More than $1 billion in retirement checks owed to Americans are sitting unclaimed — and 19 state financial officers are pushing President Donald Trump to fix the broken system keeping that money out of retirees’ hands.
North Dakota Treasurer Tom Beadle told the Daily Caller News Foundation the amount of uncashed retirement checks is growing by roughly $100 million each year. He joined officials from 18 other states urging Trump to give state unclaimed-property programs a larger role in returning retirement benefits to people who can’t be located.
“We’re talking about over a billion dollars in uncashed retirement checks that are sitting out there. And that number is growing by about $100 million a year.”
The problem starts when a retiree moves, changes an address, or loses contact with the company administering their retirement plan. A plan may send a distribution check to the last address on file — but if the recipient never receives or cashes it, the money remains outstanding indefinitely.
The Department of Labor acknowledges retirement plans lose track of people because of outdated contact information and incomplete records. Since 2017, the department’s enforcement efforts have recovered more than $7 billion in retirement benefits for missing participants and beneficiaries.
Beadle explained the scope: “What we’re talking about is money that’s already been distributed. The check’s been cut. It just hasn’t been cashed.”
The Labor Department announced a policy in January 2025 allowing retirement-plan administrators to transfer benefit payments worth $1,000 or less to state unclaimed-property funds when they can’t locate the person owed the money. The guidance requires participating state programs to maintain searchable databases, permit electronic claims, search for updated addresses, and hold the money without reducing it through fees.
But Beadle said the $1,000 cap means the policy reaches only about 28% of the missing retirement checks.
“The big thing we’re advocating for is remove that $1,000 cap,” Beadle told the DCNF.
State officials argued they already operate systems specifically designed to reunite Americans with forgotten money. North Dakota’s Unclaimed Property Division returned more than $23 million through 43,653 claims during the state’s 2023-2025 biennium.
The division participates in the States’ Unclaimed Retirement Clearing House — a collaboration involving state treasurers, unclaimed-property administrators, and the Department of Labor designed to facilitate state collection of unclaimed private-sector retirement checks.
North Dakota has gone even further with other forms of unclaimed money. A state law approved by the legislature allowed the Department of Trust Lands’ Unclaimed Property Division to automatically return certain single-owner properties worth up to $1,000 after verifying the owner’s identity and current address — mailing residents their money without requiring them to file a claim first.
The issue could become more pressing as millions of older Americans enter retirement and begin drawing down workplace retirement accounts. The Department of Labor has specifically identified people who reach normal retirement age or the required-minimum-distribution age without claiming benefits as a potential warning sign for plans trying to locate missing participants.
Federal regulators have wrestled with the issue for years. A Labor Department advisory council examined transferring uncashed retirement checks to state programs in 2019 and concluded state unclaimed-property funds have features that may make it more likely missing participants are reunited with their retirement savings.
The Labor Department also launched a federal Retirement Savings Lost and Found database following passage of the SECURE 2.0 Act. The agency said missing participants can go without benefits they earned while retirement plans spend resources attempting to locate them.
Beadle and the other state officials want the Trump administration to build on those efforts by making state programs a more prominent destination for unclaimed retirement payments and expanding the amount that can be transferred.
For Beadle, the proposal is less about creating a new government program than using systems states already operate to get existing money back into retirees’ hands.
“This is their money,” Beadle told the DCNF. “We just want to get it back to them.”
