Who Holds California's Unclaimed Money?

The headline numbers

The data is a mess, and that is what hides your money

Across 13,083,908 records, companies are named 89,305 different ways. That is not 89,305 companies. It is the same companies, with their names spelled and abbreviated differently every time.

Bank of America alone shows up under 1,523 different versions of its own name. Here are the 14 most common, copied exactly as they appear in the state's files:

That is one bank. Each line was filed by a different part of it, in a different year, using whatever naming habit that department had at the time — and there are 1,509 more beyond these fourteen.

Now apply that to your name. It was typed into these same files by whoever happened to be doing the paperwork, sometimes decades ago — with a typo, an initial instead of a middle name, a maiden name, a nickname, or your name and your spouse's mashed into one line. The state's search matches what was typed. If it does not match what you type, the money sits there and you are told there is nothing.

So the single most useful thing on this page: search every version of your name you have ever gone by, not just the one on your driver's licence.

The 25 companies holding the most

We grouped the many versions of each company's name back together. Legal settlement funds and FDIC bank takeovers are counted separately rather than added to the company they relate to — those are court or government arrangements, not the company itself reporting money it was holding.

One thing to be clear about: being on this list is not a sign a company did anything wrong. Handing forgotten money over to the state is exactly what the law requires. A big bank sits near the top because it has tens of millions of customers, not because it behaved badly.

Most amounts are small. Plenty are not.

Most records are worth a few hundred dollars. But 314,936 people have $5,000 or more waiting, and that is from California alone.

232,402 records are worth $5,000 or more. 4,268 are worth over $100,000, and those few alone add up to $861.7M. The largest single amount we found is $21.3M, an account credit handed over by Charles Schwab & Co Inc.

What kind of property it is

On top of the cash, 813,226 records hold shares of stock instead of money, covering 16,914 different companies. California does not attach a dollar value to those, so they are left out of every total on this page. The real amount being held is therefore higher than $9.22B, not lower.

1,349,028 records have more than one name on them. That matters more than it sounds: these are consistently the hardest to claim, because every person named usually has to be found and has to sign.

Methodology

• Where the data comes from.The files California's State Controller publishes of the unclaimed property it holds. We load these into our own database and keep them updated.
• When we pulled it. August 11, 2026, covering records California published up to 2026-08-05. This is a snapshot. California updates its files regularly, so these numbers will change.
• What is counted. Everything currently listed as unclaimed in those published files. It is not a claim to cover every last thing the state holds — only what California publishes.
• How we grouped the companies.We matched the many spellings of each company's name back to one company, using a deliberately cautious set of rules. Anything we were not confident about was left ungrouped rather than guessed at — so the totals per company are, if anything, understated.
• Checking our work.Every figure on this page comes from a single pass over the published files, and each one was recomputed independently before we published it. If you want to verify a number yourself, the underlying data is California's and is free to download — see the source note above.
• What the numbers do not tell you. Records holding stock have no dollar value attached. Amounts are what was handed over at the time, not what an account would be worth today. And one person can have several records.

Using these figures

Journalists and researchers are welcome to reuse anything on this page with attribution to Find My Money and a link back. There is no gate, no form, and no embargo. If you need a cut we have not published — by city, ZIP, property type, or a specific holder — email [email protected] and we will run it.

Find My Money is a licensed California asset recovery firm. We are paid a contingency fee out of what we recover, which means we have a commercial interest in this subject — worth knowing when you read our research. To be plain about it: you can search California's official database and file a claim yourself, for free, without us. Plenty of people do, and for a simple claim that is the right move.

How to claim unclaimed money in California →