Denise Coates, the billionaire boss of Bet365, a self-described “ultimate gambler” and Britain’s highest-paid woman, took home at least £280m in pay and dividends in 2025 despite a slump in pre-tax profits.
Coates’s Stoke-based gambling empire recorded turnover of £4bn in the year to March 2025, up from £3.7bn the year before. Pre-tax profits fell to £349m, from £627m in the previous year.
Bet365 incurred a £325m increase in expenses as it reshaped its global footprint, expanding its presence in the US and South America while giving up its sometimes controversial presence in China, where online betting is illegal.
Coates had already extracted more than £2.5bn in pay and dividends from a company that she began building in a car park in her home city in the West Midlands.
Accounts posted on Tuesday show that she took a further £104m in salary, while her majority shareholding means she is entitled to at least 50% of a dividend of £353.6m, taking her total income from the group to at least £280m.
The deal is an increase on the £150m she claimed last year but falls some way short of her record £469m payout in 2021.
The payout was still almost double the largest payout for a boss of a listed company. Zegona Communications, a London-listed telecoms company, paid its chief executive, Eamonn O’Hare, £131m in 2024, including a £129m bonus after its takeover of Vodafone Spain.
Both packages are far larger than the average pay for bosses of FTSE 100 businesses. The High Pay Centre, which campaigns against income inequality, said the median pay of chief executives rose in 2024-25 to a record £4.6m. That meant the median FTSE 100 boss was paid 122 times the median UK full-time worker – but 60 times less than Coates.N
While Coates’s remuneration has sometimes drawn criticism for its scale, some in the industry have pointed to the fact that she avoids structuring her deals in a way that dodges tax, making her one of the largest contributors to the exchequer in the UK.
The company donated a further £130m to her charity, the Denise Coates Foundation. The Guardian has previously reported that tax breaks available to Bet365 as a result of its donations to the foundation may have saved the company more than the charity has yet paid out to good causes.
During the year, Bet365 waived loans to Stoke City football club, which was demerged from the group and is now under the control of Coates’s brother, John.
The accounts made no mention of early-stage discussions about a possible £9bn sale of the group, which the Guardian revealed earlier this year had taken place.
The company referred obliquely to its decision to leave the Chinese market. Bet365’s presence there has long been controversial, although it has always insisted that it was not breaking any Chinese laws. The company incurred one-off restructuring and reorganisation costs of £59m after its exit from “certain markets”, it said.
It did not cease taking bets in China until the end of March, indicating that some of the cost of its exit could fall during the current financial year.
The accounts said Bet365 would “prioritise obtaining and maintaining gambling licenses wherever feasible” and focus on “markets with long-term sustainable revenue streams in the coming years”.
The company said there were “cogent arguments” in favour of continuing to operate in “certain markets”, but these did not offer “long-term sustainable revenue”.
Some pundits have viewed the departure from China as a necessary step to ensure Bet365 does not fall foul of regulators or enforcement bodies in the US, where the company is expanding fast.
It entered five new states during the year and now offers licensed betting in 16 of them. The US supreme court overturned a long-held ban on sports wagering in 2018, sparking a betting boom as individual states introduced their own regulatory regimes one by one.
