The people Europe's pension infrastructure does not reach

Europe is not ignoring this. It is building two things.

EESSI, the electronic exchange of social security information, now connects 3,120 institutions across the EU, EEA, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, with 99 business use cases and 99 per cent of them implemented. It is finished, and it works. It is also, by design, institution to institution. There is no citizen in it.

Source: European Commission, EESSI quarterly factsheet, data as at 6 July 2026.

The European Tracking Service is the designated citizen layer. Commission Recommendation (EU) 2025/2384 of 20 November 2025 names it as the pan-European hub connecting national pension tracking systems, and says in Article 4(1) that tracking should be free of charge and in Article 5(1) that it should be run on non-profit principles.

After thirteen years, it connects two countries: Belgium and France.

The Netherlands is technically ready. The Dutch pension register's own description of what remains is that it is one push of a button. It is blocked because Dutch law permits pension data sharing only with domestic administrators. Germany has the same barrier.

Source: Commission Recommendation (EU) 2025/2384; IPE, on the legal barriers to Dutch and German connection.

Every instrument above is built for people who live inside the system that owes them money.

Regulation 883/2004 coordinates between Member States. The European Tracking Service is an internal hub. The EU Digital Identity Wallet is issued by Member States to their own residents. Recommendation 2025/2384 is silent on non-residents.

Four groups sit outside all of it.

• People living outside the EU and EEA. A woman in Nador with entitlements built in the Netherlands and Belgium is covered by no European instrument at all.
• Occupational and personal pensions in most Member States. Only ten national tracking systems cover two pillars or more. In the rest there is no coordination mechanism for anything beyond the state pension.
• Pre-digital records. No register, national or European, reconstructs which employer existed under which name in 1974, what scheme it ran, or which insurer holds that scheme now.
• Estates. No European instrument addresses what happens when the member has died and the family does not know where he worked.

The pension record usually still exists. What has changed is the lock on the door.

Almost every national pension portal now sits behind a national electronic identity. Someone who has left the country generally cannot obtain or renew one. A Dutch DigiD can be applied for from abroad with a BSN, but the activation code must be collected in person, either at a video appointment or at a service desk. For an eighty-year-old in rural Morocco that is not a step, it is a wall.

The measurable version, from the Commission's own benchmark: national online availability for citizens scores 93 and cross-border scores 71. Only 45 per cent of cross-border services accept another Member State's national electronic identity.

Source: eGovernment Benchmark 2025, prepared for the European Commission.

Between 1964 and 1973 roughly 225,000 people arrived in the Netherlands under recruitment agreements, from Turkey in 1964 and Morocco in 1969, and from Spain, Italy, Portugal and Yugoslavia. Belgium signed with Morocco and Turkey in 1964. Germany signed with Turkey in 1961 and Morocco in 1963.

Of the Turkish arrivals to the Netherlands, 38.2 per cent had left again within ten years. Of the Moroccan arrivals, 28.2 per cent. Those people hold partial entitlements in two or three systems at once.

The survivors are the sharper problem. In 2016, German pensions paid into Turkey comprised 30,232 old-age pensions and 27,965 widow's and widower's pensions. In that corridor the survivors are already almost as numerous as the workers, and a survivor's pension is generally not paid automatically. Someone has to ask for it.

Source: CBS on arrivals and return migration; Wissenschaftliche Dienste des Deutschen Bundestages, WD 6-3000-083/17, 2016 data.

We asked every national pension authority in our index the same six questions on 15 August 2026, including whether a member outside the country can reach their own record, and by what route. The answers we have received so far are already published, in the institutions' own words, with the date.

The reachability study. The transparency scoreboard.

The findings will be free, openly licensed under CC BY 4.0, and every row will carry the authority that answered, the date and the wording.