires either a successor verification flow or contacting HMRC directly.

Scheme administrator portals. Even when the Pension Tracing Service successfully identifies the administrator of your workplace pension, accessing your individual account on that administrator's portal usually requires their own login credentials. Many UK pension administrator portals were built for residents and have limited international support.

The structural problem: the UK public route is composed of multiple independent systems, each with its own credential layer. An expat may pass one but fail at another. The full picture requires all of them working together.

The Pension Tracing Service is excellent for what it does, but it doesn't surface several categories of pension that expats commonly have:

Defined-benefit pensions from employers that no longer exist. If your UK employer was acquired, dissolved, or wound up after you left, the pension scheme may have been transferred to a successor administrator, bought out by an insurance company, or absorbed into the Pension Protection Fund. The Pension Tracing Service may show the original administrator, who can no longer help you, but not the current custodian.

Workplace pensions from before auto-enrolment. Auto-enrolment under the Pensions Act 2008 took effect from 2012. Pensions accrued before then often sit in older schemes with paper-based or partial digital records. The Pension Tracing Service may not have current contact details for these schemes.

Pensions held by employers with complex acquisition histories. A company you worked for in the 1990s may have been acquired in the 2000s, restructured in the 2010s, and absorbed into a parent group with a different name today. Each transition typically transfers pension obligations, but the trail can become hard to follow. The Pension Tracing Service traces the employer name you provide, not the current corporate descendant.

The State Pension contribution gap that's not yours to claim. If you worked outside the UK and EU/EEA countries don't have a totalization agreement covering your situation, you may have missing National Insurance years that affect your State Pension forecast. Identifying the gap requires checking your full work history, not just UK employers.

PensionHunter operates in the UK as a research and administrative assistance service across all three of the categories above. Specifically:

We identify the current scheme administrator for workplace pensions including pensions where the original employer no longer exists. This means tracing acquisition histories, identifying successor schemes, and confirming which administrator currently holds your records.

We prepare a complete request pack for each administrator we identify, written and ready for you to send under your written authority (an Information Request Authority). You sign one authority; we prepare the requests, written and ready for you to send, to identify the pension, confirm the balance, and obtain the information needed to claim. The administrator deals with us; you receive the result.

We do not provide financial advice. We do not recommend transfers, consolidation, or drawdown options. We find the pension, document what it is, and pass the file to you with the next steps clearly identified. Decisions about what to do with the pension remain yours.

Our three tiers for UK pensions:

• Country Pension Identification Report ($99), a structured, sourced report on every potential UK pension we can identify, within 24 to 48 hours
• Enhanced Pension Identification Report ($499), Country Pension Identification Report plus manual follow-up with administrators for you
• Global Pension Identification Report ($799), Search plus equivalent work across any other country in your work history

Full refund if we find nothing material.