How to check for unclaimed money in India (4 official portals, free)

India doesn't have one single unclaimed-money portal — it has four, run by four different regulators, and most people have never heard of any of them. All four are free, official, and take a name and a few details to search. Here's exactly where to look.

Bank deposits — RBI's UDGAM portal

UDGAM (udgam.rbi.org.in) lets you search unclaimed deposits across multiple participating banks in one place — accounts that have sat inactive for ten years or more. As of the RBI's most recent figures, roughly ₹86,917 crore sits unclaimed this way. You'll need basic identifying details; the portal walks you through it bank by bank.

Shares & dividends — IEPF

The Investor Education & Protection Fund (iepf.gov.in) holds shares and dividends transferred to it after seven consecutive years of being unclaimed — close to ₹89,000 crore at last count. If a family member ever held stock directly or through mutual funds, this is worth checking by name.

Provident fund — EPFO Member Portal

EPFO's member portal (unifiedportal-mem.epfindia.gov.in) shows your passbook and balance for every UAN you've ever had — the most common way people rediscover a PF account from a job they left years ago. You'll need your UAN and registered mobile number; over 30.9 lakh accounts sit inoperative nationally, holding roughly ₹9,330 crore between them.

Life insurance — insurer-by-insurer

There's no single unified portal here. LIC — India's largest insurer — has its own "Unclaimed Amounts of Policyholders" search under Customer Services (licindia.in). If a family member held policies with other insurers, check that insurer's own site for the same kind of list. Insurers are collectively sitting on ₹21,718 crore in unclaimed policyholder money, much of it from policies families never even knew existed.

The part that actually prevents this next time

Checking is a one-time recovery. It doesn't stop the same thing happening to the next account you open. A few services in India now offer to search on your behalf for a fee — useful if you'd rather not do the legwork yourself, but it's solving the same problem after the fact, again. The other option is not needing to search at all: keep a running, encrypted record of every account, policy, and holding as you open it, so nothing sits unclaimed for seven years in the first place. That's the specific job Vaultherit's Investments and Insurance record types do — see how that compares to India's unclaimed-asset and digital-legacy services on the India section of the full comparison page.

All four portals, with direct links and what you'll need for each, are also on the Unclaimed Money Checker — free, no signup.