Delaware’s annual MONEY MATCH round went out in mid-September, and the state says it mailed more than $1.2 million in unclaimed property checks to approximately 10,000 people. The money did not come from a tax refund or a government stimulus. It was dormant property that had been sitting in the state’s custody, paired with owners whose addresses appeared on recent income tax filings.
What the Delaware Office of Unclaimed Property announced on September 15
The announcement came from the Delaware Office of Unclaimed Property on September 15, 2026. The state put the total at over $1.2 million and the number of recipients at approximately 10,000 Delaware taxpayers. Both numbers are the state’s own, and the release does not publish an average payment or a largest check, so no per-person figure can be drawn from it.
Kyle K. Pritchard, the State Escheator and Director of the Office of Unclaimed Property, framed the mailing as a matter of efficiency. In the release he said the office is “using technology to make the process faster, more efficient, and seamless—automatically putting money back where it belongs: in the hands of Delaware taxpayers.”
The release calls this the seventh annual round. Across all seven, the program has returned over $6 million to more than 50,000 Delaware taxpayers, according to the same announcement.
Why a tax return can trigger an unclaimed property check
The word “taxpayers” in the announcement describes how owners were found, not who was paid. The state says the checks went out after a data match with each person’s most recent personal income tax return. The 2025 announcement described the same method more plainly: the program compares unclaimed property records with personal income tax returns, so an owner on file in one system can be matched to a current mailing address in the other.
That match is the whole mechanism. Nobody in the matched group had to fill out a claim form, send identification or wait on a processing queue. In the 2025 round, program leadership put the recipient’s job in a single sentence: all MONEY MATCH recipients have to do is cash the check. The 2026 release likewise says the checks were sent automatically, with no claim filing required.
The same 2025 release notes that not every kind of unclaimed property is included in the program. A check in the mail is therefore evidence of a match on the kinds of property the program covers. A missing check is not proof that nothing is waiting.
What counts as unclaimed property in Delaware
Unclaimed property is money or assets whose owners have gone missing from a business or institution’s records. The September 15 release lists the usual examples: dormant bank accounts, undeposited paychecks, unused gift card balances, utility deposit refunds, unpaid insurance claims and forgotten stocks or dividends.
The release describes the office’s mission as reuniting Delawareans with money that is rightfully theirs. Delaware’s unclaimed property site is the official place to search for a name, and the release points to it directly.
Three annual rounds, three very different totals
The size of the mailing has moved sharply from year to year. The September 12, 2023 release, issued under then-State Escheator Brenda R. Mayrack, reported roughly $570,000 going to about 4,700 recipients in that fourth round, with a program total at that point of over $5 million to 35,000-plus taxpayers.
The 2025 round, the sixth, was smaller by dollars and by headcount: nearly $400,000 to approximately 2,800 taxpayers, with more than $5.6 million returned to almost 40,000 taxpayers since the program began in 2021. The 2026 round, at over $1.2 million and approximately 10,000 recipients, is the largest of the three on both measures.
The releases do not explain what drove the swings. They do show that the pool of matched owners changes each September, and that a person left out of one round has not been ruled out of the next.
How a Delaware owner searches directly with the state
Everyone outside the matched group starts at the same place. Delaware names its own database at unclaimedproperty.delaware.gov, and the release also points to MissingMoney.com for multistate searching. The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, the group that runs its public site for the state programs, describes MissingMoney as a free website, managed by NAUPA, from which searchers can look through participating states’ databases.
Searching is free and claiming is free, and both happen directly with the state that holds the money. Paying a finder or a middleman is never required to recover property from a state program. The state official named in this announcement, Kyle K. Pritchard, leads the office that handles those claims for Delaware.
The reach of a search is the other limit worth stating. Delaware’s office holds property reported to Delaware. A former resident whose old employer, bank or insurer was based in another state may find nothing on the Delaware site, and the NAUPA site lists the official programs for all 50 states and the District of Columbia for that reason. MONEY MATCH itself, by the state’s description, works only through Delaware income tax returns.
The September 15 release closes by pointing Delawareans to the official database and to MissingMoney.com, which fits the shape of the program: an automatic mailing for owners the state could match, and a free search for everyone else.
Unclaimed property sits in more than one state’s hands
Delaware’s MONEY MATCH round reaches only owners the state could match through its own income tax returns, which leaves anyone with property in another state’s custody to search that state’s office separately. The costly gap is losing track of which offices were searched and which names were tried.
The Settlement & Refund Recovery System includes a 5-tab Excel tracker pre-filled with all 51 state unclaimed-property offices, plus a source vault of 12 official places money sits and a claim log and payment tracker.
Open The Settlement & Refund Recovery System to organize a multistate unclaimed-property search →
This piece was drafted with AI assistance; the figures were checked against the Delaware Office of Unclaimed Property’s 2026, 2025 and 2023 announcements and the NAUPA site.
