How do I find a lost pension?

Contacting your old employer or HR department to give you information on your old workplace pension, or checking old pay slips is a simple way of determining whether or not you had a workplace pension at your previous employment. 

MyPension offers a free pension tracing service to help locate your lost pensions, so sign-up today and we can help provide you with necessary arrangements to help locate lost pensions.

The first steps to finding your lost pension are:

• Sign-up to MyPension. Here, you will input some basic details such as name, date of birth, address, etc.
• We will then issue a Transfer of Agency (TOA) document that will require a signature (you can do this online during the sign-up process). The TOA provides us with permission to obtain records from the life companies regarding your pension(s).

That’s all we initially need to start searching. We right to the pension providers and request that they send us your pension details for any and all that they have for you.

If nothing comes back, it might be that the pension was under a different name (such as maiden name), or a previous address, so we might look to find out more specific information to look further into where your pension(s) might be. It’s also worth contacting your old employer or HR department to give you information on your old workplace pension, or checking old pay slips.

The more information you give us, the easier it will be to locate, such as previous employment, etc.

We wouldn’t necessarily advise you to combine all pensions into one pot, as MyPension allows you the visibility and flexibility of seeing all pensions in one place without the need to combine; however, you might want to switch your pension plan(s), dependant on benefits and performance, as well as attitude to risk and other factors our Financial Advisors can talk you through.

To see if you should switch, contact one of our Financial Advisors, today.

In general, your pension will still exist, but if you don’t locate your pension you won’t be able to access it. On death, pensions go to your estate; however, again, if your pension is not located, your estate will not know about it and it will remained un-accessed. It’s estimated that approximately €500m in pension benefits go unclaimed in Ireland. 

Yes, MyPension.ie allows you to view all your pensions in one place. This is particularly useful as you can gain access to your pension balance 24/7, as well as policy information (providers, number, amounts, etc.). You can also manage your pensions with helpful features such as switching pension plans, accessing withdrawals and use our useful tools such as our pension calculator to ensure you’re on track to reach your retirement goals.