8% of self-employed workers aged 25-34 are actively saving into a private pension, compared with 59% of employees in the same age group.

The RSA Entrepreneurial Audit shows that 23% of all self-employed are saving into a private pension compared with 61% of all employees.

Those self-employed individuals closest to retirement, aged 55-64 have an average of £85,500 saved, compared with full-time employees of the same age group who have an average of £162,247.

The number of self-employed has grown by 46% since 2000 to 4.8 million, accounting for 1 in 7 of the workforce.

The government has extended its auto-enrolment review to support how the self-employed can best be encouraged to save for retirement.

Frank Field MP, chair of the work and pensions committee, said:

“We recommended that government consider mechanisms for automatically enrolling self-employed workers and the government has committed to consider the self-employed as part of the 2017 review.”

Kate Smith, head of pensions at Aegon, said:

“Encouraging as many people as possible to save sufficiently to meet their retirement income aspirations and to keep pace with employment trends and the huge rise in people working for themselves, pension saving needs to be pushed up people’s priority list.”

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