The closure of private sector pension schemes accelerated in 2012, says the National Association of Pension Funds.
Its annual survey, of 1,018 schemes run by 280 private sector firms, found that only 13% were still open to new joiners, down from 19% in 2011.
Meanwhile 31% were now closed to existing staff as well, up from 23% the previous year.
The NAPF said new staff in the private sector now had "next to no chance" of joining a final-salary scheme.
Joanne Segars, chief executive of the NAPF, said: "The pressures on final salary pensions have proven too great for many businesses. The growing liabilities fuelled by quantitative easing will have been a factor behind the record hike in closures."
"What was once the norm is now a very rare offer. And those who are currently saving into one may find it gets closed," she added.
'Fresh closures'Hardly any firms in the FTSE 100 now offer final-salary pensions to new recruits.
End Quote NAPFThe higher liabilities created by quantitative easing and low gilt yields have prompted a barrage of fresh closures"
A year ago staff at Unilever took the unusual step, for the private sector, of staging several days of strikes against the proposed closure of their final-salary scheme.
The NAPF repeated its criticism of the government policy of quantitative easing (QE), which started nearly four years ago and which has helped push many final-salary schemes into large deficits.
This policy has seen the Bank of England pick up a third of all UK government bonds, in an attempt to inject cheap cash into the banking system and stave off an even deeper economic recession.
That process has raised the price of those bonds and simultaneously reduced the return they provide to investors.
And the knock-on effect has been that pension schemes need an even bigger stock of assets than before, to provide the same flow of cash in the future to pay their pensioners.
"The NAPF believes the higher liabilities created by quantitative easing and low gilt yields have prompted a barrage of fresh closures," the NAPF said.
Easing ahead?Allied to the effect of people living longer, and the greater cost of pension regulation, the NAPF predicted that even more schemes will close in the coming years.
It thinks that nearly half of employers whose schemes are still open to new joiners will close them, with a defined contribution scheme being offered to the staff instead.
And nearly a third of the ones that are still open to existing staff will be changed in some way it predicted, either by being closed to further contributions by current employees, or by the benefits of the schemes being made less generous and thus cheaper to fund.
The pensions industry is going through a sea-change.
The new system of auto-enrolment, which started last autumn, will eventually see several million low and middle-income workers recruited into new or existing DC schemes, where either the employer schemes did not exist before, or where the employees had decided not to join.
To consider easing the pressure on scheme finances brought about by QE, the government has now launched a consultation on tweaking the rules.
Among other things, schemes may be allowed to "smooth" the calculation they make of their assets and liabilities during scheme valuations this year, or later.
This would potentially offset some of the negative effects QE has had on the estimated cost of paying pensions.
But the NAPF said any such move might now be "too little, too late".
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