'Highest paid woman in Britain' has more than £2 billion in less than a decade

The pounds are rolling in for ‘Britain’s highest paid woman’ after her pay package reportedly rose to an astonishing £280 million in 2025.

According to the BBC, there is a litany of billionaires using Britain as their playground - 156 to be exact.

As per The Sunday Times Rich List 2025, these famous faces include the likes of Sir James Dyson, inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner (£20.8 billion), and Manchester United’s part-owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe (£17 billion).

However, there's another wealthy person who you may not be familiar with, and she's considered Britain's 'highest paid woman'.

Her name is Denise Coates.

The 58-year-old, who resides in Cheshire with her family, is the founder, majority shareholder, and joint chief executive of online wager company Bet365.

Britain's 'highest paid woman' co-founded Bet365 in the early 2000s (WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Her brother, John Coates, is the other joint executive of the company.

Launched in 2001, Bet365 is one of the world’s largest online gambling companies, with EKG previously valuing its worth at around £9 billion, as per The Guardian.

According to newly published accounts, the Etruria-based company paid Coates a whopping salary of £104 million for the year to March 2025.

This jaw-dropping figure is up from the £94.7 million she cashed in 2024.

It’s suggested that with the new figures, the gambling empress has received payouts over the last eight years that equate to more than £2 billion.

The BBC reported that Coates is also entitled to at least half of Bet365’s £354 million in dividends paid out to shareholders during the working year.

This would take her total haul for the period to at least £280 million, the outlet reported.

Overall, this is a stellar improvement on the £150 million windfall that the majority shareholder (58 percent) in Bet365 received the previous financial year.

It’s not her best payday though, if you can believe it. Back in 2021, the billionaire businesswoman brought in a record £469 million.

Bet365 paid Coates £104 million in 2025, according to reports (Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)

Information about Coates’ take-home pay comes after The Times reported that Bet365’s pre-tax figures fell 43 percent to £339 million from £3.7 billion over the 52 weeks to March 2025.

Revenue, however, rose nine percent to £4 billion, from £3.7 billion a year earlier, the outlet reported.

Coates, a trained accountant, founded her family business in a portable building in a Stoke-on-Trent car park in 2001.

She purchased the web address off eBay a year earlier, according to Stoke-on-TrentLive.

"I was convinced early on that gambling would work well on the internet. It is private, accessible and allows you to present a huge range of betting opportunities to customers," Coates said of her motivations.

She added that the internet ‘gave [her] the opportunity to enter a new and international market where we had the possibility of being the best’.

As well as Bet365, the University of Sheffield graduate runs a foundation in her name, which her company donated to in 2025.

According to the Denise Coates Foundation site, it provides ‘grants to registered charities in England to support their work locally, nationally or internationally’.