No. Tell Us Once does not cover your private pensions. It is a genuinely useful government service that reports a death to a long list of public bodies in one go, but a personal pension, a workplace pension and an annuity provider are not on that list. Someone still has to contact each of those companies directly, and that someone is you, or whoever is dealing with the estate.
This catches people out because the process is built to feel complete. You register the death, the registrar hands you a reference number, you sit through the Tell Us Once questions, and a reasonable person walks away believing the pensions have been sorted. Most of them have not. The service draws a hard line between the public sector, which it can often reach, and everything private, which it cannot touch.
Knowing exactly where that line falls is the difference between a tidy estate and a letter, arriving months later, asking for money back. The rest of this page sets out what Tell Us Once actually notifies, which pensions it leaves entirely to you, and why the delay in contacting them costs more than an afternoon on the phone.
At a glance
- Tell Us Once notifies government departments and the council. It does not contact personal or workplace pension providers, or annuity companies.
- It can notify certain public service pension schemes, but only the ones you select from a list, and only as a notification, not a claim.
- Every private pension pot, workplace scheme and annuity is your job to trace and contact, one by one.
- Pension and benefit payments made after the date of death are recoverable, so late notification usually means money has to be returned.
- For a pension pot, notifying the scheme late can also cost the family tax, because a two-year clock starts when the scheme is told.
The short answer: it tells the state, not the pension companies
Tell Us Once is run by the Department for Work and Pensions and offered to you when you register a death, either online with a unique reference number or by phone. Its purpose is to save a grieving family from writing the same letter twenty times. Report the death once, and the service passes it to the government organisations that need to know.
The key word is government. Tell Us Once reaches the parts of the state that hold records about the person who died: the tax system, the benefits system, the council, the passport office, the driving licence agency. It can also reach a defined set of public service pension schemes. What it does not reach is the private financial world, and that includes almost every pension a person builds up through an ordinary job or arranges for themselves.
So the practical position is simple to state and easy to forget under pressure. If the pension is a personal pension, a stakeholder pension, a self-invested pot, a private workplace scheme run by an insurer, or an annuity already in payment, Tell Us Once has not told them anything. The clock on those is only running because you started it, and it does not start until you call.
What Tell Us Once actually notifies
When you go through the process, the service passes the death to a standard set of organisations. It is worth knowing the list, because it is genuinely broad and does remove a real chunk of work.
| Tell Us Once usually contacts | Tell Us Once does not contact |
|---|---|
| DWP, to stop benefits and the State Pension | Personal and stakeholder pension providers |
| HM Revenue and Customs, for tax and child-related payments | Workplace pensions run by an insurer or master trust |
| The local council, for Council Tax, Blue Badge, electoral roll and council services | Annuity providers already paying an income |
| HM Passport Office and the DVLA | Banks, building societies and insurers |
| Selected public service pension schemes you choose from a list | Utilities, mortgage lenders and creditors |
The right-hand column is the one that surprises people. Everything financial and private sits outside the service. Tell Us Once will not tell a bank, will not tell an insurer, and will not tell the company that has been quietly paying a monthly annuity into the deceased's account for the last decade. If you want a wider view of the organisations the service leaves untouched, we have set that out separately in a guide to the organisations Tell Us Once will never contact.
The public service schemes it can notify
There is a middle category that causes the most confusion, because it is where the service almost helps but not quite. Tell Us Once can notify a number of public service pension schemes, and during the process you are shown a list and asked to select the ones that apply. In practice this commonly includes the NHS, teachers', civil service, armed forces and local government schemes, among others, but the participating list is not identical everywhere and it does change.
Two things are easy to get wrong here. The first is that notifying is not the same as claiming. Tell Us Once tells the scheme the member has died; it does not lodge a claim for a survivor's pension or a lump sum on your behalf. You, or the person entitled, still have to make that claim, provide documents, and follow the scheme's own process. The notification simply stops the wrong payments and opens the file.
The second is that the list only works if you read it. If a scheme the person paid into is not offered, or you are not sure whether an old employer's scheme counts, do not assume it has been covered. Note what is missing and treat those as private schemes you must contact yourself. When a former employer no longer exists at all, tracing where the pension ended up is a job in itself, which we cover in a guide to finding a pension when the company has been dissolved or the scheme wound up.
The pensions you have to contact yourself
This is the part of the job that is genuinely yours. Every private pension arrangement needs to be identified and contacted one at a time, and the first difficulty is often just knowing they exist.
Start with the paperwork. Annual statements, letters headed with a provider's name, old payslips showing pension deductions, and bank statements showing regular payments in or out are the trail. A person who changed jobs several times may have four or five separate pots, some tiny, some not, held by providers they last thought about years ago. Each one is a separate phone call, a separate death certificate copy, and a separate set of forms.
For a defined contribution pot, what happens next is usually decided by the scheme's trustees or the provider at their discretion, guided by any nomination or expression of wish the member left. Whether an unmarried partner is paid at all can turn on that form, which is why it matters so much and why we look at it closely in a guide to whether you are entitled to a partner's pension when you never married. Where the pot could pass to a partner rather than a spouse, the tax position also differs sharply from April 2027, a change we set out in why a widow pays no inheritance tax on a pension while an unmarried partner does.
If you are reading this because a death has exposed how little cover was in place, and you want to make sure your own family is not left tracing pots and chasing forms, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker look at what would actually replace your income.
Why the clock matters more than it looks
Contacting a pension provider late is not a tidy loose end. It has two concrete consequences, and both cost money.
The first is overpayment. Payments made after the date of death, whether a State Pension instalment, a benefit, or a monthly annuity, are recoverable. The State Pension and benefits are reclaimed by DWP; a private pension or annuity paid after death is reclaimed by the provider. If those payments have landed in an account and been spent, the estate still owes them back. Telling everyone promptly is the simplest way to stop money arriving that will later have to be returned.
The second consequence is quieter and specific to pension pots. When someone dies under the age of 75, the death benefits from a defined contribution pension are normally free of income tax only if they are paid out or designated to a beneficiary within two years. That two-year window does not run from the date of death. It runs from the point the scheme was told about the death, or could first reasonably have known. Sit on the notification, and you can shorten the family's own window to act, turning a tax-free benefit into a taxable one for no reason other than delay.
How to work through it in the first weeks
None of this needs to happen on day one, and it should not. But a short, ordered approach in the first few weeks saves a great deal later.
- Use Tell Us Once, and read the scheme list carefully. Tick every public service scheme that applies, and write down any that are missing so you know they are still your responsibility.
- Build a list of every private pension. Work through statements, payslips and bank records, and note the provider and any policy number for each pot or annuity you find.
- Contact each provider and ask two things. What they need to stop payments, and what they need to assess a death benefit or survivor claim. Ask each one whether any nomination or expression of wish is held on file.
- Order enough certified copies of the death certificate. Providers often want an original or a certified copy, and running short of them slows everything down.
Free, independent help exists and is worth using before you make decisions. MoneyHelper is government-backed and covers pensions and bereavement, and the gov.uk guide to what to do after a death sets out the Tell Us Once process and the wider steps in order. Neither will try to sell you anything.
Source: gov.uk, What to do when someone dies: step by step and Tell Us Once guidance, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Scotland and Northern Ireland
Tell Us Once operates across England, Scotland and Wales, and the core point holds everywhere in Great Britain: the service notifies government and selected public service schemes, never private pension providers. In Scotland you register the death with the local registrar in the same way and are offered the service through that process.
Northern Ireland runs its own arrangements rather than the Great Britain Tell Us Once service, and the death is reported to Northern Ireland departments through the relevant local process. The practical lesson does not change: whatever notification scheme covers you, personal pensions, workplace schemes run by insurers, and annuities are outside it, and the family has to contact those providers directly. You can read the rest of this topic in our guide to pensions, nominations and death benefits.
Frequently asked questions
Does Tell Us Once contact private pension providers?
No. The service passes a death to government departments and local council services, and it can notify certain public service pension schemes, but personal pensions, workplace schemes run by an insurer and annuity providers are not included. The family or the executor has to contact each of those providers directly, one at a time.
Which pension schemes does Tell Us Once actually notify?
It covers DWP benefits and the State Pension, HMRC, the local council, and the public service schemes you select during the process, which typically include the NHS, teachers', armed forces, civil service and local government arrangements. You are given a list to work through, so read it and note anything that is missing, because a scheme that is not offered is one you still have to contact yourself.
What happens if a pension provider is told late?
Payments made after the date of death are recoverable, so late notification usually means money has to be returned to the provider or to DWP. Delay also matters for tax: death benefits from a pension pot that are not paid or designated within two years of the scheme being told about the death can become taxable when they would otherwise have been tax free.