Denise Coates has been named Britain’s youngest female billionaire while also being the only female in the top 10 richest.

Ms Coates was paid about £300 million in the year ending March 2023, according to accounts filed at Companies House an increase on her salary of £217 million last year. She also took at least half of the £100 million the company paid out in dividends, given her stake as the founder of Bet365.

This year’s payout comes despite the group falling to a pretax loss of £72.6 million, from a profit of close to £50 million in 2022, as it expanded in regions such as North America.

Her pay at the family-owned company dwarfs the remuneration offered by listed FTSE 100 groups, where Pascal Soriot, boss of pharma group AstraZeneca, was the highest-paid executive in 2022 with annual earnings of about £15 million.

Ms Coates’s salary peaked at £421 million in 2020, but dropped to £250 million in 2021 and then to £213 million in 2022. This means that she has earned £1.1 billion through her annual salary alone in just four years. The group, which is more than 50 per cent owned by Coates, also paid out £100 million in dividends in 2023 and 2022, £97.5 million in 2021 and £95 million in 2020.