Anomalous dimensions of twist-two operators govern the scale evolution of parton distribution functions. For off-shell external states, the physical twist-two operators mix with unknown gauge-variant operators under renormalization. In this talk, we apply the method proposed by us in~\cite{Gehrmann:2023ksf} to compute all gauge-variant one-loop counterterm Feynman rules with five legs, which
enter the determination of
the four-loop splitting functions in QCD.