The average UK pension fund achieved a return of 6.8% last year helped by soaring Asian and emerging equity markets, it emerged yesterday.

But most final salary pension schemes are still continuing to move assets into lower-risk bonds and alternative asset classes as they seek to lock in recent gains.

The performance estimates, compiled by pension administration company BNY Mellon Asset Servicing, mean that pension funds have recorded their fifth consecutive calendar year of positive returns following the post-millennium bear market.

Emerging markets and Pacific equities (excluding Japan) were the strongest performers over the year, returning 27% and 34.2% respectively.

The only equity sector which failed to achieve a positive return over the year was Japan, which returned -6.5%.

UK equities, which remains the single biggest asset class for pension fund investment, returned 5.3% over the year.

Property fell 2.6%, its first negative return since 1992. But the strongest non-equity return at 8.5% came from UK index-linked gilts.

There are clear signs that pension funds are continuing to move away from higher-risk but potentially higher-return equities into lower-risk assets, such as bonds.

A survey by the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPT) of 369 of its members published yesterday, showed that 55% of assets in final salary schemes are invested in equities, down from almost 60% in 2006. Around 29% are in fixed interest assets (up 3%) and 16% in alternatives, such as hedge funds and cash (up 3%).

"There is a clear pattern suggesting that the less well funded a scheme is, the higher the proportion of assets that are invested in equities and the lower the proportion that are invested in fixed interest assets," NAPF reported.

It added: "To some extent, less well funded schemes are hoping that investment returns will help erode their deficits, while more well-funded schemes are looking to limit the possible effect of changes in asset values on their funding levels."

Schemes that are more than 100% funded on an accounting basis on average report that 49% of their assets are in equities and 37% in fixed interest assets. For schemes that are less than 80% funded, these proportions are 64% and 28% respectively.

There are continuing signs that even within their equity holdings UK pension funds are abandoning their historic bias towards domestic companies. NAPF found the proportion of pension assets devoted to UK equities has fallen from 31% in 2005 to 25% in 2007. Around 8% of schemes have no UK equity exposure at all.

But there are indications that companies are slowing down the closure of final salary schemes. These are highly prized because the responsibility for generating sufficient investment returns lies with the employer not the employee. But they can be more expensive to the sponsoring company than alternative arrangements.

Just 31% of private sector final salary schemes remain open to new members, down 2% on 2006. But around two-thirds of schemes anticipate remaining open in either their current or modified form over the next five years with just 1% of open schemes expecting to close to current employees.