The guide · Rules

Padel rules, in the order you actually need them.

Padel borrows its scoring from tennis and almost nothing else. The walls are in play, the serve is underarm, and the ball going out of the court is usually a winner rather than a mistake. Here is the whole game, in the order it comes at you.

If you only read one paragraph: serve underarm into the diagonal box, score it like tennis, and remember the single rule the walls run on — the ball must bounce on your opponents' floor before it touches anything of theirs. Everything below is detail hanging off those three things.

The court

Ten metres wide, twenty metres long, measured inside the walls. A net across the middle at 0.88 m in the centre, rising to 0.92 m at the posts. Service lines 6.95 m either side of the net, with a centre line splitting the space between them into two boxes.

The whole thing is enclosed, and that enclosure is the game. At the two ends it stands four metres tall: three metres of wall — glass, usually — with a metre of metal mesh on top. Down the sides the rulebook allows two arrangements, both of them stepped, so the glass is tallest in the corners where the ball spends most of its time.

That distinction between wall and mesh is not decorative. Several rules turn on which one the ball hit, and they are the rules people argue about.

Indoors, the rules ask for at least six metres of clear height over the whole court, and recommend eight for anything built from scratch. A lob is a real shot in padel, and a low ceiling quietly deletes it.

Scoring

If you have played tennis you already know this part.

• Points: 15, 30, 40, game.
• Games: first to six, with a margin of two. At 5–5 you play on to 7–5.
• Tie-break at six games all: first to seven points, margin of two, and it keeps going until someone has that margin.
• Match: best of three sets.

The only thing padel does differently is deuce, and it does it three ways. Which one you are playing is set before the match, not argued at 40–40.

On a Star or Golden Point the receiving pair chooses which side takes the serve — but they cannot swap the positions they have been receiving in all game. It is a choice of who faces it, not a free reshuffle.

The serve

Underarm, always. There is no other kind, and this is the single biggest reason padel is easy to start and hard to put down: nobody is ever aced into irrelevance in their first hour.

1. Stand behind the service line — not the back wall — between the centre line and the side wall, with at least one foot on the ground. Touching the line with a foot is a fault.
2. Bounce the ball once on the ground, inside the box you are serving from. It must not cross the service line before you hit it.
3. Strike it at or below waist height. This is the rule that keeps the serve a delivery rather than a weapon.
4. Send it diagonally into the opposite service box. The first serve of a game goes to the receiver's left-hand box, and after that it alternates.
5. Two attempts, as in tennis. Miss both and the point is gone.

After it lands in the box, one more thing can still go wrong — and it is the rule that decides a surprising number of points:

Glass is fine, mesh is not. A serve that bounces correctly in the box and then hits the side wall is live, and returning it is ordinary padel. A serve that bounces in the box and then touches the metal fence before its second bounce is a fault. Same serve, different surface, opposite outcome.

The receiver, meanwhile, has to let the serve bounce. No returning it out of the air — that one is reflex for anyone arriving from tennis and it costs them a point or two every time.

The walls

Everything about the walls comes out of one sentence: the ball must bounce on your opponents' floor before it touches anything of theirs. Hold that and the rest follows.

What you may do

• After the ball has bounced on your floor, let it carry on into your walls or your fence and play it off the rebound — as long as you hit it before it bounces a second time.
• Hit the ball into your own back wall so that it comes off, clears the net and lands in their court. This is a perfectly legal return and it looks, the first time you see it, like a trick.
• Let your shot bounce in their court and then crash into their glass or their fence. That is just a good shot.
• Play the ball into the corner where wall meets floor. If it bounces in their court, the corner is fair game.

What you may not do

• Send the ball directly into the opponents' wall, fence, or anything else on their side without it bouncing on their floor first. Point to them.
• Hit your own fence, or your own floor, with a shot you were trying to send over. Point to them.
• Clip the net or a post and then land on their wall rather than their ground. Net cord into the court is fine; net cord into the glass is not.

How a point is lost

Beyond the wall rules above, the ways to give a point away are mostly the ones you would guess — and two that you would not.

• The ball bounces twice before you return it.
• You, your racket or anything you are wearing touches the net, the posts, the tension cable, or any part of the opponents' court while the ball is live.
• You hit the ball before it has crossed the net.
• You hit it twice, or you and your partner both hit it. One of you plays the ball, not both. (Swinging together and clashing rackets is not a double hit, as long as only one of you touched the ball.)
• The ball hits you, your partner, or your clothing after you played it — or hits either of you at all after your opponents played it.
• You throw your racket at the ball.
• Anyone jumps over the net.
• You drop your racket, or the wrist cord snaps. The point goes immediately. The cord is not optional equipment — it is a rule, and this is why.
• You serve two faults in a row. Obvious, but worth saying in a list of ways to lose a point, because it is by far the commonest.

Out of the court

This is the part that makes padel worth watching.

If your shot bounces correctly in your opponents' court and then flies out over the enclosure, the point is yours. Same if it bounces in and then disappears through a hole in the fence, or wedges itself on top of the wall. The ball leaving the court is not an error; it is the ball having done its job.

And where a court has a safety area and an opening — most good ones do — a player is allowed to run out of the gate and play the ball back in. A return made from outside the court counts like any other, provided everything else about it was legal. It is the single most spectacular thing in the sport and it is entirely within the rules.

Rackets and balls

A padel racket has no strings. It is a solid, perforated head with a short handle, and the limits are tight:

• 45.5 cm total length, head and handle together.
• 26 cm maximum width, 38 mm maximum thickness.
• The face is drilled with holes between 9 and 13 mm across; near the rim they may be larger or a different shape.
• A wrist cord is compulsory, no longer than 35 cm, and it must actually be round your wrist. Losing the racket costs the point — see above.

The ball looks like a tennis ball and is very slightly smaller and softer: 6.35–6.77 cm across, 56–59.4 g, and pressurised a shade lower, which is what takes the sting out of the bounce and keeps rallies alive off the glass.

Five rules people get wrong

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Where these come from

Everything above is checked against the Rules of Padel published by the International Padel Federation, in the revision that took effect on 1 January 2026. Where clubs and leagues differ — most often on which deuce method they use — this page says so rather than picking one and presenting it as the rule.

If you spot something here that does not match the current rulebook, tell us and we will fix it.

Common questions

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