Pensions after a death

The survivor annuity is the default, not the upgrade

Federal law requires a covered pension plan to pay a married participant's benefit as a joint and survivor annuity — an income for the participant's life, continuing to the surviving spouse afterwards. Where the participant dies before retiring, a preretirement survivor annuity is required for the surviving spouse instead. This is what happens unless somebody actively changed it.^{Source 1}

The continuing payment must be at least half of what was payable while both were alive, and no more than the full amount. Because the joint form is the actuarial equivalent of a single-life annuity, choosing it makes the monthly payment smaller during the participant's lifetime. That smaller check was the price of the survivor's income, and it is why the question was asked at retirement rather than now.^{Source 2}

This is the opposite of how the arrangement reads. A surviving spouse's pension is not a benefit somebody generously added; it is the starting position, and someone had to sign it away.

What it took to give it up

Electing out of the survivor annuity is not something a participant could do alone. The spouse had to consent in writing, the consent had to acknowledge the effect of the election, and it had to be witnessed by a plan representative or a notary public. The plan was also required to give the participant a written explanation of the survivor annuity and of the consequences of waiving it, before payments began.^{Source 3}

If you are told the single-life option was elected, ask the plan administrator in writing for a copy of the spousal consent. It is the most useful sentence on this page. A waiver without an effective consent may never have taken effect — and consents are sometimes missing, sometimes unwitnessed, and occasionally were never obtained at all.^{Source 3}

There are legitimate reasons a consent may not exist: the participant was unmarried at the time, or the plan established that the spouse could not be located. Those are recognized exceptions rather than gaps. The point is to establish which situation you are in rather than to accept the first answer.^{Source 3}

One more trap worth knowing: a consent is effective only for the spouse who gave it. A person who elected a single-life annuity with the consent of a spouse they later divorced, and then remarried, did not thereby obtain the new spouse's consent.

Which pensions this covers, and which it does not

The federal survivor-annuity rules reach private-sector plans governed by ERISA: defined benefit plans, and individual account plans subject to the funding standards. Several important categories sit outside them, and the answer there comes from the plan's own rules rather than from this statute.^{Source 1}

• Government plans — federal, state, county, municipal, teachers, police and fire — run under their own statutes and rules, which often have survivor provisions of their own that are just as valuable and differently structured.
• Church plans may be exempt from ERISA.
• Railroad retirement is a separate federal system with its own survivor annuities.
• Military retired pay stops at death; the Survivor Benefit Plan is the separate election that continues an income, and it had its own decision point at retirement.
• A 401(k) is not a pension in this sense. It is an account with a beneficiary, and the rules for inherited accounts govern it instead.

If the employer was a government body, do not conclude from a private-sector answer that there is nothing. Public plans frequently provide a surviving-spouse pension, and sometimes one that continues to a dependent child.

Tracing a pension nobody can find

The common version of this problem is an employer that no longer exists, or was bought, renamed, merged or wound up decades ago. A pension does not disappear when a company does, and the entitlement survives the paperwork.

1. Look for the annual benefit statement or the summary plan description among the person's papers. Either one names the plan, which is what every later search needs.
2. Check the Social Security earnings record for the employers involved, which is often the only surviving list of where someone worked.
3. Search the federal register of unclaimed pension benefits, which holds benefits from terminated plans whose participants could not be found.
4. If the plan was insured and terminated, the federal pension insurer may now be paying its benefits, and it maintains its own search.
5. Ask the successor company's benefits department by name, and ask specifically who assumed the pension liabilities.

This is a search problem rather than a claim problem, and it has the same character as tracing a lost life insurance policy: patience, and knowing which registries exist.