PGMOL & IR35: Referee or TV Presenter?

Introduction

It's a scenario we're familiar with. You're a limited company contractor a few months into what has been a perfectly fine engagement. An email lands from your end client. They've reviewed your IR35 status, decided you're inside, and given you three weeks to move to an umbrella arrangement or move on. The reasons cited – almost without fail – are "mutuality of obligation" and "an element of control". Do you push back, or do you shrug, take the umbrella, and get on with it? And then on 1 May 2026, the First-tier Tribunal handed down its judgment in PGMOL v HMRC. LinkedIn erupted into a wave of "great win for contractors" takes, and the question shifted: does the case actually help?

The short answer is yes, it does, but it's worthwhile taking a moment to understand why.

The PGMOL referees won at the third stage of the employment status test. The Tribunal made a point of noting that refereeing was "a serious hobby" that "did not pay the bills". The referees had full-time day jobs. Officiating income was secondary. That is the opposite of a typical contracting fact pattern, where the contract is the livelihood. So if the question is "do I look like a part-time football referee?", the honest answer for most contractors is no – you look more like a TV presenter. And as you'll see, the TV presenter cases are where this gets interesting.

The bigger story here though, the one that genuinely changes the negotiating position for every contractor sitting under one of those Status Determination Statements (SDSs), is that the two factors most end clients lean on – mutuality and control – have just been put back in their proper place.

Let's unpack what changed, what didn't, and what to do about it.

A quick recap of what PGMOL actually is

For readers coming to PGMOL fresh, here is the short version of a long story.

Professional Game Match Officials Ltd – PGMOL – is the body that contracts the part-time referees who officiate matches in the Football League and the FA Cup. Most of these referees have full-time day jobs in other sectors, and refereeing is something they fit around evenings and weekends. They are paid a match fee for each match they officiate. There is no obligation on PGMOL to offer matches, and no obligation on the referees to accept the ones they are offered.

For the 2014/15 and 2015/16 tax years, HMRC took the view that these arrangements amounted to employment for PAYE and National Insurance purposes. PGMOL disagreed. What followed was ten years of litigation, five tribunal and court hearings, and £584,000 of disputed tax. PGMOL won at the First-tier Tribunal in 2018. PGMOL won again at the Upper Tribunal in 2020. The Court of Appeal reversed in 2021. The Supreme Court dismissed PGMOL's appeal in 2024 but sent the case back down to the FTT to apply the third part of the employment status test. The FTT, in May 2026, ruled again for PGMOL.

A quick technical note before we go on. PGMOL was not, strictly speaking, an IR35 case. It was an employment status case for direct PAYE and National Insurance purposes – the question being whether these referees should have been treated as employees of PGMOL, or as self-employed individuals working for themselves. The reason the case matters for IR35 is that it turns on essentially the same employment-status principles. IR35 status uses the same three-stage framework. Which is why a case about football referees has just landed squarely on the desks of every limited company contractor in the country.

In PGMOL, the Supreme Court in 2024 handed stages one and two to HMRC. Mutuality: present. Control: present. So far not good. The case went back to the FTT to apply stage three, and here, in May 2026, the First-tier Tribunal ruled for PGMOL. Decisively. The tribunal described its conclusion as "not finely balanced".

It is an FTT decision, so it is useful and persuasive, but not binding precedent in the way a higher-court decision would be.

That distinction – that the win came at stage three, not at stages one or two – is what does the work in everything that follows.

The real news: mutuality and control have been put back in their proper place

For the last 25 years, IR35 has been argued and decided primarily on two factors. Mutuality of obligation. Control. CEST tests for both. Almost every Status Determination Statement we see leans on one or both. The standard end-client move has been: "our analysis shows there is an element of control, and you have to provide your services personally, therefore inside IR35." That has been the playbook since the legislation came in.

When PGMOL reached the Supreme Court in 2024, HMRC was effectively asking the court to confirm that playbook. The court did. It conceded both factors. Mutuality of obligation: present in the referee arrangements. Control: present too. The case was then sent back to the First-tier Tribunal to apply the third part of the test.

The FTT turned around in May 2026 and ruled for PGMOL, concluding that even with mutuality and control, these referees were still not employees.

This is the part that matters most for our contractor clients. The two factors that have dominated IR35 disputes for a generation have been confirmed as insufficient on their own. You can have mutuality. You can have control. The third stage – the in-business-on-own-account test – can still defeat them both, and in PGMOL it did so decisively. The tribunal called the result "not finely balanced", which is unusually firm language for an employment status decision.

So mutuality and control are now best understood as necessary but not sufficient. They have to be present for there to be any employment relationship at all. But their presence no longer ends the conversation.

This is a game changer for every contractor sitting under an inside-IR35 SDS that relies on those two words. The contractor in our opening scenario, whose end client cited "mutuality of obligation" and "an element of control", was looking at a determination that was difficult to challenge on its own terms. After PGMOL, the same determination is materially weaker. And the place where the case will now actually be decided – the in-business-on-own-account analysis at stage three – is the part where the contractor can really have two hands on the steering wheel.

Where stage three has gone before – the cases that actually matter

Stage three isn't new. The courts have been using it to decide employment status cases for over half a century. So if you want a sense of where PGMOL has just pushed the IR35 conversation, the most useful thing to do is look at where stage three has already been.

The foundational case for our contractor clients is Hall v Lorimer, decided by the Court of Appeal back in 1993. Mr Lorimer was a freelance vision mixer who worked for over twenty production companies a year, on equipment they provided, with no obvious financial risk of his own. On a textbook checklist, he looked a lot like an employee. The Court of Appeal said no, he was self-employed, and Nolan LJ gave us the line that has shaped the third stage ever since: "the object of the exercise is to paint a picture from the accumulation of detail … the overall effect can only be appreciated by standing back from the detailed picture which has been painted, by viewing it from a distance and by making an informed, considered, qualitative appreciation of the whole."

In plain English, the question is not whether you tick a particular box. It is whether, when you stand back, the picture looks more like a business or more like employment. That is the question the PGMOL tribunal asked itself, and it is the question every status determination will turn on from here.

Over the last decade, HMRC has run a string of cases against well-known TV and radio presenters. These are some of the closest analogues to IR35 cases that our contractor clients are likely to face, and they are worth knowing because they show how powerful economic dependence on one engager can be, especially at stage three.

1. Kaye Adams Won. A long career across multiple broadcasters, with a genuinely diversified portfolio over many years.
2. Stuart Barnes Won at First-tier Tribunal in 2023 on his Sky rugby punditry, with The Times, Sunday Times, and public speaking work alongside. HMRC appealed and won at the Upper Tribunal in 2024.
3. Adrian Chiles Won at First-tier Tribunal in 2022, with BBC, ITV, sports journalism and other ventures alongside. HMRC appealed and the Upper Tribunal in 2024 found errors in the FTT's reasoning. The case is no longer the win it was first reported as.
4. Paul Hawksbee Won at FTT, lost at Upper Tribunal, lost at Court of Appeal. Almost wholly reliant on Talksport.
5. Christa Ackroyd Lost. Almost wholly reliant on the BBC.

Five cases, one clean win, two FTT wins later overturned or reopened on appeal, and two clear losses. The pattern that holds up is the one Adams demonstrates: a genuinely diversified portfolio of work across multiple engagers, sustained over years. The cases where dependence on a single engager dominated, Hawksbee and Ackroyd, were lost outright. The two in the middle, Barnes and Chiles, show how qualitative stage three really is. Both won at FTT on what looked like reasonable portfolio arguments. Both then lost ground on appeal when a higher court found flaws in the way the FTT had approached the overall employment-status assessment.

Mutuality and control were arguable in every one of them. Stage three is what decided the outcomes, and stage three is unforgiving when the portfolio thins out.

Which brings us to the question in our headline, and the comparison most contractors should be doing this week.

So – referee, or TV presenter?

Here is the comparison every limited company contractor should be doing this week.

Reading down those two columns honestly, most of our contractor clients are not in the referee column. They are in the right-hand column. The cases that look most like their engagement are not refereeing cases. They are TV presenter cases – and as we saw above, four of the five presenter cases ultimately went against the contractor, with only Kaye Adams winning cleanly. The cases that came closest to a typical contractor pattern, Hawksbee and Ackroyd, both lost.

That is the honest part of the news and it is worth saying out loud, because the headline version of PGMOL is glossing over it. A contractor reading the case as a blanket green light is misreading it.

But it still brings a great deal of value to the equation. The contractor patterns we actually see in our client base – sequential single clients running back-to-back, moonlighting alongside a main engagement, and even the genuinely long-term single client where the engagement is structured properly – are all defensible at stage three. None of them is automatically lost. What the ruling has done is shift the question from "can I argue my way out of mutuality and control?" (a question that has been getting harder for a decade) to "can I show that I am, in the round, in business on my own account?" (a question the contractor has a lot more say in answering).

The five things that strengthen that in-the-round picture are what the rest of this piece is about. They are not new advice in themselves. What PGMOL has done is make them more powerful than they were a week ago, because they are now the things the case will actually turn on.

The action list – five concrete moves, calibrated to how your business actually works

This is the centrepiece of our blog, and the section that turns the landmark news into something you can actually act on.

1. Engagement structure – whichever pattern you fit, make it look like a business engagement

Your "In Business On Own Account" picture (IBOOA if you prefer the acronym, though I'll understand if you've never seen it) is built from the shape of your engagement, not from a head-count of clients. Several patterns work; one does not.

Sequential single clients (3, 6, 12-month engagements, one at a time). One of the strongest IBOOA patterns there is. This is literally the Hall v Lorimer pattern. The fact that each engagement is single-client at any given moment doesn't matter – the picture over three to five years shows clear business activity.

Genuine moonlighting / weekend work alongside a main engagement. Strong even at small volumes. A real £3,000 of side work over a year is real evidence that the business has a parallel life. The point is existence, not volume.

Long-term single client (5, 10, 20 years). The genuinely hard case, but defensible if structured properly. The key reframe is that the longer the engagement runs, the more the structure has to do for you – distinct project scope each renewal, commercial rate negotiation, no signs of being embedded in the client's team, real business identity outside the engagement.

Token second client just for the optics – worse than nothing. Don't fake it. HMRC and the courts spot contrived arrangements quickly, and a fake second client damages your case rather than helps it.

2. Don't get drawn into the team – the biggest contractor-controlled lever

This is where contractors have the most control, and where the action list puts most of its weight. Each item is small. Cumulatively they are the difference between an IBOOA picture that holds up and one that quietly collapses.

1. Don't accept the client email address – use your own business email.
2. Don't sit on company Slack or Teams as an employee – be there as a supplier if you need to be there at all.
3. Decline the internal training programmes, the staff Christmas party, the company merch. Remember, you are a supplier of services to your client, not an integral member of staff.
4. Don't appear on the org chart.
5. Don't sit through performance reviews – you're a supplier, you're either delivering or you're not.
6. Don't ask for holiday approval – you take time off when you choose, though of course be respectful of your client's requirements. No one likes a supplier who disappears for a week and doesn't tell the business.
7. Don't have set hours that mirror employment. Of course, if you need to heavily interact with staff, then working from 10pm to 6am is probably a no go.

3. A real business identity, in the way your industry recognises it

The textbook version of this advice tells contractors to build a website. For most one-man-band professional service contractors, that is theoretical. Your business identity runs through your industry network, not a Squarespace page.

1. A current LinkedIn profile that presents you as a business, not just an employee CV.
2. Branded invoicing through Joy Pilot, which handles the look and feel without anyone having to think about it.
3. A separate business bank account.
4. PI insurance where the work warrants it.
5. Registered office address – the No Worries office address works fine, plenty of clients use it.
6. Recruitment firm relationships and personal industry contacts that get you the next role. These are the strongest IBOOA evidence most of our clients actually have, because they show you operate as a business that needs to go out and win work.

4. Keep the email trail you already have

Contractors know it's on them to go out and hunt down new work. This is a really nice IBOOA indicator. So how do you prove it?

1. The real paper trail sits in your inbox: emails to and from recruitment firms about open roles, conversations with industry contacts about upcoming opportunities, follow-ups on roles that didn't land, discussions about contract endings and what's next.
2. This correspondence already exists for most contractors. The advice isn't "start doing something new". It's: don't delete it, recognise it as evidence of how your business wins work, and keep it organised somewhere you can produce it if asked.

5. Have a substitution clause, but lean on right-to-refuse-work instead

1. Have the substitution clause in the contract. A contract without one is genuinely weak.
2. But don't lean on it as the centrepiece. Real personal substitution rarely happens for professional service contractors, and the IBOOA story has to come from elsewhere.
3. The closer functional point that PGMOL reinforced is the right to refuse work. The referees could decline matches, and the FTT placed real weight on that. For most professional contractors, that is a more relevant test than literal substitution: when a piece of work or a renewal is offered, is there a genuine commercial choice on both sides, or is it just assumed you'll take it?

Why CEST still cannot tell you the answer

A short word about CEST. HMRC's Check Employment Status for Tax tool is the engine that drives most Status Determination Statements. It is what most end clients use to decide your IR35 status, and it is what HMRC itself relies on in the first instance.

CEST is a checklist. It asks closed questions about mutuality, control, the right of substitution, the provision of equipment, and a handful of other factors. It then produces a determinative output – inside IR35, outside IR35, or unable to determine.

What CEST does not do is the thing PGMOL just confirmed actually decides cases. It does not test economic dependence on the engager. It does not stand back and paint a picture in the round. It cannot do the qualitative weighing that the FTT did in May 2026, because qualitative weighing is, by definition, not something a tick-box tool can perform.

The implication is uncomfortable for HMRC. So now, if you are relying on a CEST output as your sole defence, get a proper status review done.

The bigger picture: a quiet win for the IR35 critics, just not the way most people think

A wider thought, now that the technical reading is out of the way.

IR35 was introduced in April 2000 to fix a 2000-era problem. Some employees were leaving their job on a Friday and coming back on Monday as a limited company contractor, doing the same job for the same employer, but paying significantly less tax. And in the early 2000s, the gap really was significant. Corporation tax had a starting rate of 0% on the first £10,000 of profit. The first £30,500 of dividends was completely tax-free. The top dividend rate was an effective 25%. Run the numbers on a typical contractor on a £200 day rate in 2003/04 (we did, in a blog last year), and the total tax paid was around 18.5% of business income, compared to 27.2% for the equivalent salaried employee. The contractor walked away with £36,697 compared to the employee's £23,304. That kind of gap deserves legislation.

Fast forward to today. The dividend tax-free allowance has been crunched from £30,500 to £500. The top dividend rate has gone up from an effective 25% to 39.35%. The corporation tax starter rate of 0% has gone entirely, and the main rate is now 25%. The personal allowance has been frozen for so long it might as well be set in concrete. And the off-payroll working rules introduced in 2021 have shifted compliance liability onto end clients, who have responded by either banning limited company contractors outright or pushing them into umbrella arrangements.

Which leaves an awkward question. What is IR35 actually doing in 2026? It is forcing genuine independent contractors through a legal test so qualitative that it took ten years and five hearings before a tribunal could reach a 'not finely balanced' conclusion, in pursuit of a tax differential that has disappeared. And as PGMOL has just confirmed, even when the law gets it right, it gets it right for people who already had a portfolio of work and a full-time job elsewhere – the people who barely needed the protection in the first place.

It is not policy. It is inertia.

What to do this week

Three different actions depending on where you sit.

If you have just had an inside-IR35 SDS landed on you, do not roll over – but do not celebrate PGMOL either. The case strengthens your position if your end client has leaned on mutuality and control, but it does not automatically reverse the decision. Get your IBOOA picture properly assessed against the factors the FTT actually weighed up, and engage with your end client on that basis. There is room to push back.

If you are in a long single engagement and feeling comfortable, this is the conversation to have now. The Hawksbee and Ackroyd lesson is the one to take to heart. A long single engagement with high economic dependence is the hardest IBOOA picture to defend. The structural moves that strengthen it (distinct project scope each renewal, commercial rate negotiation, no signs of being embedded in the team, real business identity outside the engagement) take time to put in place and even longer to evidence.

If you are an end client, your SDS process needs a hard look. PGMOL has made stage three load-bearing in a way it was not before. A CEST output leaning on mutuality and control is no longer enough on its own. Every SDS that goes out from this week onwards should be written with stage three properly considered.

The Bottom Line

PGMOL is good news for our contractor clients. Just not quite the news most contractors are reading it as.

The headline reading – that mutuality and control no longer end the conversation – is genuine, and it gives every contractor sitting under a thin SDS a real negotiating position they did not have a week ago. The careful reading – that the case was won on a fact pattern most contractors cannot replicate (eg refereeing was a side hustle) – is the calibration that has to come with it. The good news comes with work attached.

The wider point is harder to ignore. IR35 was a reasonable response to a 2000-era tax problem that has since been legislated past. The arbitrage that justified the legislation no longer runs in the contractor's favour. The legal test that decides cases has become so qualitative that the highest court in the land took ten years to clarify it.

What PGMOL gives our clients, alongside the headline, is a clearer map of where the case will actually be argued from here. Stage three. The IBOOA analysis. The factors a contractor has the most say in shaping.

If you are wondering how PGMOL affects your IR35 position, or you are an end client trying to work out where this ruling leaves your contractor engagements, get in touch with No Worries Accounting. We have been guiding contractors through the UK tax system for over twenty years. Formal IR35 employment status advice (which tends to be employment law) is not something we offer ourselves, but we are happy to chat it over, and we know a number of trusted specialists we can point you towards. No obligation, no sales pitch. Well, maybe a small sales pitch. 🙂