Kirsty Taylor, 34, a team supervisor from Hartlepool, discovered a pension worth almost £60,000 that belonged to her late father – a policy her family had no idea existed.
Kirsty recalls finding paperwork for a few small pension pots for her father when she cleared out his flat shortly after he passed away in May 2024. He had spent a number of years living abroad, so she had no idea that he had any pensions of significant value and was only inspired to start searching after reading a newsletter from Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert website.
How the search uncovered the pension
Kirsty used a free pensions tracing service called Gretel as she was unsure of the names of her father’s previous employers. Gretel works by running a ‘soft search’ on your credit report to find any previous addresses, before then using this data to find missing pensions. You can choose to add more information such as your National Insurance number and any previous names you went by to improve your search results. In Kirsty’s case she had legal authority to add a relative as a third party.
She said: “I didn’t think anything of it at first – I thought if anything is found, then it's a bonus. We got a match in April 2025, but due to the circumstances around his death, we had to wait for a full death certificate to be released. That became available earlier this year and that's when I was able to get the details for me to follow up with the pensions company. It was a very pleasant surprise. I was in complete shock, and obviously, I was waiting for a long time because I didn't know how much it was going to be worth.”
The value of the discovered pension
The total amount she uncovered from her father’s pension was £58,576.29, which worked out at £19,525.43 each for Kirsty and her two siblings. Kirsty said: “It was a couple of weeks into the process, that they told me the amount that it was worth. I'd never actually seen that figure written down. I thought I'm not going to believe this until I actually see it. When we did actually receive that amount of money, I was like, oh my goodness – wow.”
Kirsty had no idea it is possible to track down the pension of a loved one and she isn’t alone. It’s estimated that there are 3.3million lost pension pots in the UK, worth a combined total of £31.1billion.
Advice on tracing lost pensions
Some of the most common reasons why pension pots become lost or forgotten include changing jobs often, or not updating your paperwork when you change address. If you know the name of your previous employer, there is also a free Government Pension Tracing Service that helps you find lost pension pots.
Millions of people will also soon have access to a new Government pensions dashboard, which will show all your pension pots in one place. All pension providers and schemes in scope of the legislation must be connected to the dashboard by October 31, 2026. However, the service is not expected to be made available to the public until 2027 or 2028.
Duncan Stevens, CEO of Gretel, said: “Our data shows that people searching on behalf of someone else typically uncover more than twice as much as those searching for themselves. For anyone administering an estate – or helping to manage the finances of a vulnerable relative – checking for lost assets should therefore be an important part of the process.”
Helen Morrissey, head of retirement analysis at Hargreaves Lansdown, added: “Taking steps, such as making sure that you haven’t lost track of an old pension, are important. As we move between different jobs, it can be easy to lose track. Once you’ve tracked down all your pensions then it might make sense to consolidate them. Having one overarching view will give you a better sense of what you have, and save you time, admin and potentially money. Just make sure that you aren’t incurring exit fees or missing out on valuable benefits such as guaranteed annuity rates by consolidating before you do so. It also rarely makes sense to transfer a final salary pension.”
