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.
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 £469m record payout in 2021.
While Coates’s vast remuneration has sometimes drawn criticism for its sheer 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 also 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 also waived loans to Stoke City football club, which was demerged from the group and is now under the control of Denise 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.
However, the company did refer obliquely to its decision to leave the Chinese market, where betting is illegal. 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.
However, 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 departure has been seen by some pundits as a necessary step to ensure it does not fall foul of regulators or enforcement bodies in the US, where Bet365 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.
