₹86,917 crore is sitting unclaimed. Some of it may be yours.

How money ends up unclaimed

A savings or current account that sees no activity for ten years, or a fixed deposit nobody claims for ten years after it matures, becomes an unclaimed deposit. The bank transfers the balance to the Reserve Bank's Depositor Education and Awareness (DEA) Fund.

As on 30 June 2026, that fund held ₹86,917 crore — a figure the Minister of State for Finance gave to Parliament in August 2026. State Bank of India alone accounts for ₹20,040 crore of it, followed by Punjab National Bank at ₹7,585 crore, Canara Bank at ₹6,830 crore, Bank of Baroda at ₹5,848 crore and Union Bank at ₹5,549 crore. Among private banks, ICICI holds ₹2,278 crore, HDFC ₹1,912 crore and Axis ₹1,734 crore.

Insurance is a separate pile. Around ₹8,974 crore lay unclaimed with life and general insurers as on 28 February 2026. Unclaimed policy amounts older than ten years are moved to the Senior Citizens' Welfare Fund, where beneficiaries still have up to twenty-five years to claim.

None of this is money anyone took. It is money nobody knew to ask for — almost always because the one person who knew the account existed is no longer here to mention it.

Where to search

1. UDGAM — unclaimed bank deposits

The RBI's centralised search, at udgam.rbi.org.in. It covers 30 banks accounting for roughly 90% of the DEA Fund, and had over 20 lakh registered users and 44 lakh searches by April 2026.

You register with a mobile number, then search by name and, optionally, PAN, Aadhaar, voter ID, driving licence or date of birth. It tells you which bank holds something under that name. You then claim from that branch directly.

2. MITRA — inactive mutual fund folios

SEBI introduced the Mutual Fund Investment Tracing and Retrieval Assistant by circular dated 12 February 2025. It is run by the registrars and transfer agents and searches industry-wide for folios that hold units but have seen no investor-initiated transaction for ten years.

This category is easy to accumulate without noticing: a folio opened with an old PAN, no registered email, an address three moves ago.

3. IEPF — unclaimed shares and dividends

When dividends go unclaimed for seven years, the shares and the dividends are transferred to the Investor Education and Protection Fund. The IEPF Authority runs a search and a claim process to get them back. Physical share certificates from decades ago are the classic case.

4. unclaimedassetsportal.in — the common starting point

Launched on 29 May 2026 by the Department of Financial Services under the आपकी पूँजी, आपका अधिकार campaign, developed with the PSB Alliance.

One honest caveat: it is a landing page, not a merged database. It routes you to the right regulator's platform depending on what you are looking for. That is genuinely useful as a front door, but a single search across your whole financial life still does not exist in India.

How to actually do this

Set aside thirty minutes.

• Make a list of names. Yours, including maiden names and any spelling a bank might have recorded differently. Then your parents'. Then your grandparents' if the family held anything in their name.
• Keep identifiers handy. PAN and date of birth get you furthest. Aadhaar, voter ID and driving licence also work on UDGAM.
• Search each portal in turn. They do not talk to each other, so a clean result on one says nothing about the others.
• Write down what you find, including the nothings. A record that you checked and found nothing is worth keeping — it saves the next person repeating it.

If you find something

The portal only tells you an asset exists. Claiming it is a separate process with the institution holding it, and what you need depends on whether the account holder is alive.

If they are, it is usually straightforward: identity proof, a KYC update and a claim form. If they have died, you are into transmission, and the documents required will depend on whether there is a nomination, a will, or neither — which is where the difference between a nominee and a legal heir starts to matter, and sometimes where a succession certificate becomes necessary.

The part the portals cannot solve

Every one of these tools is a search interface. Each assumes somebody already suspects an asset exists and knows roughly which category it falls in.

Now think about who actually needs them: a widow who never handled the investments, a son in another city going through a cupboard, someone who has no idea whether their father held mutual funds at all. They are not searching, because they do not know what to search for.

The fix sits earlier than any portal. Somebody has to write down what exists while they still can, and make sure one other person knows the list is there. That is a thirty-minute job that no regulator can do for you — here is what to put on the list.