Unclaimed money in New Zealand
This page sells nothing. Every register below is free to search and free to claim from, and you do it yourself in a few minutes.
What unclaimed money actually is
Money that is already yours, sitting on a list with your name on it, because whoever holds it has no current address or bank account for you. A refund that bounced. A final pay to an account you closed. An amount from an estate nobody could trace you for.
It is not a tax refund. A refund is worked out from a year's income. This is an amount somebody is already holding. You can be owed both, and they are claimed in different places.
There is no arithmetic here and nothing to calculate — it is a lookup. That is why it is not one of our seven checks and never will be.
How to search, in the order worth doing it
1. Inland Revenue
Money IRD is holding for people it cannot find — refunds that bounced, amounts from closed accounts, payments never collected.
How to search: Public search, no login. Type your name; try middle names, maiden names and misspellings.
Deadline: Unclaimed for twenty-five years and it goes to the Crown.
2. The Treasury
Amounts passed to the Crown by companies, banks and other institutions that could not return them to the owner.
How to search: Public list, no login.
3. Public Trust
Money held from estates and trusts where the entitled person was never traced.
How to search: Not searchable online — you ring them and ask.
Phone: 0800 371 471
4. Australian Taxation Office
Superannuation from any work in Australia. The ATO holds a large amount of lost super, and a meaningful share of it belongs to New Zealanders who came home.
How to search: Through myGov, or a paper form if you no longer have Australian login details.
This is the one that can be transferred straight into a KiwiSaver account rather than only claimed.
Search your name properly, or you will miss it
- Try middle names, and your name without them.
- Try maiden and previous surnames. These lists can be decades old.
- Try misspellings — the record holds the name as somebody typed it, not as you write it.
- Try initials only, and the name reversed, if the search allows it.
- Search for relatives who have died. Estate money sits on these lists for years, and the executor is often the only person who can claim it.
Why we will not do this for you
We will not search a register in your name. It would mean handing your details to a third party as if we were you, and this site never acts on anyone's behalf — everything is sent by you, under your own name. What we can do is put every door in one place with the exact thing to type, which is the part nobody else does.
Nobody needs paying for this. If a company offers to find unclaimed money for a percentage, everything they do is on this page for nothing.
While you are here
Unclaimed money is a list you are either on or not. The seven checks on this site are the opposite: money nobody has put on a list, because the amount was never worked out correctly in the first place — holiday pay that was calculated the old way, an ACC levy charged at the wrong classification, KiwiSaver contributions that never landed. Those are free to check too.