How to find and claim a deceased person’s bank accounts (UK)
28 August 2026 · Inherit Vault
When someone dies, their bank accounts don't announce themselves. There is no central register an executor can query, no automatic letter from every bank. If the person didn't leave a list, the family is left searching, and the searching is why an estimated £50 billion sits unclaimed across the UK. Here's how to do it properly.
Start with the paper, then the post
Go through bank statements, cheque books, cards in the wallet, and anything filed. Then watch the post for a full year: annual statements, interest certificates and renewal notices will surface accounts nobody mentioned. Emails matter as much now, if you can lawfully access them. Look for payments out to savings accounts and investment platforms, and interest payments in.
My Lost Account: the free tracing service
For bank and savings accounts, use My Lost Account. It's the free service run jointly by UK Finance, the Building Societies Association and NS&I, and it searches banks, building societies and National Savings in one application. An executor applies with the death certificate and proof of their authority. It typically takes up to 12 weeks to hear back. It's free: anyone charging you to "find lost accounts" is charging you for what this service does for nothing.
Pensions and investments have their own doors
The Pension Tracing Service (also free, on GOV.UK) finds the contact details of workplace and personal pension schemes, but you need to know the employer or provider name, which is exactly what a career's worth of job changes obscures. For shares and dividends, the registrars (Equiniti, Computershare, MUFG Corporate Markets) can search their own registers. The Unclaimed Assets Register is a commercial search that covers some insurance policies and investments for a small fee.
What unlocks the money once you find it
The death certificate gets you into the conversation; authority gets the money released. For balances under each bank's own threshold (roughly £5,000 to £50,000 depending on the bank), a death certificate and a signed indemnity is usually enough. Above that, the bank waits for the grant of probate or letters of administration. Found money also changes the tax picture: the executor must add it to the estate's inheritance tax account, even if the account turns up after the forms went in.
Dormant accounts are never lost for good
If an account sits untouched for 15 years, banks can transfer the balance into the government-backed Dormant Assets Scheme, where it funds good causes. The crucial point: the owner's (or their estate's) right to reclaim is preserved forever. Reclaims go through the original bank via My Lost Account. So even an account from 1987 is claimable, once you know it existed.
The honest arithmetic
Every step above works. Together they still miss things, because they all depend on knowing roughly where to look. A tracing service can't search a bank you never name. The average lost pension pot alone is worth around £9,470, and there are over three million of them. The reliable fix isn't better searching after a death, it's a complete list before one.
That list is what your executor actually needs from you: every account, provider, and rough balance, kept current, found easily when it matters. Leave your family a map, not a search.
Read next
Once an account is found, how the freeze and release process works. Joint accounts never needed finding, but their tax treatment surprises people: joint bank accounts when someone dies. The full overview is in what happens to bank accounts when someone dies.
Sources
My Lost Account, the free bank/building society/NS&I tracing service: https://www.mylostaccount.org.uk/ GOV.UK, Pension Tracing Service: https://www.gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details Dormant Assets Scheme, right to reclaim preserved: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dormant-assets-scheme GOV.UK, dealing with the estate: https://www.gov.uk/probate-estate Pensions Policy Institute, Lost Pensions research: https://www.pensionspolicyinstitute.org.uk/
Leave your family a map, not a mystery.
Inherit Vault is a digital inheritance vault: every account, policy, and instruction your family will need, encrypted so only you can read it, released to your executor when it genuinely matters.
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