British workers have lost track of 3.3m pension pots worth a combined £31.1bn.
That’s according to the Pensions Policy Institute, which says the number has more than doubled since 2018.
These aren't small sums gathering dust.
The average lost pot holds £9,470.
Among people aged 55 to 75, who will need the money soonest, the average is £13,620, enough to buy a 65-year-old roughly £1,000 a year of income for life.
A pot counts as lost when the provider can no longer contact its owner.
In practice, that means a letter came back marked return to sender, usually because somebody moved house years after leaving the job and never thought to tell a pension company they'd forgotten they had.
How do pension pots get lost?
Oddly enough, this is a side effect of a policy success.
Auto-enrolment has brought more than 11m people into workplace pension saving since 2012.
But each new job means a new scheme, so a typical career now leaves a trail of small pots behind it, and each house move is a chance to lose contact with one.
The pandemic-era job churn made things worse.
Research from the pension-tracing firm Raindrop found that 81% of working-age adults aren't sure where all their pots are.
That figure deserves a second read.
Four in five of the people on your payroll probably couldn't account for all their retirement savings, and some of the missing money will have been paid in by an employer just like you.
Why raise it with staff now?
Pensions are about to become far more visible.
The government has just set out the timetable for its pension reforms: workplace schemes will carry public red-to-green ratings from 2028, pots under £1,000 will begin to be consolidated automatically, and pension dashboards should eventually let savers see everything in one place.
All of which means employees are going to start looking at their pensions properly, many for the first time, and plenty will discover that the picture doesn't add up.
The jobs they can remember don't match the pots they can find.
For HR teams, that moment is a gift if you get there first.
Financial worry is one of the most common causes of workplace stress, and most financial wellbeing initiatives involve asking people to do something hard: save more, spend less, sit through a webinar about budgeting.
This is the rare one where the message is that you may already have thousands of pounds you've forgotten about.
It costs the employer nothing, asks nothing of the employee beyond twenty minutes and a list of old jobs, and occasionally ends with someone finding five figures.
How to help employees find lost pensions
The government runs a free Pension Tracing Service at gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details, which turns an old employer's name into the right provider's contact details.
It doesn't tell people how much is in a pot, just where to ask.
It's also worth warning staff off the paid "pension finding" websites that charge for the same thing.
The simplest workplace format is a pot hunt: a short lunchtime session, in person or online, where people write down every job they've held since 2012 and check they can name a pension for each one.
Most people find a gap in minutes.
National Pension Tracing Day falls in late October and gives the comms a ready-made hook, though there's no reason to wait for it.
There's a prevention job too.
New starters should get their scheme name, provider and policy details in writing during onboarding, and leavers should be reminded to note theirs and to update their address with old providers when they move.
It's a line in two emails.
It stops the next generation of pots going missing.
The return on twenty minutes
Nothing else in the financial wellbeing toolkit puts actual money into an employee's hands.
Someone who traces a forgotten £9,000 pot because of a nudge from their employer tends to remember where the nudge came from, and they arrive at the coming era of pension league tables already engaged with their savings, which is precisely what the reforms are trying to achieve.
Written by Caroline Chell
Head of Communications
