Almost everyone has one. The checking account from a first job three states away. The savings account a parent opened in your name with a few hundred dollars in it. The old account you kept open after switching banks because closing it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
Those accounts do not sit still. They leak. Inactivity fees, monthly maintenance charges, and an interest rate frozen somewhere near zero all work on the balance at the same time. And if the account goes untouched long enough, your bank is required by law to hand whatever is left to your state government.
None of this is a scam. It is all disclosed, usually on page nine of a fee schedule nobody reads. But it costs real money, and the fix takes about twenty minutes.
What your bank actually counts as inactive
The word banks use is dormancy, and the definition is narrower than most people assume. What counts is customer-initiated activity: a deposit, a withdrawal, a transfer, a check, a debit card purchase. What does not count is anything the bank does on its own. Monthly interest posting to the account does not reset the clock. Neither does the maintenance fee coming out. At some institutions, even logging into the mobile app does not qualify, because looking at your balance is not a transaction.
Most banks start charging an inactivity fee somewhere between six and twelve months of no activity. The state dormancy clock runs separately and much longer, generally three to five years depending on where you live. California, Connecticut, and Illinois treat an account as abandoned after three years. Delaware, Georgia, and Wisconsin wait five.
So there is a long stretch, often several years, where the account is still yours, still open, and still being charged.
The fee math is worse than it sounds
Inactivity fees generally run $5 to $20 a month. Put that against a small balance and the arithmetic gets grim fast. A forgotten savings account with $400 in it, charged $10 a month, is empty in a little over three years. The bank did not take your money in any dramatic sense. It just charged you for storage until there was nothing left to store.
Larger balances survive, but they underperform. The national average savings account yield was 0.64 percent as of September 17, 2026, according to Bankrate’s weekly survey, and the FDIC’s average across all savings accounts was lower still at 0.38 percent in August. The best online accounts were paying up to 4.21 percent in September, per NerdWallet’s rate tracking.
On $2,000, that gap is the difference between about $8 a year and about $82 a year. Over five years of sitting in the wrong account, you have quietly donated a few hundred dollars for no reason at all.
The Federal Reserve raised its target range to 3.75 to 4.00 percent on September 16, 2026, which means online savings rates are likely to stay competitive for a while. Money parked in a legacy account earning almost nothing is losing more ground now than it was two years ago.
When the state takes over
If nobody touches the account through the full dormancy period, the bank closes it and sends the balance to the state treasurer. The legal term is escheatment, and it applies in all fifty states.
The scale of this is genuinely large. The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators puts the total value of unclaimed property held by state governments at roughly $70 billion, belonging to about 33 million people. That is close to one in seven Americans. In fiscal 2024, states returned a record $4.49 billion to owners who came looking.
Escheatment is not theft, and in most states there is no deadline to file a claim. But it is a paperwork problem you did not need, it can take weeks or months to resolve, and states typically do not pay you interest for the years they held the money. You can search for property in your name for free at MissingMoney.com, which most states participate in, and the OCC explains the process on HelpWithMyBank.gov.
Keeping an account alive on purpose
Sometimes you want to keep an old account open. Maybe it has your longest banking relationship attached to it, or a credit union membership you would rather not give up, or a local branch you use twice a year.
If so, give it something to do. A recurring transfer of $5 in or out, once a quarter, is enough at almost any bank to count as customer activity. One small debit card purchase works too. Set a calendar reminder rather than trusting yourself to remember.
Two other things matter more than people expect. Keep the mailing address current, because the notice a bank sends before declaring an account dormant goes to the address on file, and a returned statement can itself trigger the inactive flag at some institutions. And check the fee schedule for a minimum balance requirement, since a low-balance fee and an inactivity fee can stack on the same account in the same month.
Or close it properly
If you have no real use for the account, closing it is the cleaner answer, but do it in the right order.
Move any direct deposits and automatic payments first, then wait a full statement cycle or two with a small cushion in the account. Stray subscriptions and annual charges have a way of surfacing after you thought you had caught them all, and a $12 renewal hitting a $3 balance turns a closed account into an overdraft and a collections headache.
Once the account has gone quiet, request the closure in writing or through secure message, ask for written confirmation, and save it. An account can reopen automatically if a transaction arrives after closure, so hold onto the paperwork for a year. Then move the balance somewhere that actually pays you, whether that is a high-yield savings account, an emergency fund you already have going, or toward a balance you are carrying at a much higher rate.
Finding accounts you forgot you had
The tricky part is that dormant accounts do not show up on your credit report. Bank accounts are not credit accounts, so a standard credit check will not surface them.
A few things work better. Old tax returns are a good trail, since any account that paid you more than $10 of interest generated a 1099-INT. Searching your email for the words statement, routing, or overdraft will usually turn up institutions you have not thought about in years. Then run your name, including maiden names and old middle initials, through your state’s unclaimed property site and the states you have previously lived in.
An hour of that beats the alternative, which is a bank in a city you left in 2019 charging you $10 a month to hold $340 that stopped earning interest a long time ago.
