Thirteen bosses at Britain's top public companies took home more than £1 million sterling last year, the highest number since 1995, it emerged yesterday.

Among the millionaire earners were BT head Sir Peter Bonfield, Mr Sam Chisholm, the former chief executive at BSkyB, and Sir Geoffrey Mulcahy, chief executive of Kingfisher, the retail group behind B&Q and Woolworths.

The lucky 13 were joined by seven directors from leading financial companies also paid at least £1 million.

The league table of top earners emerged as part of the latest salary survey by pay experts Monks Partnership and includes directors' basic salaries and bonuses.

The survey covers all of Britain's stock market quoted companies, but does not include bosses at leading privately-owned businesses, such as Mr Richard Branson.

But included in the top earners league is Sir Clive Thompson, chief executive of Rentokil Initial and chairman of the Confederation of British Industry.

Another millionaire named is Mr Richard Brown, who today announced he was leaving his job as chief executive of telecommunications and cable TV group Cable & Wireless. The Monks Partnership survey also compares salaries of different directors at each company.

As expected chief executives and chairman are typically the highest paid, but in a surprise change of fortunes, technical and research directors stepped up to become the second best paid board members. Mr David Atkins, consultant at Monks, said the change reflected the growing value being placed on technical innovation. The best industry to work in as far as pay is concerned is business services and leisure and publishing where board directors earn an average of £105,000.

Some earn rather more, such as Mr Martin Sorrell, chief executive of advertising group WPP whose pay totalled £1,326,000.

However, at the bottom of the ranking is engineering and electronics where board directors are paid an average of £77,000 a year.