Some £31.1 billion is said to have effectively been lost in inactive or unclaimed pension pots.
According to the Pensions Policy Institute, are were now 3.3 million lost pension pots in the UK holding an average of almost £9,500 each.
This was against 2.8 million pots collectively worth around £26 billion two years ago, with the amount in lost pensions having surged by almost £12 billion since 2018.
For those aged between 55 and 75, the average lost pot was found to be worth just over £13,600, against £6,500 for those above the age of 75.
“It’s easy to lose track of a pension,” Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Helen Morrissey commented.
“It’s a consequence of auto-enrolment that you get a pension with every job, but the risk is they go astray.”
She added the lifetime pension model, which was announced by the former chancellor in last year’s Autumn Budget to allow workers to decide where their savings go, should help prevent the problem from growing in the future.
It also comes after Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey warned against the government forcing pension funds to invest in British assets ahead of next week’s Budget.
“I think in the UK, we have a lot of work to do on the pension system,” he said, but “I don’t for a moment support a compulsory allocation of pension money to UK assets”.