United Kingdom
3.3 million lost pots worth 31.1 billion pounds, average 9,470 pounds, up 60 percent since 2018.
Source: Pensions Policy Institute Briefing Note 138, October 2024, and ABI, October 2024
The four parts of this research
- What the systems publish, and mostly do not. the pension scoreboard
- Whether a person abroad can reach them at all, in the institutions' own words. the reachability study
- Why the gap exists and why it is not closing. the non-resident gap
- And where it falls hardest, along the migration routes: migrant worker pensions
What the systems know
United States
2.13 trillion dollars in forgotten 401k accounts across 31.9 million accounts, average 66,691 dollars, 4.2 million newly left behind in 2025.
Source: Capitalize, 2025
Australia
18.9 billion Australian dollars in lost and ATO held super.
Source: Australian Taxation Office, 2025
South Africa
47.2 billion rand owed to 4.45 million members.
Source: FSCA, figures as at end 2020
These four are the best counted systems in the world. The other 20 in our study have never published a figure for members abroad. Every system we looked at, with its publisher, its date and its source, is set out row by row on the country-by-country scoreboard.
Why pensions get lost between countries
When someone leaves a country, the pension system records a leaver and stops there. No other system is told. The savings stay exactly where they were, in a scheme that now has a member living under a different address, a different tax number and often a different surname spelling.
Meanwhile the employer side keeps moving. Companies merge, change name, are acquired or close, and the scheme passes to an administrator the member has never heard of. Letters go to the last address on file, and after a house move they simply bounce. Nobody follows up, because nobody is responsible for the join between one national system and the next. That join is where the money goes quiet.
The self test
Five questions. One minute. One yes is enough to be worth a look.
- Have you ever worked in a country you no longer live in?
- Did you change employers more than three times?
- Has an old employer been renamed, merged or acquired?
- Have you moved house since you left that job?
- Would you know who to call in that country today?
Method in one paragraph
We combine two approaches. A rate projection applies the best documented loss rates to emigrant populations, giving floors of 2.8 billion pounds for the UK and 70 billion dollars for the US. A pool share approach attributes a conservative slice of documented lost pension pools to people abroad, giving a floor of 0.9 billion Australian dollars for Australia. All arithmetic and sources are shown in full in the PDF. 74 billion US dollars is a floor, not an estimate of the true total.