The total amount contributed annually into pensions (both personal and voluntary contributions to occupational schemes) has increased by nearly a fifth (17 per cent) in the last five years.

According to Prudential’s analysis of HM Revenue & Customs data, individual contributions to pensions in the 2014/15 tax year totalled £9.03bn, an increase of more than £1.3bn since 2010/11.

It’s also the second highest ever publicly available figure and Prudential attributed the increase in part to the initial success of auto-enrolment.

Figures on the total numbers of pension savers for the tax year 2013/14 showed that in the first 18 months of auto-enrolment (it was rolled out from October 2012), around a million more people in the UK started to pay into a pension.

Auto-enrolment also reversed a trend that had seen the total number of pension savers in the UK fall by 32 per cent from 7.8 million to 5.3 million in the 10 years ending 2011-12.

However, despite the success of auto-enrolment, Prudential found the level of pension contributions in 2014/15 hasn’t recovered to those seen in the year before the financial crisis struck.

In 2007/08, the total contributed stood at £10.18bn, so the latest figures are over a billion pound short of the record pension deposits.

Stan Russell, a retirement income expert at Prudential, said: “After taking a long time to recover after the shock of the financial crisis, it appears that workers in the UK are starting to catch the pension savings bug again.

“Now, more than ever, it is important for those looking to secure a comfortable retirement to save as much as possible as early as possible into a pension. With fewer people benefiting from final salary pensions and faced with volatile financial markets, especially following the result of the EU referendum, saving into a personal or workplace pension is something I would encourage all workers to consider strongly.

Russell added that the ongoing changes to pension rules are also helping to fuel their growth in popularity with auto-enrolment encouraging many first time savers, while the flexibility brought about by pension freedoms has also encouraged existing individuals to increase the amounts they save.