Forgotten money: the shares and dividends nobody claimed

When a company makes a profit, it often pays part of it to its shareholders. That payment is called a dividend. Most dividends now go straight into a bank account. But some never reach their owner. The bank account was closed, the shareholder moved house, or the shareholder died and the family never knew about the shares.

That money does not stay with the company forever. After seven years, it moves to a government fund called the Investor Education and Protection Fund, or IEPF. So do the shares themselves. On 31 March 2026, the fund held 195.68 crore shares worth ₹83,245 crore, plus ₹10,338 crore in cash.¹ Together that is about ₹93,600 crore (my arithmetic). The owners can still claim it. Very few do.

How money ends up in the fund

The rules are in Sections 124 and 125 of the Companies Act, 2013.² In simple words:

1. If a dividend is not paid or claimed within 30 days, the company moves it into a separate bank account called the Unpaid Dividend Account. The company has to publish a list of the people it owes on its website.
2. If the money sits in that account for seven years, the company must send it to the IEPF.
3. If a shareholder has not been paid or claimed a dividend for seven years in a row, the company must also move the shares to the IEPF. If the shareholder claims even one dividend in those seven years, the shares stay put.

Other forgotten money goes to the fund too, once it has gone unclaimed for seven years: deposits placed with companies that have matured, matured debentures (a kind of loan to a company), application money due for refund, and some other amounts.²

A government body called the IEPF Authority runs the fund. It was set up in 2016 under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.³ The first deadline for companies to move shares to it was 31 October 2017.⁴ The Authority holds the shares in its own demat account. A demat account keeps shares in electronic form, the way a bank account keeps money. The voting rights on these shares are frozen, so nobody votes with them.⁵ The cash sits in a government account that earns no interest.⁴

How big the pile is

On 31 March 2026	Figure
Shares held by the IEPF Authority	195.68 crore
Market value of those shares	₹83,245.43 crore
Cash in the fund (after refunds)	₹10,337.70 crore
Claims still waiting for a decision	26,510

Two notes on the units. “195.68 crore shares” is a count of shares, not rupees. And the ₹83,245 crore is a market value, so it rises and falls with share prices. The government’s figures for the year are unaudited.¹

The cash pile has grown about six times in nine years. It was ₹1,673 crore at the end of March 2017 and ₹5,675 crore by January 2023.⁴ By March 2026 it was ₹10,338 crore. In FY2023-24 alone (the year from April 2023 to March 2024), companies sent ₹2,523 crore to the fund, five to six times as much as in each of the three years before. The government’s answer does not explain the jump.⁶

Shares flow in much faster than they flow out

• Moved in
• Returned

Number of shares, in crore. FY25 means the year from April 2024 to March 2025. FY25 inflow is unaudited.Source: Rajya Sabha answer, 24 March 2026; Lok Sabha answer, 13 February 2023; EAC-PM working paper, May 2026

Over the five years from FY2021 to FY2025, companies moved about 91 crore shares into the fund. In the same years, the fund returned about 3.6 crore shares to their owners. That is roughly 25 shares in for every one share out (my arithmetic).⁶³

The inflow is also speeding up. In FY2025, 26.1 crore shares went in, double the 13 crore of FY2021.⁶ The official data does not say why.

FY2026 was much better on the way out. The fund returned 3.59 crore shares that year, more than in any earlier year.³ The government has not yet published how many shares went in during FY2026, so I cannot compare the two.

Claims: slow for years, then a jump

FY26 data is provisional.Source: Lok Sabha answers, 13 February 2023 and 27 July 2026; EAC-PM working paper, May 2026

For years, very few claims got through. In FY2025, people filed 59,940 claims. Only 12,749 were approved, and by March 2025 about 51,500 claims were waiting.³

Year	Claims filed	Decided	Approved	Rejected	Waiting at year end
FY2023	51,652	45,351	10,989	34,362	22,719
FY2024	55,031	50,726	16,985	33,741	27,024
FY2025	59,940	35,473	12,749	22,724	51,491
FY2026	72,605	97,586	62,668	34,918	26,510

Most decided claims used to be rejected: about 76% in FY2023 and 64% in FY2025. In FY2026 it was about 36% (my arithmetic).³ The government lists the main reasons for rejection. The company finds the claim incomplete. The company does not send its report on the claim in time. Or the claim form has a wrong demat or bank account number and is not fixed within 30 days.¹

The wait was the bigger problem. The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) studied the process in 2025. It found that a claim went through 25 steps on three separate websites that did not talk to each other. Officials typed the same details again at each stage. Approval took about a year and a half. Moving the shares and money after approval took another 18 to 24 months. In all, a claimant waited close to three years.³ Some people gave up. Others paid a middleman a commission to push the claim through.

The fix was simple. The IEPF Authority joined the three websites into one, which cut the steps from 25 to 15. It also decided that small claims, meaning shares worth under ₹1 lakh or dividends under ₹10,000, could be approved on the company’s report alone.³ After the new system started, monthly approvals rose from about 850 a month (April to September 2025) to 14,523 in March 2026. The EAC-PM says payouts that took up to two years after approval now take days.³ I could not find official data on how long a full claim takes from filing under the new system, so I cannot say how much the total wait has fallen.

Which companies

The IEPF Authority does not publish a company-by-company list of its shares. But every listed company reports the IEPF’s holding in its shareholding filing. On 31 March 2026, the IEPF held 8.86 crore shares of Reliance Industries, about 0.67% of the company. That alone is about 4.5% of all the shares the fund holds (my arithmetic). It also held 2.16 crore shares of HDFC Bank.⁵

For a fuller ranking I only found a private study. 1 Finance, a financial advisory firm, estimated that the IEPF held shares worth ₹89,004 crore across 1,671 listed companies in November 2025. By value, it put Reliance Industries first with 15.6% of the total, followed by HDFC Bank, Larsen & Toubro, Hindustan Unilever and JSW Steel, each at 2.2% to 2.4%.⁷ This is not an official count, and it uses a different date from the government figures above.

How a claim works

The process after October 2025 looks like this:³¹

1. Search. Check the search tool on the IEPF website (iepf.gov.in) with the shareholder’s name or the company’s name.
2. Get an entitlement letter. Ask the company, or its registrar and transfer agent (RTA, the firm that keeps its shareholder records), for a letter saying you are the rightful owner.
3. File Form IEPF-5 online. You file it on the Ministry of Corporate Affairs website. The new form, in use since October 2025, checks your PAN and demat account and fills in some details by itself. You can claim shares from several folios (separate holdings) of the same company in one form.
4. Post the papers to the company. Within 30 days, send the signed form and documents to the company’s nodal officer. These include KYC papers (ID proof such as PAN and Aadhaar), proof of ownership and a cancelled cheque. Heirs need extra papers, such as a death certificate. This step is still on paper. In July 2026 the government said it had no plan to make it fully digital.¹
5. The company verifies. The company files an electronic verification report with the IEPF Authority, which is supposed to happen within 30 days.
6. Approval and payout. The Authority approves the claim. The shares go to your demat account and the money goes to your bank account.

You need a demat account to get shares back. The IEPF Authority says the process is free and that it does not work through agents.⁸

What changed recently

• New portal. The joined-up portal was announced in August 2025, along with a call centre. All pending claims were moved to it by August 2025.⁹³
• New forms. The revised IEPF-5 form and verification report started in October 2025.¹
• Niveshak Shivir. These are one-day investor camps run by the IEPF Authority with SEBI, the market regulator. The first was in Pune on 1 June 2025. Later camps were held in Hyderabad, Jaipur, Amritsar, Bengaluru and Bhubaneswar. At the camps, companies and RTAs set up desks so people can update their KYC and nominee details and sort out claims on the spot.⁹
• A bill in Parliament. The Corporate Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026 was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 23 March 2026, and a joint committee of Parliament reported on it on 3 August 2026. Among other things, it would also send money from share buybacks that goes unclaimed for seven years to the fund.¹⁰ I could not confirm that it has become law.

The bank and mutual fund side

Shares are not the only forgotten money. Banks must move money from accounts that nobody has used for 10 years to the Reserve Bank of India’s Depositor Education and Awareness (DEA) Fund. On 31 January 2026, public sector banks alone had moved ₹60,518 crore there. Unclaimed money in mutual funds was ₹3,749 crore at the end of February 2026.¹¹

To find bank money, the RBI runs a website called UDGAM, which searches unclaimed deposits across many banks at once. It had 18.86 lakh registered users on 1 March 2026. For mutual funds, SEBI has a tracing tool called MITRA. A government campaign called “Your Money, Your Right”, run from October to December 2025, returned ₹5,777 crore across 22.95 lakh claims by the end of February 2026.¹¹ That figure covers several kinds of money, not only shares.

What this means

The fund grows mainly because shares keep flowing in, and the official data shows the inflow rising every year. The faster process cleared much of the backlog in FY2026. But even that record year returned 3.59 crore shares, while 26 crore went in the year before.

The law itself points to a few simple ways to keep money out of the fund. A dividend is only “unclaimed” if it does not reach you, so a correct bank account with the company or depository matters. Claiming even one dividend in seven years keeps your shares with you. Companies must list unpaid dividends on their websites, and you can claim from the company directly before the money moves.² A nominee, the person named to receive your shares or money if you die, makes it easier for your family to claim.

Footnotes

1. Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 1271, answered 27 July 2026. Figures as on 31 March 2026: net balance in the IEPF after refunds ₹10,337.70 crore; 195.68 crore unclaimed shares; market value ₹83,245.43 crore; 26,510 applications pending. The data for the year is unaudited, and FY2026 claim figures are provisional. The ₹93,600 crore total is my arithmetic (shares plus cash, rounded). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Companies Act, 2013, Section 124 (Unpaid Dividend Account, including the seven-year rule for shares and the explanation that claiming any dividend in that period stops the transfer) and Section 125 (what goes into the Fund, including matured deposits, matured debentures and refundable application money unclaimed for seven years). ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Sanjeev Sanyal and Aakanksha Arora, How to do Process Reforms: Case study of IEPFA, EAC-PM Working Paper 49/2026, May 2026. Table 1 (source: IEPFA) gives claims filed, processed, approved, rejected and pending, shares transferred and dividends refunded for FY2023 to FY2026. Shares returned in FY2023 to FY2026 come from this table; FY2021 and FY2022 come from the 2023 Lok Sabha answer. Its FY2026 figures add up to the Lok Sabha figures of July 2026. Rejection shares are my arithmetic: rejected claims divided by claims processed. The paper notes that its views are the authors’ and that the EAC-PM does not vouch for the figures. Its monthly approval figures for October 2025 to March 2026 add up to 57,992, slightly more than the 57,570 in its own table; I used the table. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

4. Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 1699, answered 13 February 2023. Fund balance at the end of FY2017 to FY2022, and provisional to 31 January 2023; claims approved and shares returned for FY2017 to FY2022; first due date for transfer of shares 31 October 2017; the IEPF is a non-interest-bearing public account. “About six times” is my arithmetic (₹10,337.70 crore in March 2026 against ₹1,673.20 crore in March 2017). The 2023 answer calls its figure the total balance, while the 2026 answer gives the net balance after refunds, so the two may not be measured in exactly the same way. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Reliance Industries, shareholding pattern as on 31 March 2026: 8,86,10,954 equity shares held by the IEPF Authority (0.67%), with voting rights frozen. HDFC Bank, shareholding pattern for the quarter ended 31 March 2026: 2,15,79,819 shares (0.16%). The 4.5% is my arithmetic: Reliance’s IEPF shares divided by the fund’s 195.68 crore shares. ↩ ↩²

6. Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Rajya Sabha Unstarred Question No. 3577, answered 24 March 2026. Amount received and shares transferred to the IEPF each year, FY2021 to FY2025 (FY2025 unaudited): shares of 12,97,92,080, 14,18,96,190, 16,16,64,998, 21,50,71,799 and 26,09,87,878; amounts of ₹505.67, ₹446.22, ₹452.26, ₹2,522.69 and ₹1,134.58 crore. The 91 crore and 25-to-1 figures are my arithmetic: total shares in (90.94 crore) divided by total shares returned (3.64 crore) over the same five years. ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. 1 Finance analysis, as reported by Business Today, 12 April 2026. This is a private estimate, not official data. I used it because I found no official company-wise ranking. ↩

8. IEPF Authority, home page notice: the Authority does not support any middleman, broker or agent for refund claims, and the refund process is free. ↩

9. Press Information Bureau: IEPFA set to launch Integrated Portal, 1 August 2025; pilot Niveshak Shivir in Pune, 29 May 2025; Niveshak Shivir in Bhubaneswar, 27 March 2026, which lists the earlier cities. ↩ ↩²

10. PRS Legislative Research, The Corporate Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026 (introduced 23 March 2026; joint committee report 3 August 2026), and the Bill text, notes on Clauses 36 and 37. ↩

11. Ministry of Finance, Rajya Sabha reply reported by the Press Information Bureau, 24 March 2026. The ₹60,518 crore covers public sector banks only, so the total for all banks is higher. Mutual fund figure as on 28 February 2026; UDGAM users as on 1 March 2026; campaign figures as on 28 February 2026. ↩ ↩²