My Lost Account: how the free bank account tracing service works

31 August 2026 · Inherit Vault

Your bank hasn't spent your old savings. It just doesn't know where you live. Accounts get classed as lost when the post starts bouncing, and after fifteen years of silence the money can be moved to a fund that spends it on good causes. It's still yours. It stays yours forever.

What My Lost Account actually is

It's a free service run jointly by UK Finance, the Building Societies Association and NS&I, and it lives at mylostaccount.org.uk. One application searches more than seventy providers, including every major bank, UK building societies and NS&I. That covers the old Post Office Savings Bank accounts too. If a firm offers to find your dormant account for a cut of it, they're charging you for a form you can fill in yourself.

Nobody loses your money, they lose you

Banks don't quietly write off forgotten balances. They try to reach you with whatever details they hold. When it's clear you no longer live at the last known address, they stop writing, because posting your account details to a stranger is worse than saying nothing. At that point the account gets classified as lost. The balance sits there. The letters stop.

The fifteen year rule, and why it costs you nothing

After fifteen years with no customer contact, money in a lost account can be transferred to Reclaim Fund Ltd. That's under the Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Act 2008, which the Dormant Assets Act 2022 later widened to more kinds of asset. It sounds alarming and it isn't. Your provider keeps the record, the money remains yours in perpetuity, and it's repaid to you or your legal heirs on a legitimate claim. There's no cut-off after which you've lost it. What you lose is any chance of somebody reminding you it's there.

Do the digging before you touch the form

The search runs on who you were, not who you are now. Write down every address you've lived at, back to childhood, with rough dates. Add any previous surnames. Then go looking for evidence: old passbooks, a statement in a box of paperwork, a building society you joined for the free gift at nineteen. Parents and older siblings are a better archive than you'd think, especially for accounts opened for you as a child.

The one deadline that actually bites

Here's the catch. Providers only have to keep records of closed accounts, where all the money was withdrawn or moved elsewhere, for six years after closure. So if the account was properly closed a decade ago, there may be nothing left to find. Open but forgotten accounts are the ones that survive indefinitely. If you're not sure which yours was, search anyway.

Filling it in

Set up an online profile, then complete the search form. Online is quicker, and it lets you track each provider's response as it lands. If you'd rather use paper, there are three forms and the wrong one wastes weeks: UK Finance for banks, the BSA for building societies, NS&I for NS&I products. Paper takes longer, so use the website if you can.

How long it takes, and what comes back

Expect a response within three months. You'll get an alert each time a bank or building society finishes its search, rather than one answer at the end, so results trickle in. If an account is found, the provider tells you what it needs next, and that always includes proving you're you. Living overseas isn't a blocker, they can explain how to verify your identity without visiting a branch.

If the bank doesn't exist any more

Plenty don't, and the service handles it. Abbey National, Alliance and Leicester, Bradford and Bingley, Birmingham Midshires, Bristol and West, Britannia, Halifax, Northern Rock and Woolwich accounts all sit with banks now. Choose the original provider from the drop-down, the one on your old passbook. The search then follows the trail to whoever holds it today.

If you think the answer is wrong

A nil result isn't automatically the end. You can appeal through the provider's own complaints process, and if that goes nowhere you can refer the complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service. Worth doing if you have real evidence the account existed, a statement or a passbook, rather than a hunch.

Searching on someone else's behalf

You can run several applications from one profile, which is why executors and probate solicitors use it. If the account holder is alive, you need their express authority, or the appropriate legal authority. If they've died, start with their bank directly instead. Their accounts probably aren't classified as lost at all, and that's a different process with its own paperwork.

Then make sure it never happens again

Finding the money is the fun half. The half that matters is making sure nobody has to repeat your afternoon. Tell your bank when you move, and keep telling them, because families lose track of far more than they realise. Do the same sweep for old pensions, which have their own tracing service. Then write down what you found: the provider, roughly what's in it, and where the paperwork lives. Not the passwords, that's a different and worse idea, just the map.

An account only ever gets lost because one person knew about it, moved house, and never wrote it down. You've just spent an afternoon proving how expensive that is. The fix takes ten minutes.

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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