Rugby Lineout Laws Explained: Throw, Lifting and Offside
Numbers, the gap, the straight throw and the drive - rugby lineout laws explained for English readers, from the quick throw to the maul that follows it.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Laws & Pathway19 min read
- Minimum players per side
- 2
- Lineout starts from touch
- 5 metres
- Lineout ends from touch
- 15 metres
- Governed by
- World Rugby
A hooker at the Stoop stands with both feet on the tarmac side of the whitewash, ball above his head, while fourteen forwards wait to discover where it is going. The lineout is the only restart in rugby union taken from outside the field of play, and the only one in which a team is handed possession and then invited to defend it three metres in the air.
English clubs treat it as an attacking platform before they treat it as a restart. A lineout five metres from the opposition line is worth more than a scrum in the same position to most Premiership packs, and the reason a side kicks a penalty to the corner rather than at the posts is entirely about what the lineout can produce afterwards.
The laws that govern it come from World Rugby and are applied in England by the RFU, unchanged in substance from Twickenham down to a Saturday fixture in the Yorkshire leagues. They cover more than the throw. Numbers, positioning, lifting, offside, obstruction and the maul that follows are all separate pieces of law, and a hooker who throws perfectly can still lose the ball because a lock gripped the wrong part of a leg.
When a lineout is awarded, and who gets to throw
The ball goes into touch when it or the player carrying it touches the touchline or anything beyond it. The team that did not last play or carry the ball takes the throw. That is the general rule, and the exceptions are the interesting part.
Kick a penalty into touch and the kicking side throws in, which is the whole basis of the corner-flag game. Kick from open play and it depends on where you were standing. From inside your own 22 the ball goes out where it crosses the line and your opponents throw in. From outside the 22 a kick that finds touch on the full gives no ground at all — the lineout is formed level with where the kick was taken. And a player who carries or passes the ball back into his own 22 and then kicks it out on the full loses the gain in ground as well, which is the trap that catches full-backs under pressure.
Those rules are why English sides employ a specialist left-footed kicker for one touchline and why territorial kicking looks so different from one 22 to the other.
Where the ball goes out is the mark, and the lineout is formed level with it, running from five metres in from the touchline to fifteen metres in. Between those two marks the players stand. Outside them, nobody in the lineout may be.
A ball that goes out closer than five metres from the goal line brings the lineout back to the five-metre mark, because a lineout cannot be formed on or over the try line.
The mark itself is the assistant referee's job rather than the referee's. He runs the touchline, raises the flag, and stands at the point where the ball went out with his arm indicating which side throws. Referees in England will overrule an assistant on the direction of the throw where they saw the touch themselves, but almost never on the position of the mark, because the assistant was the only official looking at the line. On a wet afternoon at a club ground with volunteer touch judges, the mark is frequently a negotiation.
Not every ball crossing the touchline produces a lineout. A ball that goes into touch-in-goal, or over the dead-ball line, restarts play with a drop-out or a scrum depending on who put it there, and a lineout is never formed from it. That distinction catches out wingers who dive for a corner and take the ball into the wrong square metre of grass.
Numbers, and why the throwing side controls them
Two per side is the floor. Beyond that the law hands the decision to the team throwing in: they choose the maximum number for that lineout, and the defending side may match it or use fewer, but never exceed it.
This is a genuine tactical weapon and it is under-appreciated by casual watchers. A hooker who calls a two-man lineout has just told six opposition forwards that they have no job, which either leaves them standing uselessly ten metres back or forces them into the backline where they are slower than the men they are marking. Sides in the Premiership use short lineouts to isolate a defence's best jumper, to create space in midfield, and to get quick ball when a full lineout would be a lottery.
The defending team cannot respond by adding a body. They can respond by taking one away, which is the counter to a shortened lineout: match the numbers, then put your spare forwards in the defensive line where they are more useful than they would be jumping.
Numbers have to be declared by formation rather than by announcement. There is no card handed to the referee. The throwing team forms up, the defending team forms up alongside, and the referee counts. A defending side that puts an extra man in has committed an offence and the throwing team gets the sanction.
The people who are in the lineout without being in it
Three positions sit at the edges. The thrower stands in touch. His immediate opponent may stand in the five-metre channel but has to be two metres back from the five-metre line, which is why you almost never see a hooker charge down a throw. And the receiver, usually the scrum-half, stands two metres back from his own line of players, in the space where the ball is expected to come down.
None of them counts towards the lineout numbers, and all three are governed by their own positional rules. The shirt numbers and positional roles that go with each of those jobs are set out separately.
The throw itself, and what happens when it goes wrong
Between the two lines of forwards there is a gap of a metre. The law creates it by requiring each team to stand a metre back from the line of touch, and it exists so the ball has somewhere to land and so the two packs are not already in contact before anything has happened. Closing the gap before the throw is an offence.
The throw has to be straight down that gap. Not straight at the jumper the hooker fancies, not straight in the sense of not wobbling — straight along the line of touch. A hooker who leans and delivers the ball on his own side of the line has thrown it not straight, however cleanly it arrives.
Get it wrong and the non-throwing team chooses. They may take a scrum, which they feed, or a lineout at the same mark, which they throw in. The choice matters more than it looks. A pack that fancies itself will take the scrum and go for a shove; a side five metres from the opposition line will take the lineout every time, because a five-metre attacking lineout is the single best set-piece platform in the sport and a scrum in the same position is not close.
The straight-throw requirement has been the subject of law trials aimed at relaxing it where the defending side does not contest, on the argument that policing a throw nobody is competing for wastes everybody's time. Those trials have not applied uniformly across competitions, and English club rugby, the age-grade game and the international game have not always been on the same version. Anybody refereeing across levels should confirm which variation is in force rather than assume.
A throw that fails to reach the five-metre line, or one that travels beyond fifteen metres without being touched, has its own consequences. The short throw is an offence. The long one is not, but the ball is then in open play beyond the lineout, and the offside lines behave differently as a result.
What the hooker is actually doing
None of the law explains why throwing is difficult, so it is worth saying. A hooker has to deliver a ball of a fixed size to a moving target that is being lifted by two other moving people, on a flat trajectory, in wind, with a defender attempting to jump into the same square metre, having called or been given a code that both his lifters and his jumper have to have understood identically.
The calls are not the mystery they appear from the stand. Most systems in England encode two things: which pod jumps, and whether the ball is thrown to the front, middle or tail. Everything else — the dummy movements, the shifting pods, the second caller — exists to stop the opposition decoding those two facts in the second and a half available. Sides change the code at half-time as a matter of routine, and a side that has been read will usually go to a shortened lineout rather than try to out-think a defence that already knows the answer.
None of that is regulated. The law says nothing about calls, which means it also says nothing to stop a defending forward shouting a false call, and referees have generally treated that as legitimate gamesmanship rather than an offence.
- Ball in touchThe referee marks the spot where the ball or the carrier crossed the line and awards the throw.
- Forming upBoth teams line up between the five and fifteen metre marks, a metre either side of the line of touch.
- Numbers setThe throwing team's formation fixes the maximum. The defence may match it or use fewer.
- ThrowThe ball leaves the hooker's hands and must travel straight down the gap. Lifting may now begin.
- ContestJumpers are lifted, the ball is tapped or caught, and supporters lower their man safely.
- Lineout endsThe ball or the player carrying it leaves the lineout, or a ruck or maul moves past the line of touch.
- Open playThe ten-metre offside line disappears and normal open-play offside applies.
The sequence the laws describe. Several of these steps happen within a second of each other in the professional game.
Lifting, supporting and the law that keeps a jumper alive
Lifting was legalised after decades in which it happened anyway and everybody pretended it was supporting. The current law allows a player to be supported or lifted, and imposes conditions that all exist for the same reason: a man three metres in the air with no way of protecting himself is the most vulnerable body position in the sport.
Pre-gripping is permitted. Two supporters may take hold of their jumper before the ball is thrown, which is why you see locks crouch with hands already on a flanker's shorts. The lift itself may not start until the ball has left the thrower's hands. Lifting early is an offence, and it is one of the few in the lineout that referees at all levels in England pick up consistently, because it is visible.
Where the grip goes is written into the law. A supporter may not grip his jumper below the shorts from behind or below the thighs from the front. The point is to stop a lifter grabbing an ankle or a boot and putting a man up with nothing controlling his hips.
The obligation that gets forgotten is the one at the end. Supporters must lower their jumper to the ground safely as soon as the ball has been won. Dropping him and turning to join the maul is an offence even if nothing bad happens.
Against all of this sits the hardest line in the lineout law: an opponent may not play a player who is in the air. No tackle, no pull on the shorts, no shove at the hips. A jumper who is taken in the air and lands badly is exactly the injury the law was written to prevent, and the sanction reflects it — a penalty at minimum and a card where the referee judges the landing dangerous. Officials in England are given very little discretion here, and rightly so.
Offside at the lineout: two lines and a receiver
Players taking part in the lineout are offside if they cross the line of touch before the ball has been thrown in and touched by a player. Once the contest is live they may move, and a jumper who is put across the line by his lifters at the right moment has done nothing wrong.
Everybody else has a different line. Players not participating must remain ten metres behind the line of touch, or on their own goal line where that is nearer, until the lineout ends. That ten metres is what creates the space a lineout attack plays into, and it is why a backline can stand flat off a lineout in a way it never could off a ruck. The contrast with the tight offside lines at the breakdown is stark, and it is the single biggest reason first-phase attack from a lineout looks so different from phase play.
The receiver has his own rule: two metres back from the lineout, standing in the space between the five and fifteen metre lines. Only one receiver per side is permitted.
Offside at a lineout is a penalty, taken fifteen metres in from the touchline rather than at the mark, which is a small detail worth knowing because it changes the angle of the kick at goal considerably. The general architecture of offside across the rest of the game is covered in our offside law guide.
When the lineout ends, and why the answer keeps changing
The lineout is over when any of several things happens: the ball or a player carrying it leaves the area between the five and fifteen metre lines, a ruck or maul forms and every foot of every player in it moves past the line of touch, the ball is thrown beyond fifteen metres, or the ball becomes unplayable.
The moment it ends, the ten-metre offside line evaporates and the whole defensive picture changes. This is why a defending backline that has been standing obediently ten metres back can suddenly be all over a fly-half — they have not moved illegally, the line has simply gone.
For a driving maul the trigger is the one about every foot moving past the line of touch, and it is the reason defenders count feet rather than watch the ball. A maul that has not quite crossed the line still holds the opposition backline ten metres away. One that has crossed it releases them.
Working out precisely which of these has happened, in real time, with a maul rolling and twenty-eight other players moving, is one of the harder pieces of refereeing in the sport, and it is done without help. A television match official's remit does not extend to adjudicating whether a maul crossed the line of touch, as our page on what the TMO may review explains.
Obstruction, pre-gripping fouls and the offences that hide in plain sight
Lineout offences divide neatly into things that look illegal and things that do not.
The first group is short: barging, shoving a jumper, holding an opponent, closing the gap. Referees see those.
The second group is where matches are quietly decided. A supporter who steps across an opposing jumper's run-up has obstructed him without making contact. A pod that forms a wall around its own jumper so nobody can get near him is obstruction of exactly the kind the law prohibits, dressed as good technique. A player who binds onto an opponent before the ball is thrown, so that the opponent cannot jump when it is, has committed an offence that is almost invisible from the stand and completely obvious on the training-ground footage the coaches watch on Monday.
| Offence | What the referee is looking for | Usual outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Throw not straight | Ball delivered off the line of touch | Choice of scrum or lineout to the other side |
| Closing the gap | A team steps across the metre before the throw | Free kick |
| Lifting early | A jumper leaves the ground before the ball leaves the hands | Free kick |
| Offside at the lineout | Crossing the line of touch or the ten-metre line too soon | Penalty on the fifteen-metre line |
| Obstruction | Blocking an opponent's route to the ball without playing it | Penalty |
| Playing a man in the air | Any contact with a jumper before he lands | Penalty, and often a card |
| Not lowering safely | Dropping a jumper rather than bringing him down | Penalty |
The sanctions in that column are the general position rather than an exhaustive account, and some of these vary in application between competitions. The pattern to take from it is that the safety offences are penalties and the technical ones are frequently free kicks, which is a deliberate piece of drafting: the law punishes danger harder than it punishes sloppiness.
The quick throw-in, and the narrow gate it has to pass through
A quick throw-in is a lineout taken before the lineout exists. Get it right and a defence that has kicked to touch expecting a breather finds the ball live behind it. Get it wrong and you have handed the throw to the opposition.
- Same ballIt must be the ball that went into touch. A replacement ball from the touchline kills the option.
- UntouchedNobody may have handled it except the player who carried it into touch and the player throwing it.
- Before the lineout formsOnce players have lined up at the mark, the chance has gone.
- Correct positionThe thrower stands in touch, anywhere between the mark and his own goal line, with both feet outside the field.
- Five metresThe ball must travel five metres before it touches the ground or another player.
- Straight or backwardsIt may go straight along the line of touch or towards the thrower's own goal line, never forward.
Each of these is a separate requirement in the law. Failing any one of them invalidates the throw.
The untouched condition is the one that ends most attempts. A ball boy who picks it up, a supporter in the front row who catches it, a team-mate who kicks it back — any of those and the quick throw is gone. This is why you see wingers at English grounds sprinting to a ball that has landed in an empty stand rather than a full one, and why some sides deliberately fetch the ball themselves rather than let it be returned.
Throwing towards your own goal line is legal and is the whole point of the tactic. The thrower can retreat as far as his own line and throw from there, which lets a side take a quick throw well behind where the ball actually went out and attack into space the defence has vacated.
If a quick throw is taken illegally, the throw goes back to the mark and a normal lineout is formed, with the opposition throwing in. The cost of trying and failing is real, which is why it is a decision made by the players nearest the ball with no time to think about it.
The driving maul, and the laws that make it possible
A catch and drive from a lineout is one of the few pieces of rugby that is genuinely difficult to defend legally, and it exists because of an interaction between two laws rather than because of any single one.
Once a jumper is caught and brought down, his team-mates bind onto him, the ball is transferred to the back, and a maul is formed. Defenders cannot collapse it. They cannot pull it down, they cannot take the legs, and they cannot tackle the ball-carrier, because the ball-carrier is buried three rows back with bodies in front of him. Playing a player who does not have the ball is obstruction — except that in a maul, the law expressly permits the attacking side to have players in front of their own ball-carrier. That is the exception that makes the drive work.
There are limits. Joining from the side is an offence. A maul that stops moving forward must restart within a few seconds or the referee will call it, and the law gives it one stoppage rather than an endless series. When a maul that started from a lineout becomes unplayable, the put-in for the resulting scrum goes to the side that did not have the ball at the start of it, which is why defending packs sometimes stop competing altogether and simply wait for the drive to die.
The counter that has largely replaced wrestling with a maul is refusing to engage: step away, let the catcher land, and defend the drive as an open-play attack instead. It concedes territory and it removes the penalty risk, which for a side defending its own line in the last ten minutes is usually the right trade. The full mechanics, including the sack and the unsuccessful-end-of-maul law, are in our maul law guide, and the scrum equivalent covers the other set piece.
Lineouts in the age-grade game in England
Nobody plays a full contested lineout at eight years old. The RFU's age grade regulations build the set piece up in stages across the continuum, starting from a simple uncontested restart with a small number of players and adding elements as the age groups progress. Lifting comes late, and deliberately so: the safety case for restricting it in younger age groups is the same case that produced the adult law about lowering a jumper safely.
The precise ages at which lineouts appear, at which numbers increase and at which lifting is permitted have been revised by the RFU more than once, and a coach should read the current Regulation 15 rather than work from memory. Our page on the age grade rules sets out how the progression is organised and where to find the current version.
Two other English variants are worth knowing. Sevens uses a lineout with a minimum of two players from each side, which changes the contest completely, and the details of the abbreviated game are in our sevens guide. And in a good deal of social and veterans rugby the lineout is played uncontested by local agreement, which is not a law variation so much as an accommodation between two clubs who would like everyone to be able to work on Monday.
Winning a lineout you are not throwing into
Stealing an opposition throw is the single most valuable thing a defending pack can do, and it is much harder than it was before lifting was legalised, because a lifted jumper reaches a height a standing one cannot.
The methods break into two families. The first is prediction: watching a hooker's feet, reading the caller, timing a jump off the movement of the opposition pod rather than off the ball. Sides at Premiership level put serious analytical work into opposition lineout patterns, and a defensive lineout coach who correctly calls the front ball on a five-metre throw has done more for his team than most of what happens in the following ninety seconds.
The second is disruption without contest. Compete at the front so the throw has to go long. Put a man in the air at the tail so the hooker cannot find his best jumper. Match the numbers so that no free man exists. None of that wins the ball, and all of it degrades the quality of the possession, which for a defence is often the better outcome — a scrappy lineout ball with a defence set is worth far less than a clean one.
There is a third option, which is to concede the catch and set up to defend the maul. Against a good driving pack near your own line this is the choice that gets made most often, and the crowd at a full English ground will boo it every time. The players are right and the crowd is wrong.
Watch a full lineout sequence from the stand at Twickenham and the thing to follow is not the ball but the tail of the lineout — the two forwards at the back who either commit or hold. Most lineouts are decided there. The rest of the England rugby guides work through the other set pieces and the laws that surround them, and the broader rugby section covers the competitions those laws are played under.