How to Become a Rugby Referee in England: Courses and Levels

Nine o'clock on a Saturday morning in October. An appointments officer at a county referee society is looking at a spreadsheet with more fixtures on it than names, working out which of this afternoon's matches will have a qualified referee in the middle and which will have a club coach in a tracksuit doing his best. That calculation happens somewhere in England every week of the season, and it is the reason this page exists.

The Rugby Football Union has been the governing body of the English game since 1871, and the officiating structure beneath it is not run by the RFU directly. It is run by a network of independent county and regional referee societies — Yorkshire, Lancashire, Somerset, the London society and thirty-odd others — which recruit, train, appoint and grade the officials who take charge of everything from a Counties 3 fixture on a council pitch to the top of the community game. The RFU sets the award, writes the regulations and employs the professional group. The societies do the rest.

There are far fewer of them than there were, and far fewer than the fixture list needs.

The shortage, and what it does to a Saturday morning

When a match has no appointed referee, it does not get cancelled. A club coach or a spare player takes the whistle, and the fixture goes ahead with an official who has no formal law training, no independence and no protection. That is the everyday consequence of the shortage in England, and it is worse at 3rd and 4th XV level than anywhere else, because societies appoint their qualified members to league fixtures first.

Two things drive the numbers down. Attrition among new officials is heavy in the first two seasons, and the reasons given are consistent: abuse from touchlines, the isolation of turning up alone to a hostile ground, and the discovery that refereeing is far harder than it looks from the stand. The second driver is age. A large proportion of active society members in England have been doing it for decades, which is a credit to them and a structural problem, because the replacement rate is low.

The upside for anyone considering it is unusual. A qualified referee in most English counties can have as many matches as they want, at whatever level they can handle, within weeks of finishing the course. There is no waiting list. There is no competition for appointments at the entry grades. If you are prepared to be shouted at by a man in a puffa jacket holding a pint on a touchline in Kettering, the door is open.

Refereeing also does something for a player that no amount of playing does. It teaches you the breakdown from the inside — why the ruck laws are refereed the way they are becomes obvious once you have had to make forty of those judgements in eighty minutes, and a great many club players who take the course do it purely to become better at the game they are still playing.

The RFU entry-level course and what it actually covers

The RFU's entry-level refereeing award has been through several names and delivery formats over the years — an evening classroom course, a weekend day, a blended course with online modules and a practical session — so the sensible approach is to ask your local constituent body or society what they are currently running rather than to trust any fixed description of it. The content, though, has been consistent for a long time, because what a new referee needs on day one has not changed.

It covers four things.

The laws you will actually apply. Not all twenty-one of them in equal depth. The course concentrates on the tackle, the ruck, offside, foul play and the set piece, because those are the decisions that occur every ninety seconds. Marks, the ball in touch and scoring get less time, because they are largely self-evident on the pitch.

Positioning. This is the part that surprises candidates, and it is the single biggest determinant of whether a new referee looks competent. Where to stand at a scrum, which side of the ruck to be on, how deep to be at a lineout, how to arrive at a breakdown without being in the passing channel. A referee in the wrong position guesses; a referee in the right position sees.

Signals and communication. The signal set is prescribed by World Rugby and has to be unambiguous, because the touchline, the video and the disciplinary process all read it. What is not prescribed is the talking, and modern refereeing in England is heavily verbal — managing a scrum with voice before penalising it, telling a jackal he is late rather than blowing.

The administrative frame. Match card, front-row competency declarations, uncontested scrums, injuries, temporary suspensions, and what you are obliged to do if a player is sent off.

The course does not make you a good referee. It makes you a legal one, which is the prerequisite. Everything else comes from the twenty or thirty matches after it.

Course fees are set by whoever runs the course — the constituent body, or the society — so there is no national figure, and a page that gives you one is inventing it. What is worth knowing is that the money often comes back. Many societies subsidise the fee outright, and a common arrangement is a refund once a new official has completed a set number of appointments, which exists precisely because attrition in the first season is the problem the societies are trying to solve. Clubs will sometimes pay it for a member willing to qualify, on the reasonable calculation that a club with its own referee has an easier time filling its own fixtures.

Two groups take the course for reasons other than becoming a referee, and both are welcome. Coaches take it because they cannot coach the breakdown without knowing exactly where the line is. Players in the back end of their careers take it because they have spent fifteen years arguing with officials and want to find out whether they were right. A reasonable number of the second group never referee a match and become considerably less noisy on a Saturday, which the game counts as a win.

1. 1Contact the societyEvery county or regional referee society lists a secretary. That one email starts the process, and the reply usually comes the same week.
2. 2Book the entry-level courseRun by the constituent body or society, over a weekend day or a pair of evenings, with an online element in most current formats.
3. 3Complete the course and registerYou are entered on the RFU's records as a qualified official and become a member of the society.
4. 4DBS checkRequired before officiating any age-grade rugby, and processed through the society or the RFU rather than by you directly.
5. 5First appointmentsUsually a lower senior XV or an age-grade fixture, chosen deliberately for a forgiving environment.
6. 6Advisor attendsAn experienced member of the society watches an early match, writes a report and talks it through afterwards.
7. 7GradingOnce you have a body of matches and reports behind you, the society places you on its grade structure and the appointments get harder.

The typical sequence in an English county. Timings vary by society and by how often courses are scheduled locally.

Societies, appointments and the Sunday night email

A referee society is a members' organisation, not a branch of the RFU. It has a committee, a subscription, an annual dinner and a constitution, and in many counties it predates most of the clubs it serves. What it holds, and what makes membership non-optional in practice, is the appointments function.

Clubs submit their fixtures to the society. The appointments officer — a volunteer, almost always, and one who spends a startling number of hours on it — allocates an official to each one, weighing the level of the match, the grade of the referee, geography, availability and, quietly, temperament. Some fixtures need an experienced official because the two clubs dislike each other. Some are ideal for a new referee because both coaches are patient. That judgement is not written down anywhere and it is the most valuable thing a society does.

Appointments typically land by email early in the week, and you confirm. Societies expect availability to be entered honestly and in advance; nothing burns goodwill faster than a Friday-night withdrawal that leaves a match uncovered.

Membership brings other things with it. Law update evenings, which matter more than they sound, because World Rugby amends the laws and runs global trials on a rolling basis and a referee working from a three-year-old understanding will get something badly wrong. Mentoring. Social contact, which is the reason a lot of members stay. And insurance cover, arranged at society or union level, which an unattached individual refereeing a match arranged privately does not have.

Climbing the ladder from a Counties fixture upwards

Progression in English refereeing is a grading system operated by the society at the bottom and by the RFU's panels at the top. Societies grade their members on a numbered internal scale, feeding the strongest into regional and national panels; the exact numbering has been revised more than once and differs in detail between societies, so a number quoted by a referee from Devon does not necessarily mean the same thing as the same number quoted in Cumbria.

Stage	Where you referee	Who assesses you
Newly qualified	Age-grade and lower senior XVs, local fixtures	Society advisor, informally at first
Society graded	Counties divisions, moving up as reports allow	Society advisors and referee coaches
Regional	Regional 1 and Regional 2, with assistant-referee work above	Regional selectors and panel assessors
National panel	National Leagues and the Championship, plus AR appointments	RFU panel assessment
Professional group	Premiership and international rugby	Full-time RFU appointment and review

The shape of that ladder is worth understanding before you start, because it explains an oddity of the pathway. Progress upward is not primarily about knowing more law. Every referee on the list above knows the laws. What separates the levels is speed of decision, accuracy under fatigue, and the ability to manage thirty adults who are becoming less reasonable as the match goes on. A referee who cannot get a scrum to stay up at Counties 2 will not get it to stay up in National League 1, where the front rows are stronger and the consequences are larger. The scrum laws page explains why that particular set piece defeats more officials than any other part of the game.

At the top, the professional group is a full-time employed body within the RFU, responsible for Premiership fixtures and providing England's officials to international rugby. World Rugby appoints its international panels from nominations submitted by unions, which is why a referee's route to a Test match runs through the RFU rather than around it.

How fast anyone moves through that structure depends more on volume than on talent. A society member refereeing one match a fortnight will take several seasons to accumulate the body of reports a promotion needs; one taking a Saturday senior fixture and a Sunday age-grade match through the whole season will do it in a fraction of the time, because refereeing is a skill built by repetition and there is no substitute for the accumulated hours. Societies know this and will happily give an eager newcomer two appointments a weekend from the first month.

The other honest note about the ladder is that most people stop partway up it deliberately. A referee settled at a level they enjoy, thirty minutes from home, with clubs they know and a Saturday that ends in a bar rather than a motorway, is not a failed candidate for promotion. The English game runs on people who found their level and stayed there for twenty years, and societies value them more than they value the small number who go all the way through.

Advisors, coaches and how an official is developed

The word English refereeing uses is advisor, and the distinction from assessor is deliberate. An assessor marks. An advisor watches, writes, and then spends forty minutes in a clubhouse afterwards going through three or four moments with you, usually the ones you already knew were wrong.

An advisor's report follows a structure: positioning, law application, management, communication, and the handling of specific incidents. It will say what to work on next, in concrete terms — "you are arriving at the breakdown square to the play rather than at an angle, which is why you are missing the entry from the side on the far touchline" is a typical note, and it is more useful than any amount of law revision.

Beyond that, societies run in-season development in several forms. Video review sessions, where members watch clips and are asked to make the call before the answer is shown. Law amendment briefings, particularly after World Rugby closes a global trial and something becomes permanent. Practical evenings at clubs, working on scrum engagement or lineout offside with players who have volunteered. And, increasingly, video of members' own matches recorded on a touchline camera, which is uncomfortable and effective in roughly equal measure.

The other development route is refereeing sideways rather than upward. Running touch as an assistant referee at a level above your own is the standard way to learn what the next tier looks like without being responsible for it, and most societies actively push newer members into AR appointments for exactly that reason. Sevens tournaments are another — sevens compresses a season's worth of decisions into a weekend and exposes positioning weaknesses ruthlessly, because there is nowhere to hide on an empty pitch.

Refereeing age-grade rugby, where the laws are different

This is where a great many new officials start, and it is not the soft option it sounds like.

Age-grade rugby in England is governed by the RFU's Age Grade Rugby regulations, which set out a distinct version of the game for each band. Contact is introduced progressively rather than all at once: the youngest bands play tag, then a limited-contact game, then a version with restricted scrums and lineouts, until the full fifteen-a-side game arrives in the upper teenage bands. Scrum numbers rise band by band. Push distance is capped at several ages, measured in metres and enforced by the referee. Lineouts start uncontested. Pitch dimensions, match length and squad sizes all vary with the band.

A referee working age-grade rugby therefore needs to know which version of the game is being played before kick-off, and the regulations are updated periodically, so an official who learned the variations five years ago and has not read them since will be refereeing something that no longer exists. The age-grade rules page sets out the structure in full.

Two additional obligations attach. A valid DBS check is required for anyone officiating age-grade rugby in England, arranged through the society or the RFU rather than obtained privately. And the safeguarding expectations are explicit: how you speak to players, how you manage a sideline, and what you do if you have a concern about a child's welfare.

Young officials are a category of their own. The RFU has set the minimum age for its entry-level award at 14 in recent years, with young referees restricted to age bands below their own and supported by an experienced adult on the touchline. Those thresholds have been revised, so confirm the current position with the society rather than assuming. What is not in doubt is that a fourteen-year-old refereeing an under-11s match needs an adult standing nearby, and that adult's main job is the parents.

Fitness, and what the middle actually demands

There is no formal fitness test to qualify as a referee in England. There is a very quick informal one, administered by the game itself in the sixty-eighth minute, when the ball goes wide and you are eight metres behind the play with no idea whether the pass out of the tackle went forward.

• 1Referees on the pitch
• 2Assistant referees
• 30Players to monitor

The composition of a fifteen-a-side match under World Rugby's laws. It describes the officiating team, not any workload measurement.

A referee covers ground comparable to a back-row forward over eighty minutes, without the recovery a substitution provides and without the ball to look at as an excuse to stop. The specific demand is not endurance so much as repeated acceleration — the sprint from a breakdown to the next breakdown, twenty metres at a time, several hundred times.

At community level the standard required is simply the fitness to be in the right place. Officials at the national panels and above are formally tested, in line with the standards applied across elite rugby, and the elite group in England trains to a programme comparable to a professional player's conditioning work. The intermittent-recovery running tests used across elite rugby are applied to match officials as well as players; the exact protocols are set by the union and have changed over time.

The part people underestimate is cognitive. Decision quality degrades with fatigue faster than running speed does, which is why an official who is comfortably fit for the level makes better calls in the last quarter, and why a referee promoted a level too early tends to fail in the final twenty minutes rather than the first.

What match officials are paid in England

The honest answer is a range from nothing to a salary, with most of the country at the bottom of it.

In the community game the standard arrangement is expenses rather than a fee. Mileage, at a rate set by the society or the competition, and a meal in the clubhouse after the match, which is a genuine part of the arrangement rather than a courtesy. Some competitions and some leagues do pay a set match fee to the appointed official; the practice is inconsistent across England and is decided by the competition organiser rather than nationally. Published fee scales exist in places and are the exception rather than the rule, which is why any figure quoted on a general website should be treated with suspicion. Ask the society, and ask which competition the appointment is in.

At the top, the professional group of match officials is employed by the RFU on contracts, with the pay structure of a specialist professional role rather than a match-by-match arrangement. Between those two ends sits a semi-professional middle — the Championship and the National Leagues — where officials receive match payments that are meaningful without approaching a living.

Nobody in England becomes a referee for the money, and the societies know it. What they can offer instead is the thing the shortage guarantees: as much rugby as you can physically take, on grounds you would otherwise never visit, with a level of access to the game that no supporter has. There are worse trades.

Abuse, Respect and what happens after you report it

Refereeing in England has a touchline problem, and the RFU's response to it has been running for years under the Respect programme — codes of conduct for players, coaches, spectators and officials, roped-off spectator areas at age-grade matches to keep parents away from the pitch, and a set of expectations that clubs are held to rather than asked about.

The enforcement sits in the RFU's disciplinary regulations, at Regulation 19, which set out the offences, the process and a table of sanctions. Abuse of a match official is treated as one of the more serious categories, with high entry points, because the game's position is that an official who is abused stops officiating and the fixture list shrinks. Under the laws themselves, foul play includes abuse of match officials, and a referee has the authority to penalise, card or, in the last resort, abandon.

1. 1On the pitchThe referee deals with what happens during play - penalty, temporary suspension or a send-off, at the referee's discretion.
2. 2Match reportThe official submits a report to the society and to the relevant constituent body or league within the required window.
3. 3Club responsibilityClubs are answerable for the conduct of their players, officials and spectators, so a touchline incident is the club's case to answer.
4. 4Disciplinary panelThe constituent body or competition convenes a hearing. The official may be asked to give evidence, in person or in writing.
5. 5SanctionThe regulations set entry points and ranges for each offence, with aggravating and mitigating factors applied to reach the outcome.
6. 6SupportSocieties expect to support the member through it. An official who reports and is then left alone does not report twice.

The general sequence under the RFU's disciplinary regulations. Specific timescales and panel composition are set by the regulations and vary with the level of the offence.

Societies take this seriously in a practical way that is worth knowing about before you start. A new referee who has a bad afternoon at a club with a reputation will typically find that the society already knew about the reputation, and that the appointment was a mistake rather than a rite of passage.

Touch judges, assistant referees and the rest of the officiating team

Two different jobs share a flag in England, and the distinction matters.

A club touch judge is a volunteer supplied by each side, usually a substitute or a supporter, and their remit is narrow: signal when and where the ball goes into touch, and signal whether a kick at goal is successful. They are not asked to judge offside, they are not asked to report foul play, and a referee should not rely on them for either. Their neutrality is nominal and everybody knows it.

A qualified assistant referee is a member of the officiating team. The remit widens considerably: foul play reporting, offside at the touchline, in-goal decisions, and communication with the referee, which at higher levels is by radio. Appointed ARs appear from the upper community levels upwards, and running touch is the standard apprenticeship for a referee moving into a new tier.

Above that sit roles that only exist in the professional game. The television match official reviews incidents referred by the referee within a defined protocol, and the scope of what a TMO may look at has been narrowed and widened several times — the TMO page traces those changes. The citing commissioner reviews footage after the match and may cite an offence the officials missed, independently of anything that happened on the pitch. A fourth or fifth official manages replacements, blood bins and the technical area, and administers the replacement of a red-carded player where a competition uses that mechanism, which the red-card replacement page covers.

Officiating rugby league, and why the qualification does not transfer

An RFU refereeing award qualifies you to referee rugby union. It does not qualify you to referee rugby league, and the reverse is equally true. They are separate sports with separate governing bodies, separate laws and separate officiating pathways, and the Rugby Football League runs its own match officials structure through its own department.

The differences on the pitch are fundamental rather than cosmetic. Thirteen players a side rather than fifteen. A set of six tackles rather than a contest for possession at the breakdown, which removes the single hardest area of union refereeing and replaces it with a different discipline entirely — the play-the-ball, the ten-metre defensive line, and the tackle count. Scrums in league are largely uncontested restarts rather than a contest, which changes what the official is watching for. The side-by-side comparison sets the two law sets against each other properly.

The officiating team differs too. League uses a referee and two touch judges, with a video referee at televised professional matches, and the touch judges carry a broader in-goal responsibility than a union club touch judge does. At the top of the English game, Super League officials are contracted by the RFL and operate as a full-time group, in the same way the RFU's professional officials do in union; the Super League format page sets out the competition they work in.

If you live in the league heartlands of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria, both pathways are available within a short drive of each other, and a small number of people qualify in both. Most do not, and the reason is not tribalism. It is that each set of laws takes several seasons to referee well, and the instincts one builds in the other actively work against you. A union referee's first league match tends to go wrong at the play-the-ball, where union's entire vocabulary of contest simply does not apply.

Anyone weighing up the whistle against the other ways into the English game will find the coaching route and the playing route start from the same place. Our wider coverage sits in the rugby section, and the full set of English guides is indexed on the England hub.