• Michigan is sitting on more than $2 billion in unclaimed property, waiting for owners to claim it
• Searchable online databases have made it easier to find surprise windfalls, but barriers remains
• Michigan has paid out less than half of the money it’s taken in over the last decade

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This Christmas, thousands of Michiganders may have left some presents unopened. They were not under any tree, but in Michigan’s treasury: Cold hard cash that was theirs all along, waiting to be reunited.

The Michigan Department of Treasury is holding onto some $2 billion in unclaimed property: paychecks, tax refunds, insurance payouts, prizes — even the contents of a bank’s safe deposit box. And the amount is growing.

It’s easy to learn whether the government may be holding your long-lost money — if it’s worth more than $50 — due to a searchable database of Michigan’s unclaimed funds, and an accompanying search engine for unclaimed property that’s nearly nationwide. 

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Under Michigan law, if a business is holding or owes someone property for more than three years, it’s considered abandoned and becomes custody of the state. For governments it’s just one year.

The owners’ claim on the money never expires, and the state government always has to pay out, even decades later — if a rightful heir can prove the money should go to them. 

Terry Stanton, the administrator of the state’s unclaimed property program, said he recently saw a person claim an insurance policy payout that had been owed to one of their forebears since the 1980s. The descendant of the policyholder had provided a copy of the insurance policy as proof of their ownership.

“Our primary priority is to pay out as much as we can to the citizens of Michigan, or, you know, the people of the Midwest,” he told Bridge Michigan in an interview. 

The department is holding approximately 26 million properties, Stanton said, and the average payout for a claim is “in the $2,500 range,” he said. 

Physical property turned over to the state can be sold at auction, with the state passing on the proceeds to the owner once a claim is made.

Stanton is proud of the state’s work to reunite Michiganders with their money. The unclaimed property division costs about $5.8 million to operate, but reunites far more money with their owners, and budget documents indicate it’s funded by revenue from unclaimed property that has no beneficiaries. 

After a 2018 update modernized the system for looking up and requesting unclaimed property, Stanton said his office takes in “four or five times” the number of claims it did previously. The state has had to hire additional staff to take on the workload. The website was refreshed again in May, and under law, the division is required to do some advertising and outreach to raise awareness. 

The total paid out to property owners has almost doubled over the past six years, from $86.7 million in the 2018-2019 fiscal year to $163.6 million in the fiscal year ending this past October. 

Despite setting payout records in five of the last six years, that success might be overshadowed by the fact that the amount being sent to the treasury is growing far faster, from $206.2 million in fiscal year 2018-19 to $481.2 million in the most recent fiscal year.

In other words, over the past ten years the division paid less than half of the money it took in from unclaimed property — $2.7 billion of property abandoned and $1.2 billion paid out.

Still, Stanton said that over the past decade the overall balance of unclaimed properties hasn’t changed “a significant amount,” though it fluctuates from year to year.

Michigan could make it easier to get at least some of the money back to its owners. 

In Delaware, Pennsylvania and Washington, for instance, “money match” programs line up abandoned property with tax records to automatically return money to its rightful owners

For that to be possible in Michigan, Stanton implied that’d require lawmakers to act.

“Our statute at the moment requires that a claim be filed,” Stanton noted. “We can’t do automatic payments.”

It means that some obvious recipients — municipalities, school districts — have money waiting to be returned to them, but with a paperwork barrier in the way. 

Any abandoned property less than $50 isn’t on the website at all, either. Owners have to call into the state to check if they’re owed anything. 

In 2023, that amounted to 17.6 million properties worth a combined $190 million — more than half of all the unclaimed properties held by the state. 

Given that the total amount of abandoned property is currently hovering around $2 billion, Stanton said, it’s a relatively small proportion of the overall funds.

It’s not an airtight system: in 2023 a Wyandotte man pleaded no contest to stealing more than $40,000 from the unclaimed property division “by creating and submitting fraudulent estate documents, probate records, death certificates, and other vital records,” according to a press release from Attorney General Dana Nessel’s department.

For people who may need a wider search, every US state except Hawaii, along with the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and two Canadian provinces all participate in missingmoney.com, from the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators.

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