The Gary Lineker tax case: what his £4.9m IR35 win really means for you
By Hussein Bhaiji FCCA CTA, Managing Partner. Last reviewed: October 2026.
In 2023, Gary Lineker won his tax case against HMRC over a £4.9 million tax bill. The headlines called it an IR35 case, and it is regularly held up as a victory for freelancers everywhere. But he won it on a point that surprises most people, and the lesson for your own business is not the one the headlines suggest. So what did the tribunal actually decide, why did Lineker win, and does it change anything for you?
Gary Lineker v HMRC: what was the £4.9m tax bill about?
Gary Lineker provided his presenting services through Gary Lineker Media (GLM), a general partnership between him and his former wife, Danielle Bux. HMRC argued that his work for the BBC and BT Sport between 2013 and 2018 should have been taxed as employment under the intermediaries legislation, better known as IR35. It assessed a total of around £4.9 million, made up of roughly £3.6 million of income tax and £1.3 million of National Insurance. That headline figure would have been reduced by the tax Lineker had already paid through the partnership, but the sums at stake were still very large.
What is IR35, in plain English?
IR35 exists to catch what HMRC calls disguised employment. If you work through your own company or partnership but in reality you are working as the client’s employee, IR35 is designed to tax you as one. The test asks what the relationship would look like as a hypothetical contract directly between you and the client: whether the client controls how you work, whether you have to do the work personally, and whether there are mutual obligations within the engagement, the client to pay and you to work. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in HMRC v Professional Game Match Officials Ltd [2024] UKSC 29, those obligations do not need to continue between engagements. Get caught by IR35 and income that might have been taxed efficiently as dividends is instead taxed as salary, with National Insurance on top. Our accountants for contractors and freelancers check this before each new contract starts.
Why did Gary Lineker win? The partnership point
The tribunal never got to the usual questions of control, personal service and obligation. In Gary Lineker & Anor t/a Gary Lineker Media v HMRC [2023] UKFTT 340 (TC), Judge John Brooks decided the case on something more fundamental. Because Lineker signed the BBC and BT Sport contracts himself (the BBC contracts jointly with Danielle Bux), as a principal of his partnership and as the worker doing the job, the tribunal found there were direct contracts between him and his clients. IR35 only applies where services are provided through an intermediary. Where the contract is already direct, the judge ruled, the intermediaries legislation “does not, and cannot as a matter of law, apply”.
Note
The win balanced on a knife edge. Had Danielle Bux signed the contracts on behalf of the partnership instead of Lineker, an intermediary would have stood between him and the client, and IR35 could have been argued in full. The outcome turned on who put pen to paper, not on whether Lineker looked like an employee.
Did HMRC give up?
Not immediately. HMRC disagreed with the decision and pursued an appeal to the Upper Tribunal. It withdrew that appeal before the two-day hearing listed for 2 and 3 December 2024, and the case was settled in November 2024 on terms that have not been disclosed. The First-tier Tribunal decision therefore stands as the only judicial ruling in the case. As a First-tier Tribunal decision it does not bind other tribunals, so it sets no precedent for anyone else’s contract. Most of the contracts in question pre-dated the off-payroll reforms. Those rules reached public bodies such as the BBC in April 2017 and the private sector in April 2021, shifting responsibility for deciding IR35 status from the contractor to the end client in most cases. Small private sector clients are exempt, and the contractor’s own company still decides. From 6 April 2026 the small company test uses the higher thresholds of £15 million turnover and £7.5 million balance sheet total (with 50 employees unchanged; a client is small if it meets two of the three), so some clients that made status decisions in 2025/26 have handed that responsibility back to the contractor.
What does the Lineker case actually mean for you?
Most coverage misses this. Lineker did not win because a tribunal decided he was genuinely self-employed. He won on a narrow structural point about how his contracts were signed. If you work through a normal personal service company and your contract runs through that company, you do not get the benefit of his argument at all. Your engagement would still be judged on the usual control, personal service and obligation tests, exactly the tests the Lineker tribunal never reached. If you work through your own company, our guide Am I inside or outside IR35 in 2026/27? explains who decides your status and how to challenge a determination.
Example
Take a contractor billing £120,000 a year through their own company. Operating genuinely outside IR35, they might take a salary of £12,570 and the balance as dividends, and pay tax broadly like any other business owner. If the same engagement is caught by IR35, almost all of that £120,000 is treated as employment income, with employee and employer National Insurance stacked on top of income tax. At 2026/27 rates the annual difference is smaller than it used to be, about £4,200 on these figures, assuming no other income and the English and Welsh tax bands, if the rate is cut to absorb employer National Insurance, because corporation tax and dividend tax have both risen, the dividend allowance is down to £500 and the main rate of employee National Insurance is now 8%. Together those outweigh the rise in employer National Insurance to 15%. The larger risk is the one Lineker faced. When HMRC challenges past years, its demand is for the full PAYE income tax and National Insurance on each year’s deemed employment income, plus interest and any penalties. Credit for the corporation tax and dividend tax you have already paid is not automatic: it depends on claims made within time limits. Repeat that over four or five tax years and the cash at stake runs well into six figures, which is how HMRC’s figure for Lineker reached £4.9 million.
Warning
HMRC first raised IR35 with the Lineker partnership in April 2017 and its determinations reached back to the 2013/14 tax year. HMRC can and does look back years, and it actively targets higher earners. A status decision you made casually at the start of a contract can become a six-figure problem long after the work is done. This is one area where getting it right at the outset is far cheaper than defending it later.
How Merit helps you get IR35 right
Because our team includes professionals who have worked inside HMRC, we know how a status challenge is actually built, which facts an HMRC officer leans on, and where an HMRC challenge is weak, as it proved to be in Lineker. Our Chartered Tax Advisers review your contracts and working practices before HMRC ever looks at them, structure your company and your income efficiently, and make sure the position you take is one you can defend if HMRC challenges it. And because our partners have built their own businesses from nothing to over £1m in turnover, our advice is commercial: we help you stay outside IR35 where that is genuinely correct, rather than leaving it to chance.
If you contract through your own company, or you engage contractors and worry about your own exposure under the off-payroll rules, have your contracts and working practices reviewed now, while you still control the outcome.
Frequently asked questions
Did Gary Lineker win his tax case?
Yes. The First-tier Tribunal ruled in his favour in March 2023. HMRC appealed, then withdrew the appeal and settled on undisclosed terms before the Upper Tribunal hearing, so the tribunal decision stands as the only judicial ruling. What was actually paid under the settlement has never been published.
What is IR35?
IR35, or the intermediaries legislation, taxes contractors as employees where they work through their own company or partnership but the reality of the relationship is employment. It looks at control, personal service and mutual obligation within the engagement.
Why did Gary Lineker win his IR35 case?
Because he signed his BBC and BT Sport contracts personally (the BBC contracts jointly with Danielle Bux), as a partner and as the worker, the tribunal found the contracts were direct. IR35 only applies where services run through an intermediary, so it could not apply.
Does IR35 apply to partnerships?
It can. The tribunal agreed with HMRC that the intermediaries legislation applies where an individual’s services are provided through a partnership. Partnerships are brought in by section 49(3) ITEPA 2003 (Chapter 8) and section 61M(2) (Chapter 10). Lineker won because he signed the contracts himself as a partner, and so contracted as principal under section 5 of the Partnership Act 1890. The tribunal said that had only Danielle Bux signed on behalf of the partnership, the intermediaries legislation could have applied.
Can HMRC investigate old contracts?
Yes. HMRC first raised IR35 with the Lineker partnership in April 2017, and its determinations reached back to 2013/14. The normal time limit is four years from the end of the tax year, extended to six years where behaviour is careless and 20 years where it is deliberate.
Does the Lineker case mean I am safe from IR35?
No. His win rested on a narrow point about how his contracts were signed. Most contractors working through a personal service company would still be judged on the usual status tests.
Not sure whether you are genuinely outside IR35? Merit Accountants is a firm of Chartered Certified Accountants and Chartered Tax Advisers, and our team includes professionals who have worked inside HMRC. We will check your contracts and working practices and tell you where you stand before HMRC asks. Book a review of your IR35 position.