Educational, not advice. This article explains how Child Trust Funds work at maturity and how the free tracing service operates. It is general information, not personal financial advice. Savvy Investor Guide is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Nothing here tells you what to do with the money once you have found it.
What this article covers: who has a Child Trust Fund, how to trace one for free and what the service will and will not tell you, what happens to money nobody claims, whether there is any deadline, how a transfer into an ISA is treated against your annual allowance, and what the firms charging to find your account are actually selling.
What it does not cover: what to do with the money once you have it, or which account to move it into. It covers the United Kingdom only.
In short
- 760,000 matured Child Trust Funds are sitting unclaimed, according to the FCA on 1 September 2026. If you were born between 1 September 2002 and 2 January 2011, one of them may be yours.
- Finding it is free, needs no account and takes about ten minutes. HMRC’s own service says so on its front page.
- The service tells you who your provider is, not what is in the account. That surprises people, and it is stated plainly on the form.
- There is no deadline. An unclaimed account becomes a protected account on your 18th birthday and stays there until you do something with it.
- The money keeps its tax-free status and moving it into an ISA does not use up your £20,000 annual allowance.
- The average unclaimed account holds £1,980. The average account people do claim holds £3,203. Those are both HMRC’s figures, and the gap between them says something.
- One firm charged 25% plus VAT, capped at £420, for the free search. The Advertising Standards Authority banned its adverts in May 2025.
On 1 September the Financial Conduct Authority put out a press release with a number in it: 760,000 matured Child Trust Funds, worth an average of £2,000 each, remain unclaimed.
The advice attached to it is sound. The interesting part sits underneath the headline: which £2,000 that actually is, why the pile of unclaimed Child Trust Funds keeps growing, and why an entirely free ten-minute search has a small industry built around charging for it.
Who has one, and why they have forgotten
Child Trust Funds were opened for children born between 1 September 2002 and 2 January 2011. The government paid in a voucher, usually £250 and sometimes £500, and parents and relatives could add to it. The scheme closed to new accounts in January 2011 and was replaced by the Junior ISA.
Which means the whole thing was set up by adults, for babies, and in many cases the babies were never told. The account was opened in the child’s name at a provider the parents chose, possibly two house moves and one bank merger ago. The oldest children in the scheme turned 18 in September 2020. Every month since, another cohort has aged into an account they may know nothing about.
That is why the unclaimed pile grows rather than shrinks. Nobody is stubbornly refusing to collect. New eighteen-year-olds simply arrive faster than old ones claim.
The number, and which number it actually is
Here is where it pays to read the statistics rather than the headline. HMRC publishes three different average values for Child Trust Funds, and they are not interchangeable. From its Annual savings statistics, on a 5 April 2025 basis:
| Which accounts | Average market value |
|---|---|
| All Child Trust Funds | £2,242 |
| Matured accounts that were claimed or moved to an ISA | £3,203 |
| Matured accounts still sitting there unclaimed | £1,980 |
So the FCA’s “£2,000 each” is not a rounding of the £2,242 figure you will see quoted elsewhere, and it is not evidence that values have fallen. It is the unclaimed cohort, £1,980, rounded up. The FCA is quoting the right number for the group it is talking about.
The comparison in that table is the part worth sitting with. The accounts people do claim are worth about 62% more than the ones left behind. HMRC does not explain why, and neither will I, because there is more than one honest reading. Bigger accounts may be easier for the family that funded them to remember. A provider may try harder to reach a larger balance. People who know they have money may simply be the people who go and get it. Either way, the unclaimed pile is not made up of trivial sums. £1,980 is the average of what is being left.
For scale, HMRC’s same release records that around 3,043,000 accounts had matured between September 2020 and April 2025, of which around 2,285,000 had been claimed or automatically transferred to an ISA, leaving around 758,000 matured accounts still running as Child Trust Funds. That is roughly one in four of everything that has matured, still untouched.
Find a lost Child Trust Fund free in about ten minutes
The route is Ask HMRC to find a Child Trust Fund provider on GOV.UK. Three things about it catch people out.
You do not need an account or a login. There is no Government Gateway step and no sign-in wall. You go straight into the questions. The service’s own front page puts the average completion time at about ten minutes.
It tells you who holds the money, not how much there is. HMRC states this on the form itself, in one flat sentence: “We cannot tell you how much is in the Child Trust Fund.” You get the provider’s name. You then go to the provider for the balance. If you were expecting to see a balance, this is the step that disappoints.
You cannot save your progress. GOV.UK’s guidance is explicit: “You’ll need to complete the form in one go – you cannot save and return to it.” Ten minutes, one sitting.
The first question asks which of three describes you: aged 16 or over and looking for your own fund, a parent or guardian looking for a child’s, or other. If you are searching for yourself you need your National Insurance number. If you are a parent or guardian searching for a child, you need the child’s full name, address and date of birth, plus any previous names and adoption details where they apply.
On timing, GOV.UK says: “You’ll usually get this within 3 weeks of HMRC getting your request, if you apply online. Postal applications will take longer.” If nothing arrives within six weeks you can write to HMRC, quoting your reference number.
There is a second free route. The Share Foundation, a charity, runs a finder tool for anyone aged 16 or over, describing it as “a simple FREE online search tool for young people aged 16+ to help locate their account” and as “free of charge and supported by HMRC and the tracing group CTF register”. The same charity has a separate statutory job managing Child Trust Funds for children in local authority care, which it has done for the Department for Education since October 2017. Those are two different things and it is easy to conflate them: the finder is open to everybody, the account management is specific to looked-after children.
What happens to an unclaimed Child Trust Fund
Nothing dramatic, which is the reassuring answer and also part of the reason the pile is so large. There is no cliff edge to concentrate anyone’s mind.
The National Audit Office set out the mechanics in its 2023 investigation into Child Trust Funds:
The account holder can choose to take over managing the account at 16 years old and can access the funds at 18 years old. At this point, legal ownership of the CTF transfers to the account holder and the account becomes a protected account. No further payments can be made into the account, but interest and gains on investments continue to accrue.
National Audit Office, March 2023
And on how long that state lasts, the NAO is equally plain: the matured accounts “remain in this state until the account holder withdraws the funds or instructs the CTF provider to transfer the funds to another account”.
The protected account is not an informal arrangement. The FCA requires it. Its guidance on maturing dormant Child Trust Fund accounts says that where a provider has had no instructions, it “is required to transfer the investments held within the CTF to a ‘protected account’ on the 18th birthday of the account holder”, and that in that account “the investments should be treated as if they had remained in the CTF account”. The stated purpose is to make sure the money keeps its tax advantages.
Two consequences follow. The interest or investment growth carries on. And the tax-free treatment survives maturity with no expiry attached to it.
A Child Trust Fund transfer does not use your ISA allowance
This one causes real confusion, because a transfer that looks like a £2,000 deposit ought, intuitively, to eat £2,000 of a £20,000 annual ISA allowance. It does not.
The rule sits in the Individual Savings Account Regulations 1998, at regulation 5DZA, and it is unambiguous: a transfer of this kind “is to be disregarded for the purposes of the overall subscription limit”. Your annual allowance is untouched by moving a matured Child Trust Fund across.
The same regulation confirms the other half of the picture: “No further subscription may be made to the CTF matured account.” Money can come out or move across. Nothing new goes in.
That is the position for a standard adult ISA, which is what almost everyone in this situation is dealing with. Lifetime ISAs have a separate £4,000 annual limit and their own rules. No primary source was available to settle how a Child Trust Fund transfer is treated against that limit, so this article does not say.
Is there a deadline? No, and no dormant-assets sweep
Nothing in GOV.UK’s guidance, the FCA’s rules or the NAO’s investigation sets an expiry date for claiming a matured Child Trust Fund. The mechanism points the same way: the protected account persists until the holder gives an instruction, and nothing in the rules attaches a clock to it.
The next question people ask is whether the money eventually gets swept into the Dormant Assets Scheme, which redirects long-untouched financial assets to good causes. Child Trust Funds are not in the scheme’s scope today. The government’s 2025 Dormant Assets periodic review mentions them exactly once, in a summary of what one respondent suggested, that government “may wish to revisit assets that were previously considered by the Commission on Dormant Assets such as oyster cards, gift cards and Child Trust Funds”. A suggestion that something be revisited for possible future inclusion is a fair indication that it is currently outside.
That said, the direction of travel has been on the record for years. The NAO wrote in 2023 that “the government has not yet decided its long-term strategy to manage CTFs that remain unclaimed several years after maturing”, and added: “In time, some matured CTFs are likely to be transferred into the scheme.” No such transfer has been legislated, and no date has been set. It is a watch, not a deadline.
The firms charging for the free search
The FCA’s press release flags fees of £400 to locate an account, and firms “charging a monthly subscription for a one-off tracing service”. It does not name anyone. One firm has been named by an adjudicator, so that is the one worth looking at, because the ruling establishes the facts rather than asserting them.
On 28 May 2025 the Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint against Turner Lewis Limited over adverts on TikTok, on all three grounds raised. The ASA found the adverts omitted material information, including the fee and the existence of the free HMRC route, and that they “took advantage of consumers’ inexperience and credulity by suggesting that the process was more complicated than it was”. The complaint had been brought by MoneySavingExpert.
The fee structure recorded in the ruling was 25% plus VAT of the amount located, capped at £420, with a further £150 plus VAT charged to anyone who cancelled after the fourteen-day cooling-off period. The firm’s own published terms state the same headline: “Our service fee is 25% + VAT of the total funds within your CTF.” Its terms also state, in its own words, that it “is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), as we do not offer financial advice”, and do tell customers they have “the option to locate your Child Trust Fund for free directly through HM Revenue & Customs”.
Run the arithmetic against HMRC’s own average for an unclaimed account. On £1,980, 25% is £495 before VAT and £594 with it, so the £420 cap bites and that is what you pay. That is 21% of the account, for a search that is free, needs no login and takes about ten minutes. On a smaller account the percentage applies in full: £1,000 located costs £250 plus VAT, or £300.
The point is not that these firms do nothing. They do the search, and some people would rather someone else did. The point is the price of the thing against the difficulty of the thing. That is what the ASA’s finding comes down to.
The FCA’s own framing, from Chris Knight, its director of insurance: “tracing and accessing your own Child Trust Fund costs nothing, so think twice about handing over a chunk of your savings to a claims firm for a job you can do yourself.”
Common questions
I was born in the window but my parents say they never opened anything. Is it worth checking?
Yes, because parents did not have to. If a parent did not open an account within a year of receiving the voucher, HMRC opened one on the child’s behalf with a provider it chose. Those are exactly the accounts nobody remembers, because nobody in the family ever picked the provider or received a welcome pack they paid attention to.
I am 16, not 18. Can I do anything yet?
You can search, and you can take over running the account. GOV.UK’s position is that the holder “can take control of the account when they’re 16” but “the money belongs to the child and they can only take it out when they’re 18”. HMRC’s finder offers “Aged 16 or over and looking for your own trust fund” as its first option.
Can money still be paid into a Child Trust Fund?
Into an account that has not yet matured, yes: up to £9,000 a year, the same limit as a Junior ISA. Once the account matures on the holder’s 18th birthday it becomes a protected account and, in the words of the ISA Regulations, “no further subscription may be made”. No new Child Trust Funds can be opened by anyone, since the scheme closed in January 2011.
Does an unclaimed account stop earning?
No. The NAO’s description is that “interest and gains on investments continue to accrue” in the protected account, and the FCA’s requirement is that the investments “should be treated as if they had remained in the CTF account”. Whether that means growth or a loss depends on what the money is invested in, which varies by provider and account type.
What if I have moved house since I was a child?
That is the common case rather than the exception, and it is why the HMRC route exists. The search works from your National Insurance number and your own details, not from an address the provider holds, so a provider that has lost track of you can still be found.
Sources
- FCA, “FCA urges young adults to check for unclaimed Child Trust Funds”, 1 September 2026
- GOV.UK, “Find a Child Trust Fund” and the Child Trust Fund overview
- HMRC, “Commentary for Annual savings statistics: September 2025”, section 3
- National Audit Office, “Investigation into Child Trust Funds”, HC 1197, 14 March 2023
- FCA, “Maturing dormant Child Trust Fund accounts”
- The Individual Savings Account Regulations 1998, regulation 5DZA
- ASA ruling on Turner Lewis Ltd, 28 May 2025
- The Share Foundation, CTF Recovery