Dormant accounts don’t disappear
Curtis thought he was finished with the estate. His father had been organized, and the proof was sitting on the dining room table: one accordion folder, labelled tabs, statements filed by year. Two bank accounts, a GIC, the pension, the insurance policy. Curtis closed each one in turn, paid the final bills, filed the terminal return, got the clearance certificate, and drafted the email to his sister telling her the cheques were coming.
What wasn’t in the folder was a savings account his father opened in 1998, at a branch in a city he left in 2004. No statements ever arrived to be filed, because the address on that account was two moves out of date. There was about $2,100 in it. And the money hadn’t been at that bank for years.
What happens to an account nobody touches
When an account or instrument at a federally regulated bank or trust company goes 10 years with no owner activity, and the institution can’t reach the owner, the balance stops being the bank’s to hold. It gets turned over to the Bank of Canada, which holds it as custodian on behalf of whoever actually owns it.
The bank is supposed to warn you first. Under the Bank Act, federally regulated institutions have a legal obligation to send written notice after two, five and nine years of inactivity, and the nine-year notice tells you the balance is headed to the Bank of Canada if nothing changes. Those notices go to the last address on file. If your father moved twice and never updated an account he’d stopped thinking about, three letters went to strangers, and the transfer happened on schedule.
The Bank of Canada is blunt about what happens next: nothing. Balance holders aren’t notified when their funds arrive on their books. Those three letters are the only warning anyone gets.
That’s the whole mechanism. It runs on a stale address and a calendar. The account isn’t gone, and the money is still his, but it’s no longer anywhere that a careful reading of that accordian folder will find it.
How long it sits there
Balances under $1,000 are held for 30 years. Balances of $1,000 or more are held for 100 years. Anything still unclaimed at the end of that period goes to the Receiver General for Canada.
Interest is less than people assume. The Bank pays interest for the first 10 years of custody, and only on balances that came over as interest-bearing savings accounts. Everything else earns nothing at all, for decades.
So there’s no deadline coming up next month. The problem is a different one. An estate gets wound up, the residue gets distributed, the executor is discharged, and the account keeps sitting there because nobody ever knew to look.
It’s a bigger pile than most people expect
As of December 31, 2025, the Bank of Canada was holding about $1.6 billion in unclaimed bank balances, spread across 3.6 million accounts and instruments. In all of 2025 it paid out 1,937 claims worth $20 million. That’s the snapshot of the problem in two numbers: 3.6 million balances, and fewer than two thousand people a year who go and collect one.
The Bank has said the oldest balance on its books dates back to 1900. That date is the last time an owner touched the money, not the day the Bank took custody of it, which is why it tells you nothing about the retention clock.
The registry covers a good deal more than chequing and savings accounts. It includes term deposits, GICs, deposit receipts, positive credit card balances, bank drafts, certified cheques, official cheques, money orders and traveller’s cheques. It used to be limited to Canadian dollars. Since December 2023 the Unclaimed Properties Office also holds foreign denominated accounts, transferred over in Canadian currency, so a U.S. dollar account at a Canadian bank is now in scope. If you’ve read otherwise, you’ve read something written before the rule changed.
Knowing what it doesn’t cover matters just as much. RRSPs and RRIFs aren’t there, apart from the Canada RSP and Canada RIF plans. Neither are TFSAs, life insurance policies, safety deposit boxes, gift certificates, or stocks and dividends, which are a matter for the province’s securities commission. Neither are deposits at a provincially regulated credit union or caisse populaire, because the Bank Act doesn’t reach them. Those balances go to a provincial registry instead, in the four provinces that run one, and I’ll come back to that further down.
The exception is a credit union that has gone federal, since the Act treats a federal credit union as a bank. Even then, only balances that went dormant after the switch follow the bank rules. Anything that moved to the provincial program before the credit union federalized stays there. Coast Capital in British Columbia went federal in 2018, and BC Unclaimed tells former members to search both databases. A “nothing found” result at the Bank of Canada isn’t a clean bill of health for the whole estate.
How to actually search it
The search is free, it takes about a minute, and anyone can run it. You don’t need to be the executor, and you don’t need to prove anything just to look.
The catch is that a registry holds whatever name the bank had on file the day the money was handed over. That’s often not the name on the death certificate. Search the legal name, then the short form, then the middle initial version, then a maiden name, then any name a spouse might have been listed under. Alberta’s own guidance says the same thing: try your first initial, a nickname, or any other name you’ve used.
A NAME ON FILE ISN’T ALWAYS THE LEGAL NAME
Marguerite searched the Bank of Canada registry for her father under the full name on his will and got nothing back. She only found the account because a cousin mentioned that he’d banked under the shortened version of his first name for as long as anyone could remember, and had never used anything else at that branch. Same man, same money, different form of his name.
Claiming is a separate step from searching, and that’s where an executor needs documents. The Bank of Canada charges nothing to search or to process a claim, though you may still pay for notarization or legal help to produce the evidence it asks for.
It also has a view on who can file. A claimant is the living owner or their authorized representative, an heir or beneficiary of an estate with no will, or the executor, administrator or liquidator of an estate with a will. If your authority comes from a power of attorney, a court order or a letter of probate, you file that document itself. There’s no separate authorization form to fill out on top of it.
Two timing points worth planning around. Average processing runs 120 days, longer if the claim is complex or the package arrives incomplete. And once you’ve initiated a claim, the Bank closes it if the documentation it asked for hasn’t arrived within 12 months. For an executor waiting on a grant, that clock is real. Claims above $5,000 also have their own submission requirements, so read the claim form rather than assuming everything can go online.
Transfers into the registry happen once a year, between mid-November and December. An account that only recently crossed the ten-year line won’t be listed yet. If you suspect there’s something out there, the place to ask is the institution itself.
One more thing about searching. Some firms use the Bank’s public data to find claimants and then charge for help with the claim. The Bank of Canada says plainly that it doesn’t endorse those firms and has no business relationship with them. You can do all of this yourself, for nothing.
Every search in this article exists because somebody’s records were never written down anywhere. In Plain Sight™ is a personal records organizer: financial accounts, legal documents, insurance policies, digital access and the contacts an executor will need, in one place, in the terminology your province uses. It saves, it reopens when something changes, and it prints, so the record can sit with your will instead of living in your head. An executor reading a list doesn’t have to go looking for accounts nobody remembered.
Also check your province
Four provinces run their own unclaimed property registries: British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec and New Brunswick. They exist because a lot of money never reaches the Bank of Canada in the first place. Credit union deposits, uncashed payroll cheques, utility and rental deposits, insurance proceeds, court funds, money left behind by dissolved companies. None of that is covered federally. Revenu Québec says so directly on its own register: for an account at a federally regulated institution, contact the Bank of Canada, because the Minister of Revenue has no jurisdiction over it.
Alberta shows the scale. As of March 31, 2025 the province held roughly 344,808 unclaimed items worth about $168 million, and searching is free through either the provincial site or MissingMoney.com, which covers 40 or so state and provincial registries in a single search. Alberta also has something the federal registry doesn’t. A claim has to be submitted within 10 years of the date Tax and Revenue Administration received the property, and the periods that put property there in the first place are short: one year for unpaid wages or a utility deposit, three years for an RRSP or RESP, five years for a deposit or GIC at a provincially regulated institution. An estate can lose Alberta property by waiting, in a way it can’t lose a bank balance.
The BC Unclaimed Property Society held more than $222 million for 185,716 owners as of April 2026, from dormant credit union accounts, unpaid wages, court funds and estates. That works out to roughly one British Columbian in 31. Searching and claiming are free.
Quebec’s register at Revenu Québec covers unclaimed successions as well as financial assets. As of August 25, 2026 it listed about $710 million across 549,648 files, and that figure counts only property with an assigned cash value. Searching is free, but Quebec is the one province that charges when the claim is paid out: 10% of the value of a financial asset, with a minimum of $60 and a maximum of $1,211 in the current fee year. Quebec also runs deadlines. Property worth less than $500 has to be claimed within ten years of being remitted to the Minister of Finance, there’s no deadline above that, and an heir to an unclaimed succession has ten years from the opening of the succession.
New Brunswick’s program, FundsFinderNB, is run by the Financial and Consumer Services Commission. About $42 million is waiting to be claimed, and just over $4 million has been returned since the program began. Property generally becomes reportable after three years of inactivity, or ten for a credit union account. Searching and claiming are free.
Everywhere else, there’s nothing to search. Manitoba studied the idea through a Law Reform Commission consultation in 2019 and never built a program. Ontario got closer and still ended up with nothing: it passed unclaimed property legislation in 1989, never brought it into force, and eventually repealed it. Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island and the three territories have no program either. If the deceased lived in one of those places, the federal search isn’t the first step. It’s the only one, which makes running it more important, not less.
While you’re at it, check the Canada Revenue Agency for uncashed cheques. Government of Canada cheques never expire. Individuals can see theirs in CRA My Account, and a legal representative can view and replace a deceased person’s cheques through Represent a Client, with the replacement deposited to the estate account. The online view only shows cheques more than six months old, and business and trust cheques take a phone call. As of July 2026 the CRA was holding about $1.88 billion across 10.8 million uncashed cheques.
There’s one more free search worth adding to the list. The Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy holds unclaimed money left over from bankruptcy estates, and the Bank of Canada points claimants there itself.
What if you find it after the estate is closed
This is the question executors ask once they learn the search exists, and the answer is better than most people expect, but it isn’t free.
Finishing the distribution doesn’t end your appointment. Money that belonged to the deceased is still estate property, and you’re still the person entitled to collect it. You generally don’t need a fresh grant to go after it. You’ll need the same proof you needed the first time: the death certificate, the will, and the grant if one was issued.
What changes is what you owe the court and the tax authorities. Where probate was granted, a newly discovered asset usually has to be reported and probate fees or estate administration tax paid on its date-of-death value.
In British Columbia, that means filing a supplemental affidavit of assets and liabilities with the registry and paying the fees on the new asset. No new grant of probate is required.
In Ontario there are two steps, and the first one is the one people often miss. The estate trustee files a sworn statement with the court describing the newly discovered property, and the additional estate administration tax becomes payable when that statement is delivered. An amended Estate Information Return then goes to the Ministry of Finance within 60 calendar days of that delivery. The Ministry separately has four years from the date the tax was due to assess or reassess. That’s a limit on the government, not a countdown that lets the executor off.
In Quebec, the liquidator’s job isn’t finished while estate property is still outstanding.
Tax works on the same principle. A clearance certificate covers what was reported up to the date it was issued. It doesn’t reach an asset the CRA never saw.
Then the money goes where the residue went. A few hundred dollars found after the estate was presumed settled still belongs to the beneficiaries, split the same way, even when the paperwork costs more than anyone thought. That’s the real argument for searching before you distribute rather than after. Recovering $2,100 late can mean a court filing, an amended return, and possibly a lawyer’s time, to hand out amounts that would have been three extra lines on a cheque run six months earlier.
Write down that you looked
Here’s the practical piece for anyone acting as an executor right now. Run the Bank of Canada search under every plausible version of the name. Run the provincial registry if one exists where the deceased lived, and where they lived before that. Check the CRA. Check the Superintendent of Bankruptcy. Then record the date you searched and what came back, and keep it with your estate file.
Beneficiaries rarely ask whether you searched. They ask years later, when a letter turns up addressed to a person who died in 2019, why nobody looked. Being able to answer that with a date and a printout is worth the ten minutes.
Curtis found his father’s account eleven months after the estate closed, when a friend mentioned the registry over coffee. Getting the money released took a death certificate, a copy of the will, and a fair bit of paperwork he’d hoped never to open again. He got it. He just didn’t get it in the same year as everything else, and his sister had already received her share of what she thought was the whole estate.
Ten minutes, before you distribute. That’s the entire ask.
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Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.
