Most pension schemes do not hear about a member's death from the government. They hear about it from family, from returned post, from a bank, or from their own mortality screening. When none of those happens promptly, the pension keeps being paid.
The UK's Tell Us Once service notifies HMRC, the DWP and public sector and Armed Forces pension schemes when a death is registered. It does not notify private or occupational schemes. For most trustees, the job of finding out falls to the scheme.
Mortality screening exists to do that job. It does it well for most members, and poorly for a few groups that between them account for a large share of the risk. Government data puts the overpayment liability from undetected deaths in UK pension schemes at an estimated £511m.
How standard screening works
A mortality screen compares the scheme's member records with UK death registration data. Where a member's name, date of birth and address line up with a registered death, the screen returns a match. High-probability matches are investigated, the payment is suspended and the death is confirmed.
Run monthly, which is what many specialists now recommend for pensioners in payment, this catches most UK deaths within weeks. The overpayment is small and recoverable.
The weakness is in the word "match". A screen can only find a death if the data on both sides is close enough to connect.
The groups that fall through
Members living overseas
There is no central, publicly available death register for people who live abroad. A UK pensioner who dies in Spain or Australia does not appear in UK registration data at all. Many schemes still rely on periodic paper certificates of existence for these members, which are slow, easy to delay and open to abuse. The gap between a death and the scheme finding out can run to months, and in some cases years.
Care home residents
These deaths are registered in the UK, but the record may show the care home's address while the scheme still holds the member's former home address. Name formats can differ too. A screen that leans heavily on address matching can score these as low confidence or miss them entirely.
Deferred members
Screening is often set up for pensioners in payment and rarely runs automatically across deferreds. A deferred member who dies before retirement creates no overpayment, but the scheme keeps carrying a liability that does not exist, and may later write to their estate about a retirement that will never happen. Screening deferreds before a valuation or a buy-in removes liabilities the scheme does not need to price.
Members with poor underlying data
Missing National Insurance numbers, transposed dates of birth and old surnames all lower match rates. The members with the weakest records are also the ones most likely to be missed.
What an undetected death costs
The direct cost is the overpayment itself. Recovery means writing to the estate or next of kin, often months after the death, at a time when the family is least able to deal with it. Some of the money comes back in instalments. Some of it never comes back.
The indirect costs are harder to see. Staff time spent on recovery. The complaint that follows a demand letter to a bereaved spouse. The audit finding. And for trustees, a question about whether the scheme's controls were adequate.
Fraud sits at the far end of this risk. A pension that continues after death into an account someone else can access is one of the oldest forms of pension fraud. Weak existence checks on overseas members are where it is hardest to detect.
Closing the gap
The fixes are known. What varies is whether schemes apply them consistently.
Screen pensioners monthly against UK death data, and record each run. Add screening that targets the groups standard screens miss, including care home residents and members abroad. The difference is measurable: MM, Navro's mortality data partner, reports identifying 15% more deceased members than other providers detect. For overseas members, use existence checks that do not rely on the member returning a paper form, and set a clear process for what happens when a check goes unanswered.
Screen deferreds at least before every valuation and any risk transfer exercise.
Fix the underlying data. Tracing to confirm current addresses and filling gaps in National Insurance numbers both raise match rates for every future screen.
Then connect the result to the payment. A death confirmed by the screening provider should stop the next payment automatically, not wait for someone to update the payroll file by hand.
One record from check to payment
Overpayments happen in the gap between knowing and acting. When screening, tracing and payment sit with different suppliers, that gap is built into the process: a match is reported, passed to the administrator, checked, and only then reflected in the payment run.
Navro runs mortality screening, existence checks and address tracing through the same provider that executes the payment, so the check and the payment are linked and the scheme has a documented record of when the check ran and what followed. See how Navro's mortality screening works.
Frequently asked questions
How do pension schemes find out a member has died?
Usually through a combination of notification from family or the member's bank, returned post, and the scheme's own mortality screening against UK death registration data. The government's Tell Us Once service does not notify private occupational pension schemes, so schemes cannot rely on it.
What is mortality screening for pension schemes?
Mortality screening compares a scheme's member records with death registration data to identify members who have died. Matches are investigated and, once confirmed, payments are stopped. Many specialists recommend monthly screening for pensioners in payment.
Why does mortality screening miss overseas pensioners?
There is no central public death register for people living outside the UK, so deaths abroad do not appear in UK registration data. Schemes need separate existence checks for overseas members, which many still carry out through paper certificates.
Should pension schemes screen deferred members for mortality?
Yes. Deferred members are often left out of routine screening. Screening them before valuations and risk transfer exercises removes liabilities for members who have died and avoids writing to estates about benefits that will never be paid.
What happens when a pension is overpaid after a member dies?
The scheme normally writes to the deceased member's estate or next of kin to recover the overpayment. Recovery can be slow and incomplete, and it carries a risk of complaints, particularly when the overpayment is discovered long after the death.
Related reading
- Gone-Away Members: What Reasonable Steps Look Like in 2026
- £511M in Pension Overpayments: The Proof-of-Life Problem UK Schemes Face
Sources: GOV.UK: What to do after someone dies, Tell Us Once · Pensions Expert: Mortality screening, what you need to know · Broadstone: TPR record-keeping guidance briefing (March 2026)
