PGMOL V HMRC: employment status: HMRC decide not to appeal

HMRC has confirmed it will not appeal the final ruling in the eight-year Professional Game Match Officials Limited v HMRC case, which found the referees were genuinely self-employed. The case concerns the employment status of football referees who are engaged on a match-by-match basis. HMRC considered that the referees’ relationship with the PGMOL, for the duration of any engagement, is that of employee, and so PAYE and NIC is due on the fees paid. 

Following a remittal from the Supreme Court, the First-Tier Tribunal released its judgement on 1st May 2026. The case provides authoritative guidance on applying employment status tests factoring in the three-stage process outlined in the seminal case of Ready Mixed Concrete (RMC) (1968).  

Whilst First Tier Tribunals do not create binding precedent, the ruling is the first to explore how the Supreme Court’s clarified legal principles must be applied, so it a persuasive authority. 

Those three stages, as set out in RMC, can be summarised as follows: 

• To be an employment contract, there must be both personal service and a mutuality of obligations. 

• To be an employment contract, the engager must have sufficient control over the worker. 

• Unless one or more of the previous two tests has definitively led to the conclusion that there is not an employment contract, the status of the contract is to be determined by considering the contract in the light of the wider factual matrix. 

Why didn’t the Tribunal find the referees to be employees? 

The FTT’s decision rested on several key factors that will resonate with businesses in many sectors engaging flexible or casual workers. 

Mutuality of obligation: “suffused with choice” 

There may have been an “irreducible minimum” of mutuality, but the obligations between PGMOL and its referees were nevertheless “narrow, short-lived and suffused with choice”. There was no obligation on PGMOL to offer appointments, nor on referees to accept them. Referees could block off dates and decline appointments for any reason, or no reason at all. 

Significantly, referees could withdraw from an accepted appointment right up until arriving at the ground, without facing any disciplinary sanction or penalty. If they did, PGMOL would appoint a replacement. 

This is a powerful illustration of how genuine freedom to accept or reject work remains one of the strongest indicators pointing away from employment. 

Control: regulatory, not contractual 

PGMOL exercised significant control by setting match day procedures, fitness protocols, assessments and coaching systems. However, PGMOL simply re-hashed regulatory requirements that the Football Association imposes on referees. Because PGMOL’s control was regulatory, facilitative and developmental rather than managerial or supervisory, the Tribunal gave this control little weight when it came to determining whether referees were employed by PGMOL. 

Operational involvement is not the same as organisational integration 

The Tribunal drew an important distinction between “operational involvement” and “organisational integration”. While referees were operationally embedded within PGMOL’s systems, their professional identity, authority and accreditation derived from the FA. PGMOL’s role was administrative. Referees did not participate in its governance or commercial activities. 

Working regularly within an engager’s systems does not, of itself, equate to being integrated into the engager’s undertaking as an employee. 

A lack of economic dependency 

While referees bore little financial risk and had no opportunity for entrepreneurial profit, the absence of economic dependency was given considerable weight. In almost all cases, refereeing was a secondary activity that did not provide livelihoods; referees were economically anchored elsewhere. 

An urgent need for HMRC to align with the law 

We now know that HMRC’s view on key parts of status case law, particularly how to apply the RMC framework correctly, has been misaligned with legal principles clarified in the Atholl House (2022) and the PGMOL case.  

HMRC’s view has always been that mutuality of obligation at stage one of RMC meant only identifying payment for work done and it should not be revisited at the third stage. At stage two of RMC, HMRC also believed any amount of control was sufficient to establish control and should also not be revisited. However, the Judges in both the Atholl House and the PGMOL disagreed with this approach stating that the extent and nature of these factors should be examined and revisited in stage three – together with other factors in the wider factual matrix. 

These cases demonstrate that mutuality and control (in the first two stages of RMC) as irreducible minima do not create a presumption of employment. The evaluation at the third stage of RMC is not a search for inconsistency with employment but rather a balanced evaluation of the facts.  

Significantly, the PGMOL decision highlights the urgent need for HMRC to update its internal guidance in line with established law, removing the risk that inspectors apply their own outdated rulebook rather than the law itself. 

HMRC’s status tool in its guidance, CEST, should be overhauled because its underlying logic is legally misaligned. CEST currently produces an indeterminate result when applied to the PGMOL case, despite the case not being finely balanced and having no employment hallmarks. 

Once the precondition thresholds are met using CEST, its conclusion defaults to ‘employed’ and will never move to ‘indeterminate’ or ‘self-employed’, thereby creating a barrier to fair tax treatment. That cannot be right. 

What should businesses consider as next practical steps following this decision? 

This may include: 

• Reviewing whether your current engagement arrangements genuinely preserve workers’ freedom to accept or reject work. 

• Revisiting whether workers can disengage without incurring a penalty after they have accepted work. 

• Examining whether your control mechanisms are managerial and supervisory, or whether they can be better characterised as facilitative and quality-assuring. 

• Relaxing requirements which may be taken to indicate integration into the core functions of the business. 

• Assessing the extent to which your workers are economically dependent on you for their livelihood, or whether the engagement is supplementary to other income. 

• Conducting your own multi-factorial employment status assessment rather than relying exclusively on CEST. 

If you would like to discuss your off-payroll processes, systems, policies and status determinations, you can contact Jas Rai, Employment Taxes Operating Partner HERE