Our QDRO was never filed. What now?
If the QDRO was never filed, the retirement account was probably never divided. Your decree said what should happen. A QDRO is the separate order that makes the plan administrator do it, and without one the plan has no instruction to follow and no authority to act.
This is discovered years later more often than anyone would like, usually when someone retires or changes jobs.
What a QDRO actually is
(If the prior question is whether your spouse has a claim on the account at all, that has its own answer and it is usually less than people fear.)
A Qualified Domestic Relations Order is a court order directed at a retirement plan. It tells the plan administrator to pay part of one person's account to the other, and it has to satisfy federal requirements and the plan's own rules before the plan will honor it.
Two things follow from that. The decree alone is not enough, because the plan is not a party to your divorce and does not take instructions from it. And the plan gets a say, because a QDRO that does not meet the plan's requirements gets rejected and has to be redone.
Not every account needs one. QDROs apply to employer plans like 401(k)s and pensions. IRAs divide through a different mechanism: your decree plus a direct transfer from one IRA custodian to the other. Two ways to ruin that, and both are common. Do not withdraw the money and hand it over, and do not do the transfer on a signed settlement agreement before a judge has actually entered the decree. Either version is a taxable distribution to whoever owned the account, with a penalty on top if they are under 59 and a half, and the cash is already gone. Military and federal government plans have their own separate procedures again.
Finding out whether it happened
Call the plan administrator, not your ex. Ask whether a domestic relations order is on file for the account and whether it has been qualified and implemented. They will tell you. This is the only answer that counts, and people are frequently told by an ex that it was handled when it was not.
Then check your own paperwork for a separate order distinct from the decree, and for correspondence from the plan.
Is it too late?
Usually not, and this is the reassuring part. A QDRO can usually still be entered well after the divorce is final, because it implements a division the decree already ordered rather than creating a new right. It is not unlimited: it depends on what your decree actually says and whether the court kept jurisdiction, and long delays can run into state rules about stale judgments.
But three things genuinely get worse with time, and they are the reason to move now rather than next year.
The money can leave. If your ex has already withdrawn, rolled over, or spent the account, an order arriving afterward has less to reach. Some plans will freeze an account on notice of a pending order, which is a reason to notify them early.
Death narrows it, but does not automatically end it. Federal regulation says an order cannot be refused as a QDRO solely because it was issued after the participant died, so a death is not the automatic defeat people assume. What can still be paid then depends on the plan's terms and on whether survivor benefits were preserved, and pensions are less forgiving here than account plans. File now rather than testing it.
Long delay invites an argument that you sat on the right too long. Courts do not usually accept that where a decree clearly ordered the division, but the longer the gap, the more room there is to make it.
What to do
Get the decree language in front of someone who drafts these, confirm with the plan whether anything is on file, and ask the plan for its QDRO procedures, which most administrators publish and many will pre-review in draft form.
If your attorney was supposed to prepare it and did not, raise it with them directly. Firms often handle it without further charge when the drafting was within the original scope.
Then confirm implementation rather than assuming it. The whole reason this problem exists is that everyone assumed someone else had done it. The rest of the post-divorce list is in what to do after the divorce is final.
QDRO requirements come from federal law and from each plan's own rules, while questions of delay and enforcement come from your state. Government and military retirement systems use different orders entirely. This is a specialist task, and a botched order is worse than none, so it is worth someone who does them routinely.