Pennsylvania’s Money Match law lets the state Treasury send unclaimed property to its owner without a claim form, as long as the property belongs to a single owner and is valued at up to $500. Treasurer Stacy Garrity’s office announced the first batch of 2026 Money Match checks on March 27, 2026: more than 100,000 checks worth nearly $23 million, printed, stamped and heading to mailboxes across the state.
Act 81 and the $500 ceiling
The programme rests on Act 81 of 2024, which, per Treasury’s October 30, 2025 announcement, passed the House and Senate unanimously. It authorizes Treasury to return certain single-owner properties valued up to $500 automatically. Treasury’s list of what that covers includes dormant bank accounts, uncashed checks, forgotten stocks, insurance policies and tangible property from abandoned safe deposit boxes.
The $500 figure is a ceiling on which properties qualify for the automatic route. It is not an amount a person receives. A property worth $40 returns $40, and a property worth $480 returns $480. The March 2026 release states the same rule: Money Match allows Treasury to return unclaimed property valued at up to $500 belonging to a single owner automatically, without requiring a search or claim filing.
That ceiling was still the operating rule when the 2026 batch went out, which is the check that the 2025 figure remains current. Treasury’s 2025 round was larger in letters: more than 107,000 notification letters, checks mailed in mid-December, and a first-year target of more than $40 million returned.
The question for anyone who has lived in Pennsylvania, moved out of it or been named on an old account is whether their name could be in the automatic group, and what to check before a letter or check shows up.
A household sorting Money Match property from claim-required property across more than one state needs a place to record each search; The Settlement & Refund Recovery System includes a 5-tab Excel tracker pre-filled with all 51 state unclaimed-property offices.
Open the 51-office unclaimed property tracker →
Who is in, and who still has to file
Three conditions decide whether a Pennsylvania resident’s property travels the automatic route, and Treasury’s two announcements state them directly. The property must have a single owner. Its value must be $500 or less. And it must be free of what Treasury calls other complexities. Property above $500, property with multiple owners, and claims with other complexities still require an owner to search, file a claim and supply documentation.
In practice a household can be in both groups at once. A retiree with a $120 dormant bank account may receive a check, while an insurance policy worth $900 under the same name sits in the claim-required pile until a claim is filed. Treasury’s October 2025 release puts the broader pile at $5 billion in unclaimed property held by Pennsylvania, with more than one in ten residents having funds waiting at an average of more than $1,000 per claim.
What arrives in the mailbox, and what to do with a surprise
The sequence Treasury describes is a notification letter first, then a check. In the 2025 round the letters went out in the autumn, and the checks followed in mid-December. In 2026 the first batch of checks was announced in March. The pages read here do not give a date for any further 2026 batch.
For a letter that looks wrong, Treasury gives a specific address: [email protected] for anyone who believes a check was received in error. Garrity described the mailings in October 2025 as “the best kind of mail to send,” adding that the money does not belong to the state.
Because a check from the state is just the kind of mail a scammer imitates, the safest habit is to treat the letter as information rather than instruction: nothing in Treasury’s description asks an owner to pay anything, call a number to release the funds or send documents for an automatic return. A search on Treasury’s own site, the state’s unclaimed property search, shows whether Treasury holds property under a name without any letter being involved.
What Money Match is not
It is not a general refund programme, and it does not cover property above the ceiling. Treasury’s pages describe a Pennsylvania mechanism only, so a person with property in another state would deal with that state’s office. It also does not replace the search: a reader who was never matched can still look.
Searching Pennsylvania Treasury before the next batch
The free official route is Treasury’s unclaimed property search. A household can enter each adult’s name, including older surnames and prior addresses, and record whether each hit is under the automatic ceiling or above it. Property that shows as above $500 or shared between owners is claim-required, so that is where documentation matters.
For a check already in hand, the thing to compare is the name and the property type against the letter, and then the question of whether a surprise payment was expected. The address for reporting a letter or check that looks wrong is the one Treasury gives, [email protected].
For a household that wants a written trail across states, The Settlement & Refund Recovery System includes the source vault of 12 official places money sits and a claim log and payment tracker.
Get The Settlement & Refund Recovery System for a Pennsylvania unclaimed-property search →
This piece was drafted with AI assistance; the figures and dates were checked against the Pennsylvania Treasury Money Match announcements linked above.
