Most people in Ireland change jobs several times before they retire. Each job with a pension scheme can leave a pension pot behind, and the letters stop once you move house or change your email address. The money is still yours.
If you were in an employer’s scheme for at least two years before you left, you have a preserved benefit in that scheme. A Personal Retirement Savings Account (PRSA) or a personal pension from a broker can also be sitting with a life company without you seeing a statement.
Below: how to trace a pension yourself, what to do when the employer has closed, how to find a UK pension, and what to do with it once it turns up. If you would rather hand it over, a senior advisor does the tracing with you.
What happens to a pension when you leave a job in Ireland?
Your pension does not leave with you, and it does not disappear. Under the Pensions Act, a member who leaves an occupational scheme with at least two years’ service is entitled to a preserved benefit, paid from the scheme’s normal retirement age. With less than two years, the scheme rules decide between a refund of your own contributions and a transfer.
The Pensions Authority lists three routes on leaving: leave the benefit where it is, transfer it to your new arrangement, or take a refund in limited cases. Most people take the first route by doing nothing, which is how a pension gets lost.
How do I know if I have a lost pension?
You may have a forgotten pension if any of these apply:
- A payslip in a past job showed a deduction marked pension, superannuation, PRSA or AVC (Additional Voluntary Contribution).
- You paid into a personal pension or a PRSA through a broker or a bank and stopped when money got tight.
- You worked in the UK for more than a year and were enrolled in a workplace pension there.
My Future Fund, the State auto-enrolment scheme that started on 1 January 2026, covers employees aged 23 to 60 earning over €20,000 with no workplace scheme. It does not reach back, so a job you left in 2015 still needs tracing the old way. If you have no pension at all, starting a pension is the page you want.
How do I trace an old pension in Ireland step by step?
There is no single national pension finder in Ireland. Tracing means working through the people who might hold a record of you, starting with the ones most likely to answer quickly.
Step 1: Gather what you know
For every job with a possible pension, write down:
- The employer’s legal and trading names and the address you worked at.
- Your start and finish dates, even roughly.
- Your PPS number, which every Irish scheme record is keyed to.
- Old payslips, P60s or P45s, which often name the scheme or show the deduction.
- Any letter or statement naming the scheme, the trustees or the administrator.
- The life company, if it was a PRSA or a personal pension.
- Your National Insurance number for any UK job.
If you cannot remember your dates, the Employment Detail Summary in Revenue’s myAccount lists each employment for recent tax years.
Step 2: Hand it to us
That is your part done. With a signed letter of authority, we do the searching for you and come back with the statement, the value and your options. Here is what we do on your behalf:
- We ask the old employer’s HR or payroll whether you were a member of the scheme, what it is called and who administers it now. Employers change administrators, so the name in an old booklet is often out of date.
- We go to the scheme’s trustees and registered administrator, who keep the member records. Deferred members are entitled to a benefit statement each year, so we ask for your current statement, your transfer value and your options.
- For a PRSA, a personal pension, a Personal Retirement Bond (PRB) or an executive pension, the record sits with the life company, so we ask each likely company to search under your PPS number and date of birth.
- If the employer and the administrator both draw a blank, we raise an enquiry with the Pensions Authority, which regulates every occupational scheme, giving the employer’s name, the years you worked there and the scheme name if we have it.
- We put every request in writing with your PPS number, which gets answered faster than a phone query, and we keep the log of who was asked and when.
Let us find it for you.
An employer name and rough dates are enough. We trace the scheme and show you your options.
What if the employer no longer exists?
An employer closing does not close the pension scheme. Scheme assets are held in trust, separate from the company, so a liquidation or a dissolution does not take your pension with it. The trustees, or their administrator, still hold the records, and a scheme that was wound up will have moved each member’s benefit into a PRB, a PRSA or another scheme.
We start with the Companies Registration Office (CRO), whose register shows the company’s status, such as normal, dissolved or ceased, and whether it was taken over, renamed or wound up; the filed documents can name the liquidator. From there we go to the trustees, the administrator or the Pensions Authority for the records, as above.
How do I find a UK pension from when I worked in Britain?
Paul worked in Manchester from 2009 to 2014 and was enrolled in his employer’s workplace pension. He is Irish tax resident now. We use the UK government’s Find pension contact details service, which gives the contact details for a workplace or personal pension from the name of the employer or the provider. It does not say whether a pension exists or what it is worth, so we then write to the scheme with Paul’s National Insurance number and dates of employment.
Paul can then leave the pension in the UK or transfer it to an Irish scheme that HM Revenue and Customs recognises as a Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Scheme (QROPS). The UK State Pension cannot be transferred. Our page on transferring a UK pension to Ireland covers the overseas transfer charge and the tax residence condition.
Where can a lost pension be and who do we contact?
| Type of pension | Where the record is | Who we contact | What we ask for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Occupational (company) scheme | The trustees and the registered administrator | The employer, then the administrator | Benefit statement, transfer value, options |
| PRSA | The PRSA provider (a life company) | The provider; the Pensions Authority’s PRSA register lists them | Current statement and charges |
| Personal pension (retirement annuity contract) | The life company that issued the policy | The life company or the broker who set it up | Policy number, value, charges, retirement age |
| Personal Retirement Bond (buy-out bond) | The life company the old trustees chose | The life company, or the old administrator to find out which | Policy details and retirement options |
| AVCs | Inside the main scheme, or with a separate AVC provider | The main scheme’s administrator, then the AVC provider | Whether the fund is inside the scheme or standalone, and its value |
| UK workplace or personal pension | The UK scheme or provider | gov.uk Find pension contact details, then the scheme | Membership, value, and whether a QROPS transfer is allowed |
What is a pension from an old job worth today?
Sinéad left a job in 2011 with €8,000 in the company scheme and never looked at it again. At an illustrative growth rate of 5% a year before charges, that €8,000 would be about €16,600 after 15 years. With a 1% annual management charge, so 4% a year net, it would be about €14,400, and about €21,300 if it stays invested until she is 66, ten years from now.
Those are illustrations, not projections for any fund. The value of your investment may go down as well as up. A pension left in a cash fund since 2011 could be worth less than she paid in after charges. Our pension calculator shows what a traced fund plus your current contributions could give you at 66.
What can I do with a traced pension?
You then have four routes:
- Leave it where it is. Sensible if the charges are low and the fund suits you, less so if nobody has reviewed the default fund since you left.
- Transfer it to your current employer’s scheme, if it accepts transfers in. A transfer must move the whole benefit.
- Move it to a Personal Retirement Bond, a policy in your own name that the trustees buy to replace your entitlement in the scheme. You choose the funds and the provider.
- Move it to a PRSA, allowed where you are changing employment or the scheme is being wound up, and at any time for the AVC portion.
A defined benefit pension should not be transferred without advice, because you would be giving up a guaranteed income. Our pension review and transfer page compares the four routes, and the private pension, PRSA and AVC pages cover the products you might move into.
Can I cash in a lost pension?
You cannot take cash before retirement age, except on ill health. An occupational scheme can pay benefits from age 50 if you have left that employment. A PRSA or a personal pension pays from 60. At that point you can normally take 25% of the fund as a lump sum, tax free up to €200,000 across all your pensions, with the next €300,000 taxed at 20%. The rest can buy an annuity or go into an Approved Retirement Fund (ARF).
