This paper aims to investigate the speed regulation problem for permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) servo systems subject to unknown load torque disturbances. The proposed method utilizes sliding mode control (SMC), invariant manifold theory, and disturbance observation technique. In the PMSM servo systems, the unknown load torques will affect the control performance to a large extent, which is unmatched. In addition, compared with full-state measurement, the output-feedback framework is easy to implement and reduces the sensor costs. However, it is difficult to handle unmatched disturbance and unmeasured states simultaneously. To this end, this paper specifically combines the sliding mode control theory with the invariant manifold theory and puts forward an output-feedback disturbance rejection control method. The key idea is that the unmatched disturbance in the PMSM servo systems is transformed into matched one by taking advantage of the invariant manifold, which is different from existing results. The transformation maintains most of dynamics of the PMSM system for control design, which improves the accuracy. In addition, an extended state observer is designed to estimate the current and lumped disturbance simultaneously; then, the output-feedback SMC method is proposed by introducing the estimations. Besides, the switching gain in the proposed sliding mode controller can change with estimation errors adaptively, and the chattering reduces. Simulation results on a PMSM system validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.