This is free elsewhere. Here is exactly where.

Finding out which schemes you might be in

The government runs a free tracing service. It is at gov.uk, it is called Find pension contact details, and it gives you the current contact details for a scheme if you can name the employer or the provider. 834,000 people used it in 2025. It costs nothing and it is good at what it does. Use it: gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details.

Finding out which employers you had

HMRC holds your employment record and must give it to you free of charge. You can ask for it as a subject access request under data protection law; there is no fee and the law gives HMRC a month to answer. Your last five years are already visible in the HMRC app and your Personal Tax Account, again free: gov.uk/personal-tax-account. You do not need us for any of this.

Letters to send

MoneyHelper, the government’s own money guidance service, publishes free letter templates for tracing a pension — one to write to an old employer, one to write to a provider. They are Word documents, they are free to download, and you should download them: moneyhelper.org.uk. If they do what you need, stop reading and stop here. We would rather you did that than paid us for something you did not need.

Free tracing from pension companies

Several pension companies will trace your old pensions for nothing. They are competent and they are quick. They are paid a percentage of your money every year once it is moved to them. That is not a criticism; it is simply how they are funded, and they are open about it.

So what are you paying us for

One thing. The seven questions, put in writing, to every scheme you were ever in, before anybody moves anything.

The free letters ask whether a pension exists. They are tracing letters, and tracing is the easy half. Nobody’s free letter asks what the exit penalty is, whether there is a guaranteed annuity rate, whether the retirement age is protected, or what happens to it when you die — because the companies funding free tracing are funded by the transfer, and those four answers are the four most likely to stop one. That is not a conspiracy. It is just what happens when a service is free because someone else is paying for it.

We are paid by you, once, and by nobody else ever. So we can put those questions in the post.

What you do not get, and cannot get from us, is any opinion about what the answers mean. We are not authorised to advise on investments and we will not do it informally. We will not tell you whether a pension is good or bad, whether to move it, or who to move it to. When the answers arrive, you will hold a set of facts about your own money. What you do with them is for you, or for a regulated adviser, or for the free guidance service at MoneyHelper, which is genuinely free and genuinely good.

Correct as at 17 September 2026. What we will never do.