Proton radioactivity from deformed nuclei is usually well reproduced using the particle‐rotor model in the strong coupling limit. Recent attempts to go beyond the adiabatic approximation, by the addition of the Coriolis interaction, have failed in reproducing the experimental results. We show that the introduction of the pairing residual interaction in the non‐adiabatic coupled channel method permits to recover the perfect agreement with data. © 2003 American Institute of Physics