The free checker
Finding the money is the easy part — the search is free at the official doors, and we'll show you those too. The claim is where families stall: a certified death certificate here, a kinship document there, an authority paper whose name changes by state and by amount. This checker computes your exact chain from the statutes and the states' own rules — and it tells you plainly when your claim is simple enough that you don't need anything else, including us.
Tell it the state holding the money, who you are to the person it belongs to, and roughly how much it is. It answers with the four things families actually get stuck on: whether you can skip probate, the documents in the order the state wants them, who else has to sign, and the finder fee in dollars you keep by filing yourself. No login, nothing uploaded; it runs on this page, in your browser.
We never ask you to upload a death certificate, an ID, or any document — not here, not anywhere. Anyone who asks for your state-portal password while offering to "help" with a claim is running a scam.
How to read the verdict: the probate-skip answer is measured against your state's own small-estate rule — for California, against the cap for the year of death, because that is what the law uses. Where we could not verify a state's rule against the primary text, the result says so in plain words instead of guessing. The checker will never smooth over a gap to make your case look simpler than it is.
First — whose hands is the money in? This site is about money held by a state (the unclaimed-property programs). If instead a company is holding your money — a marketplace or payment platform sitting on your balance — that's a different fight with different doors: our sister site MoneyFrozen is built for it. If a state treasurer or comptroller holds the money, stay here.
Every rule the checker applies is cited on the result itself: California Probate Code §13100 with the Judicial Council DE-300 date-of-death bands; Texas Estates Code chapter 205 and the 34 TAC §13.9 heirship tiers; New York SCPA §1301 and the Table of Heirs requirement; Florida chapter 717's all-beneficiaries rule; and each state's program guidance for the chain, the finder caps (California CCP §1582, New York APL §1416, Florida §717.135 — the current text, 20% with a $1,000 per-account cap), and the published timelines. States whose cells we could not primary-verify are flagged unverified on the result and in the state table.
The working papers for the chain itself — the per-state checklists, the Table of Heirs worksheet, the co-heir letters, the rejection-recovery chapter — live in the kit. See everything inside the $39 MoneyLeftBehind Kit →