Claiming Property Held in a Trust That Has Ended

• Property titled to a trust is reported under §1530 like any other holder report, not through probate, so the ten per cent fee cap applies.
• A terminated trust does not erase the record; the State holds the property under the trust's name until someone claims it with proof of entitlement.
• Claims of $1,000 or more in cash, and all securities and safe deposit box claims, must be notarized.
• No fee may be collected before the Controller approves the claim and pays the owner.
• Questions about who a trust's terms entitle to receive property are for an attorney, not an investigator.

Why would unclaimed property be reported under a trust's name?

Many accounts are titled to a trust rather than to an individual: a revocable living trust holding a checking account, a brokerage account styled “Jane Doe, Trustee of the Doe Family Trust,” or an insurance policy naming a trust as beneficiary. When the holder loses contact with the trustee, it reports the account to the State Controller the same way it would report any dormant account, under Code of Civil Procedure §1530. The trust’s name stays on the record exactly as reported. If the trust has since wound up, because the grantor died and the assets were distributed, or because the trust’s own term simply ended, the record does not update itself. It sits unchanged until someone files a claim.

These records are easy to miss because a search by personal name will not surface them. The Controller’s files are searchable by the name on the account, which here is the trust, not the person who created it or the people who inherited from it. A search run here across the records we index will pick up trust names as well as personal ones.

How is a terminated trust different from a probate estate?

A trust and a probate estate are not the same thing, and the difference matters both for how a claim is built and for what it costs, covered below. A revocable living trust exists to avoid probate: on the grantor’s death, the successor trustee distributes the trust’s assets directly to the named beneficiaries, with no probate court involved. Property that escheats out of a trust therefore normally arrives at the Controller through the ordinary §1530 holder-reporting process, the same channel as any unclaimed bank account or insurance payout.

That is different from an estate that does pass through county probate, which lands in the Controller’s separate Estates of Deceased Persons File. If a trust’s asset ended up in probate instead, perhaps because it was never properly transferred into the trust, the probate rules apply, and property/probate-estates covers that situation. Worth confirming which one applies before assuming either set of rules.

What does the Controller need to see to pay a trust claim?

The record shows the property belongs to a trust, so the Controller needs evidence of two things: that the trust ended, and that the person claiming is the one now entitled to what it held. In practice that usually means some combination of the trust instrument, any amendments, a certification of trust, documentation of the trustee’s or successor trustee’s authority, and government-issued identification for the person signing the claim. Exactly which documents a given claim needs depends on the property type and the trust’s own terms. See how-to-claim/documents for what a complete claim file generally contains, and how-to-claim/heir-estate for claims built around a death.

Where a trust held several accounts across several companies, the paperwork can repeat across several separate claims, since each holder reported its own account independently rather than as a group.

Do I need a notary, and what does that cost?

Claims of $1,000 or more in cash must be notarized, and all claims involving securities or a safe deposit box must be notarized regardless of the dollar amount. A California notary public may charge at most $15 per signature for an acknowledgment and $15 for a jurat, under Government Code §8211. That is a small, fixed cost set by statute, not something a recovery firm controls.

Does the ten per cent fee cap apply to a trust's property?

Because trust-held property is ordinarily reported under §1530 rather than arriving through county probate, the ten per cent fee cap in Code of Civil Procedure §1582 applies to it. That cap reaches property reported under §1530; it does not reach estates that pass through county probate, where the Controller states there are no fee restrictions on investigators. For a trust claim, the fee ceiling is in place. We charge a percentage of what the Controller actually pays and nothing if nothing is recovered, and no fee is collected before the claim is approved and paid, as the law requires. See resources/finder-fee-law for the fee rules in full, and pricing for ours.

What if the trust's terms are unclear about who should receive the property?

Sometimes the hard part is not finding the record but working out, from the trust document, who it actually names, especially after amendments, a trustee’s death, or a disagreement among beneficiaries. That is a legal question about the trust’s own terms, and it is not one we answer. An attorney who handles trusts and estates is the right person to interpret the document and confirm entitlement before a claim is signed. Once that is settled, we can help build and file the claim itself through services/full-service-recovery.

Questions People Ask

Figures on this page are from our copy of the State Controller’s published file as it stood on 30 October 2026. The State republishes the file weekly, so current totals will differ. Search is always against the latest copy.