You spent three years in London in your thirties. Or eighteen months in Amsterdam, two years in Dubai, a season in Sydney. You were paid, you were taxed, and somewhere in that payroll a pension was opened in your name. Then you moved on, and you never thought about it again. It is still there. It is still yours. And nothing in any pension system anywhere is designed to reconnect it to you once you have crossed a border.

By Frank Marco, founder of PensionHunter

The size of what gets left behind

The numbers that exist are large, and they only cover the handful of countries that bother to count.

In the United Kingdom, the Pensions Policy Institute counts 31.1 billion pounds sitting in 3.3 million forgotten workplace pension pots, an average of 9,470 pounds each, as of October 2024. That total has grown by around 60 percent since 2018. For people aged 55 to 75, the average forgotten pot is 13,620 pounds.

In the United States, the research firm Capitalize counts 2.13 trillion dollars across 31.9 million left behind retirement accounts, an average of 66,691 dollars, in its September 2025 research. Roughly 4.2 million accounts were newly left behind during 2025 alone.

The Australian Taxation Office reports 18.9 billion Australian dollars in lost and unclaimed superannuation. South Africa’s Financial Sector Conduct Authority put unclaimed retirement benefits at 47.2 billion rand across 4.45 million members as at the end of 2020.

Those four countries are, as far as we can establish, the only ones that publish anything at all.

The number nobody has ever produced

Here is the part that surprised us most while researching it. Of 24 major pension systems we examined, 20 publish no figure whatsoever for money lost or unclaimed inside them. And not one system anywhere in the world counts what people lose specifically when they move between countries.

That is a strange gap. Cross-border movement is the single most reliable way to lose a pension, and it is the one thing nobody measures.

So we tried to put a floor under it. Not an estimate, a floor: the smallest number the published evidence can support, with the arithmetic shown.

The method is simple enough to check. In the UK, 3.3 million forgotten pots across a working age population of roughly 53 million gives a rate of about 6.2 per 100 people, which is roughly 1 in 16. Applied to the 4.8

million or more UK born people living abroad, that suggests around 298,000 forgotten pots belonging to British emigrants, worth about 2.8 billion pounds at the published average.

In the US, 31.9 million left behind accounts across roughly 262 million adults gives about 12.2 per 100, or roughly 1 in 8. Applied to the approximately 8.7 million Americans living abroad, that is around 1.06 million accounts, worth about 70 billion dollars.

Add Australia on a pool share basis and the total comes to at least 74 billion US dollars across roughly 1.35 million accounts, in two corridors alone. Every input is dated and attributed, every assumption is stated, and corrections are invited. We would rather be corrected than be quoted for a number we cannot defend.

Why the system cannot find you

A pension gets opened without you doing anything, and it can be forgotten the same way.

When you leave a country, the provider carries on writing. In the local language, to the address on your last payslip, about a scheme whose name has probably changed twice since you left. Employers merge. Schemes are sold. Administrators are replaced. The post keeps arriving at a flat you moved out of a decade ago, until it stops arriving at all.

There is no international register. There is no forwarding system. Nobody is looking for you.

Five questions worth asking yourself

1. Did you work in another country for more than a few months at any point since the 1990s?
2. Were you over 21 and earning a normal local salary at the time?
3. Have you moved address since, or changed your name?
4. Did an employer you worked for merge, get acquired, or close?
5. Have you ever received pension correspondence at an old address that you did not follow up?

Two or more yes answers, and there is a reasonable chance something exists in your name that you are not counting.

Three things you can do this week, for free

Check the official register, if the country has one. Many do. The Netherlands has Mijnpensioenoverzicht, Denmark has PensionsInfo, Australia has the ATO’s lost superannuation search. We publish a free directory of the official government portals for 46 countries, with no charge and no registration, at pensionhunter.ai/pension-portals.

Write down every employer, precisely. Not the brand you remember, the legal entity that paid you. Old payslips, contracts, P45s, bank statements showing salary credits, even your own LinkedIn history. Exact dates matter more than most people expect.

In the UK specifically, ask HMRC for your National Insurance record. It is free and it is a legal right. Between 1978 and 2016, many workplace schemes were contracted out of the state earnings related scheme, and that status is recorded against your NI record. It will show you which tax years you were in a contracted out scheme, which tells you a workplace pension existed and roughly which employer it belonged to. It is the single most useful free step available to anyone who worked in Britain.

Do all three before you consider paying anybody, including us.

Where the free routes stop

For people who have already left the country, two walls tend to appear.

The first is identity. Almost every national portal requires a national digital identity to log in. DigiD in the Netherlands, MitID in Denmark, itsme in Belgium. If you have emigrated you often cannot obtain one, and frequently cannot keep the one you had. The register exists, it holds your record, and the door will not open.

The second is the trail. The employer that paid you may no longer exist under that name. The scheme may have been sold twice and renamed three times. One case we worked involved a London bank whose pension obligations now sit inside a completely different bank’s fund, in a section named after a business that stopped trading years ago. Following that chain across borders, through registries in languages you may not read, is the actual work.

A closing thought

None of this money is missing. It is sitting in named accounts at regulated providers, in systems that are working exactly as designed. What is missing is the person it belongs to.

The pension is not going anywhere. Neither, unfortunately, is the system that lost track of you. The only variable is whether you go looking.