Almost half (48 per cent) of workers are failing to pay anything at all into their pension pot each month.

However, it would seem they don’t realise the full cost of their reluctance to plan for the future, according to research from Barclays Financial Planning.

The average worker may predict that he will have to go on working until the ripe old age of 63, but people are likely to be disappointed in their expectation of receiving £18,300 a year to live on when they finally get around to drawing their pension.

Barclays says that the average employee currently puts away about £54 a month, which would lead to an income of £2,054 a year aged 63.

Adding the upper limit of the basic state pension would bring their total retirement income to £6,320, but this is only around a third of the amount expected.

Barclays calculates that the average worker needs to increase their pension payment by £315 a month to get back on track toward meeting their desired retirement income.

And most “shocking”, according to the firm’s director, Stephen Ingledew, is that “little has changed in a decade”.

“People continue to have high expectations around retirement, but contributions remain woefully inadequate and mass inertia persists.”

Approximately 63 per cent of people polled by Barclays said that they weren’t worried about saving for retirement at all.

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