You could have hundreds or even thousands in cash and not even know it.
That’s because 1 in 7 people have unclaimed funds in the United States, according to the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (NAUPA). More than $4 billion in missing money got returned back to its owners in 2024.
“These are things that they completely forgot about” from five to 20 years ago, said Darrin Wilson, associate professor of public administration at Northern Kentucky University and a co-author of an academic paper about how states manage unclaimed property.
The lost money is typically from uncashed checks, insurance policies, investments, utility deposits, old bank accounts or unused gift cards, and often it’s because you moved or someone died with accounts that named you as a beneficiary.
Sometimes, it might just be a few dollars in lost money, but sometimes this money could be “life-changing,” said Meaghan Aguirre, director of unclaimed property at Nebraska State Treasurer’s Office and vice president of NAUPA.
“We’ve had stories where people will reach out to us after the fact, just thanking us, because they were on the verge of losing their homes or being evicted from their apartments,” Aguirre said. That’s why she calls the unclaimed property program the “greatest consumer protection program out there.”
“So many people, when they have unclaimed property, it’s because it’s money that they didn’t know they had that was due to them,” she said.
Why Tons Of Money Every Year Goes Unclaimed
Your money doesn’t suddenly get lost. Usually, the business or financial institution will try to contact you first about the money it owes you.
“It could be a case where a company loses contact with you. They attempt to mail a check or maybe a statement related to an account, and [these statements] come back as undeliverable or ‘unable to forward’ and that sort of thing,” Aguirre said. Over time, “that money then becomes dormant and reported to the state.”
“It’s not just funds that go unclaimed. In a past job as a policy analyst for Kentucky’s state treasury department, Wilson said he saw tangible items get reported as unclaimed, too, like war medals, handguns, or “things that you might see in a safe deposit box at a bank.”
How To Check If You Have Unclaimed Funds
Every state maintains their own online database of unclaimed property. Both Wilson and Aguirre said people should be looking up to see if they have unclaimed funds at least once a year.
Take it from Wilson: He said he recovered around $200 from one state, and $20 from another state this year in unclaimed funds from over a decade ago.
“I usually check every year, and I guess those assets happened to be turned over to the respective states by this year, so that they finally popped up in the database.”
One was from a local hospital in Tennessee: “I must have overpaid for medical services, and then didn’t realize that,” he said.
You, too, can have this happy surprise if you regularly search for unclaimed funds online.
One of the easiest ways to search is to go missingmoney.com, which is a free website endorsed by NAUPA where you can look up your name in almost every state’s unclaimed property directory. This way, you can search for unclaimed funds for multiple states at once.
If you suspect your old job owes you money, you can also search the Department of Labor’s database for back pay this employer might owe you.
If you think you have a qualifying claim, you might be asked to provide documentation like proof of address to recoup your money. Or in some states, you might not need to prove anything at all for smaller claims. States like New York and North Carolina are simply sending people with qualifying claims of $250 or less a check.
Keep in mind that by the time you get reunited with your lost property, you might not get the exact item you lost, but the cash value of the asset.
That’s because “each state has a different policy on at what point they can liquidate that asset into cash,” Wilson explained. “So they may hold onto a tangible product or an item for X amount of years until they sell it, usually through eBay or some type of other online marketplace mechanism to get cash, and then that they’ll hold the cash for the person.”
Wilson noted that people 65 and older are the demographic that tend to have the most unclaimed funds, because they have worked longer and used banks longer so there’s “more time for things to get lost or forgotten.” He said that after a family member dies, you should look up to see if they have unclaimed property ASAP, because these kinds of funds get much harder to get back after the probate process closes.
“Once a year, go to missing money.com,” he said. “Check your name, check your relatives or family members’ names into the database, and see if anybody has any unclaimed property in a place that you used to live.”
So go right now and check to see if any version of your name shows up in an unclaimed funds database. There just might be an unexpected windfall waiting for you.
