Padel Rules Explained: Serve, Walls, Scoring and Faults

Stand behind the back glass of any of the enclosed courts that have gone up beside English tennis clubs, leisure centres and retail parks, and within two rallies the whole rulebook is on view. Padel is a doubles game played on a walled court 20 metres long and 10 wide. Every point starts with an underarm serve, hit diagonally after a bounce, and the score is kept exactly as tennis keeps it. What makes it padel is one rule about the walls: the ball must bounce on the opponents' floor before it touches anything else on their side, and once it has, it may come off the glass or the fence and still be played.

That is the game in a paragraph. The code behind it is the Rules of Padel published by the International Padel Federation, and it is the code the LTA, the sport's governing body in Britain, applies to its own competitions and points every club towards. There is no separate English version. A league match in Surrey is played to the same text as a professional final in Madrid, and the organiser chooses only among options the rulebook itself offers, the most important being what happens at deuce.

How a point starts and stays alive under the rules of padel

Every point begins the same way. The server stands behind the service line, lets the ball bounce, and hits it at or below waist height across the net into the service box diagonally opposite. There are two attempts. The first point of a game is served from the right-hand side and the server then alternates, left and right, until the game is over. The detail of the action, which is where most faults at club level are actually committed, has a page to itself in our guide to the serve and its faults.

The receiver has to let that serve bounce. After it, the rally is governed by a very short list of permissions. Each pair may let the ball bounce once on its own side, and only once. Either player may instead take it out of the air. The ball is hit once, by one player, and has to travel back over the net. It may clip the tape on the way and still be good.

What a tennis player notices first is how little the lines matter. They mark the service boxes and nothing else. Once the serve is in, the court has no baseline to miss and no tramlines; the boundary is the enclosure itself, and whether a ball is good is decided by what it touched and in what order. A ball that lands a centimetre from the back glass is worth exactly as much as one that lands on the service line.

The one ball that has to bounce

Padel has no equivalent of pickleball's kitchen and nothing like its double-bounce rule. The only shot a player is forbidden to volley is the return of serve. A receiver who takes the serve out of the air loses the point, and so does the receiving pair if the served ball strikes either of them before it lands, wherever on the court they happen to be standing.

From the return onwards, everything is available. The server's partner, who normally starts at the net, may volley the return. The receivers may volley whatever comes back. Good padel is played largely in the air from a position two or three metres behind the net, which is why this small rule carries so much weight: it hands the serving pair the first chance at that position and makes the return the one moment when the receivers are obliged to hit from deep.

How long the ball stays live

A ball is in play from the moment the serve is struck until the point is decided. That sounds too obvious to write down, yet it has a consequence that catches people out every week. A player who catches a ball that is plainly flying long, or blocks it with a hand before it reaches the glass, loses the point. The ball was still live. It had not yet touched the wall, so it was not yet out, and the rulebook does not deal in what was about to happen.

1. 1ServeStruck underarm after a bounce, from behind the service line, into the diagonal service box.
2. 2ReturnThe receiver lets the serve bounce once and hits it back. This is the only shot that may not be volleyed.
3. 3RallyEach pair plays the ball once per turn, on the volley or after a single bounce on its own floor.
4. 4WallsAfter bouncing on the floor the ball may hit glass or fence and still be played before it bounces again.
5. 5EndThe point is over when a ball bounces twice, stays in the net, or reaches the opponents' wall or fence without touching their floor.

The order of events in a rally under the Rules of Padel. No numbers here, only the sequence each point follows.

The wall rule that settles most arguments: floor first, then glass

Here is the whole of it. On the opponents' side of the net, the ball must touch the floor before it touches anything else. If it does, it is in play, and it remains in play when it goes on to hit the back glass, the side glass or the wire fence. If it reaches any of those first, it is out, and the pair that hit it loses the point.

Squash players find this back to front. In squash the wall is the target and the floor is where the rally dies. In padel the floor is the target and the wall is the defenders' second chance: the surface that keeps a ball they could not reach in the court long enough for them to turn and play it.

What the ball does on the opponents' side	Ruling during a rally
Bounces on the floor and touches nothing else	In play until it bounces a second time
Bounces on the floor, then hits the glass	In play, and may be returned off the rebound
Bounces on the floor, then hits the wire fence	In play, however it comes off
Hits the glass before the floor	Out; the hitters lose the point
Hits the wire fence before the floor	Out; the hitters lose the point
Clips the top of the net, then bounces on the floor	In play
Bounces on the floor, then leaves the enclosure	Point to the hitters unless it is legally returned from outside

The glass and the fence are treated identically here. Either one, struck first, ends the point against the hitter; either one, struck after the bounce, leaves the rally alive. The two surfaces part company only on the serve and on a player's own side of the court, and both of those cases come later.

The ball in the join between floor and glass

One ball causes more disagreement than all the others together: the hard drive that arrives at the foot of the back wall and seems to hit floor and glass at once. The rulebook does cover it. Rule 14 lists a ball that lands in the angle where the wall meets the ground as a correct return, so a ball that hits the join itself is good. What remains is a question of fact, whether it met the glass just above the join first, and at pace nobody on the court can see it.

The rebound usually gives the answer. A ball that reached the floor first has already begun to rise, so it comes off the glass climbing. A ball that met the glass first is still travelling downwards when it rebounds, so it drops to the floor close to the wall and sits there. Players who have spent a season on court read this without thinking. In a friendly game with no umpire, the pair on whose side the ball landed makes the call, and a pair that honestly could not tell gives the ball as good.

The fence that helps the attacker

A ball that bounces and then catches the mesh is in play, but mesh does not return a ball the way glass does. It kicks sideways, or dies and drops. On a standard court the long middle stretch of each side is wire with no glass behind it, so a volley angled to bounce near the service line and run into that fence is one of the most reliable winners in the game. The rule did not create that shot by accident. Leaving the fence live after the bounce rewards the pair at the net for finding an angle, in a sport that otherwise gives the defenders an unusual number of second chances.

Using your own glass, and why the wire fence cannot be used the same way

Two separate permissions apply on a pair's own side, and beginners tend to learn the first and never hear about the second.

The first is passive. After the ball has bounced on your floor it may strike the back glass, the side glass, both in turn, or the fence, and you may play it at any moment before it touches the floor again. Nothing limits the number of surfaces. A lob that lands deep, climbs the back glass and drifts out towards the service line has done nothing wrong, and neither has the player who waits for it. Letting the ball go past and taking it after the rebound is the foundation of defensive padel. It buys time, it turns a ball arriving at speed into one that is leaving slowly, and it is the habit a player who learned tennis first takes longest to acquire, because every instinct says to hit the ball before it gets behind you.

The second permission is active, and stranger. A player may hit the ball into the glass on their own side so that it rebounds over the net. Spanish players call the shot the contrapared. It is used when the ball has come off the back wall so low, or so close to the glass, that there is no room to swing forwards: the player faces the wall and plays the ball back into it, hard and slightly upwards, and it loops over both pairs as a lob. The shot is legal provided the ball goes from racket to glass to the far side without touching the hitter's own floor on the way, and provided it then lands on the opponents' floor like any other return.

What the fence does not allow

The same shot played into the wire is a lost point. So is any ball that leaves a player's racket and touches the mesh on their own side, by design or by accident, even if it then carries over the net.

Surface on your own side	Ball arriving after it has bounced	Ball coming off your racket
Back glass	May rebound and then be played	May be hit into it to rebound over the net
Side glass	May rebound and then be played	May be hit into it to rebound over the net
Wire fence	May rebound and then be played	Point lost
Floor	One bounce only	Point lost
Net	Not applicable	Point lost unless the ball carries over

The rulebook does not explain itself on this, but the logic is not hard to reconstruct. Glass returns a ball truly, so a shot played off it is a matter of skill and can be read by the pair across the net. Mesh does not. A ball driven into wire might go anywhere, and a rule that allowed it would reward luck with a rebound no opponent could anticipate.

Older courts in Britain and Spain sometimes have rendered concrete or brick where a modern court has glass. The rules speak of walls, whatever they are built from, and of the metallic fence. A solid back wall is treated exactly as glass is. The panel of mesh that sits above the back glass, taking the enclosure up to four metres, is fence for every purpose: a ball that bounces and then reaches it is alive, and a ball hit straight into it is out. The full layout of glass and wire, panel by panel, is set out in our guide to court dimensions and wall heights.

Every way a pair loses the point

Strip away the walls and what remains is a list a tennis player would mostly recognise, with four or five entries that are padel's own.

How the point is lost	What the rule covers
Second bounce	The ball bounces twice on a pair's floor before it is hit
Ball not returned over the net	It stays in the net, or touches the hitter's own floor or fence first
Wall or fence before floor	The return reaches the opponents' glass or mesh without bouncing
Double hit	One player strikes the ball twice, or both partners touch it
Ball strikes a player	It touches a player's body or clothing, anything but the racket
Net or opponents' court touched	A player, racket or clothing touches the net, a post or the far side during the point
Ball hit before it crosses	A volley taken on the opponents' side of the net
Two faults	The server misses with both serves

The ball that hits a player

Being struck by the ball always costs the point of the pair that was hit. Where the player was standing makes no difference, and neither does whether the ball was heading out. It follows that a smash aimed at an opponent's feet which catches a shin before it has bounced wins the point for the smasher, though without the player in the way it would have flown into the glass and been out. This is the rule a group of friends most often gets wrong in its first month, usually by awarding the point to the injured party.

Touching the net

The ball is live until it bounces twice or is otherwise dead, and during that time no player may touch the net, its posts or any part of the opponents' side with body, racket or clothing. The commonest breach is the volleyer whose momentum carries them into the tape after a put-away. If the ball had already bounced twice before the contact, the point was over and no harm is done. If it had not, the point goes the other way. Fractions of a second decide it, and without an umpire players are expected to own up.

One hit, one player

Only one of the pair may play the ball. If both rackets make contact with it, at the same instant or one after the other, the point is lost. Rackets that clash in the air are a different matter: when only one of them actually met the ball, play goes on. A ball carried or scooped on the face is treated as a faulty hit. The rule asks for a clean strike, and at club level the benefit of the doubt goes to the hitter, as it does in tennis.

Reaching over the net and playing from outside the court

Start with the exception. A player may reach over the net and hit the ball on the opponents' side in exactly one situation: the ball has already bounced on that player's own side and has then travelled back across the net without anyone touching it. Heavy backspin does this, and so does a strong wind on an outdoor court. In that case the player may lean over and play the ball where it is, so long as nothing touches the net or the far floor.

They had better do so. The ball has had its one bounce on their side, and when it lands on the far side that counts as the second. A pair that stands and watches a spun drop shot hop back over the tape has lost the point.

In every other circumstance the ball must be hit on the player's own side. Following through across the plane of the net after a legal contact is permitted. Meeting the ball before it has crossed is not.

Out through the door

The four-metre back wall and the side fence, three metres high along its middle stretch, can both be cleared. A powerful smash that lands on the floor may bounce clean over the back, or kick out sideways over the lower fence, or leave through the opening beside the net post where many courts have no door at all. Once it has bounced and left the enclosure the point belongs to the pair that hit it, unless the other pair manages to return it.

Over the back wall, they cannot. Rule 13 treats a ball that bounces correctly and then clears the end wall as a lost point for the defenders even where out-of-court play is authorised. Over the side or through the door, they are allowed to try. Where a court has clear space around it and the competition has authorised out-of-court play, a player may run out through the opening, reach the ball before it bounces a second time or touches anything outside, and send it back into the opponents' half. It is the most spectacular passage of play the sport has, and the professionals have turned it into a routine piece of defence against the smash.

1. 1BounceThe smash lands on the opponents' floor, which makes it a good shot whatever happens next.
2. 2ExitThe ball carries over the side fence or runs out through the opening beside the net. Over the back wall, the point is already lost.
3. 3ChaseA defender leaves the court through the opening on their own side while the ball is still in the air.
4. 4ReturnThe ball is hit before it bounces outside and sent back into the opponents' half of the court.
5. 5ResultIf it lands on their floor the rally continues; if the defender cannot reach it, the smasher wins the point.

The sequence the rules follow where out-of-court play has been authorised. On courts without safe space outside, the point simply ends at the second step.

The condition matters more in England than the television pictures suggest. The rule applies only where the surroundings meet the federation's safety requirements, which ask for two openings on each side and a clear area outside at least three metres wide, four long and three high, and a great many British courts are fitted into halls, converted warehouses and corners of car parks with a wall, a neighbouring court or a row of benches immediately outside. On those courts a ball that bounces and leaves is simply a point won. Ask before the first serve.

Padel scoring in outline: games, sets and the choice at deuce

Anyone who can score a tennis match can score this one. Points run 15, 30, 40 and game. A set goes to the first pair to win six games with a margin of two, a tie-break is played at six-all, and a match is the best of three sets.

The single place where padel has developed rules of its own is deuce, the score of 40-all. The rulebook offers three ways of resolving it. Under advantage scoring a pair must win two points in a row from deuce, however long that takes. Under the golden point one deciding point is played at the first deuce, and the receiving pair chooses whether to receive on the right or the left. The star point, written into the federation's rules with effect from January 2026, sits between the two: advantage is played through the first two deuces, and a single deciding point settles the game if it reaches a third.

Which of these applies is the organiser's decision and has to be announced before a ball is hit. In a social game it is whatever the four players agree, and in England that is very often the golden point, for the plain reason that courts are booked by the hour.

Points to win a game4

Games to win a set6

Points to win a tie-break7

Points to win a match tie-break10

The minimum a pair must reach to win each unit. Tie-breaks and match tie-breaks need a margin of two, and so does a set unless it goes to a tie-break at six-all. Games need two clear points only under advantage scoring.

Show the numbers

The target in each unit of padel scoring

Item	Value
Points to win a game	4
Games to win a set	6
Points to win a tie-break	7
Points to win a match tie-break	10

Every one of those numbers deserves more room than an outline can give it: the serving pattern in the tie-break, the ten-point decider many amateur events use in place of a third set, the americano formats that are not matches at all. They are worked through in our page on how padel scoring works, from the golden point to the tie-break.

Service order and who receives on which side

Before the match a coin is tossed or a racket spun. The winners may choose to serve or to receive, in which case the losers pick an end; or they may pick an end and leave the other choice to their opponents; or they may hand the whole decision across the net.

Then each pair makes two decisions that bind it for the rest of the set.

The pair serving first nominates which of its players will serve the opening game. Their opponents nominate their own first server for the second game. The partners of those two serve the third and fourth, and the order of four then repeats, unchanged, until the set is over. A pair may choose a different order at the start of the next set and cannot change it sooner.

Receiving works on the same principle. Each pair decides which player will receive serves hit to the right-hand box and which will take those hit to the left, and they keep those sides for the whole set. This is the origin of the phrase every padel player uses about themselves, that they play on the right or play on the left. The rule fixes only where a player stands to receive. Once the return has been struck the pair may move wherever it likes, and the server's partner is free to stand anywhere on their own side at any time.

When somebody serves or receives out of turn

It happens constantly, especially after a change of ends. The remedy is undramatic. If the wrong player is found to be serving, the right one takes over as soon as the mistake is noticed and every point already played stands. If a whole game has gone by before anyone spots it, the order stays as it has become for the rest of the set. A receiving pair that has swapped sides by mistake stays swapped until the end of that game and goes back to its original arrangement the next time it receives. Nothing is replayed. No point is taken away. The rules assume an honest muddle and treat it as one.

Changing ends, continuous play and let points

Pairs change ends when the number of games played in a set is odd: after the first game, the third, the fifth and so on. In a tie-break they change after every six points. The reason is fairness, and on an outdoor court in England it is not theoretical. A low sun behind one back wall or a crosswind along the length of the court can be worth a game or two a set.

Play is meant to be continuous from the first serve to the last point. The rulebook's allowances in the edition that took effect in January 2026 are short: twenty seconds between points, ninety seconds at a change of ends and two minutes between sets. There is no rest at the change after the first game of a set, only twenty seconds at the changes inside a tie-break, and no food or drink between points. The principle is what a club player needs: the server sets a reasonable pace, the receiver plays to it, and nobody stops for a drink in the middle of a game.

Let points

A let is a point replayed from scratch, first serve included. The rules give it for a ball that breaks or splits during the rally, for anything foreign that comes into the playing area, and for any interruption nobody could have foreseen.

At an English club with four courts side by side, that middle category does nearly all the work. A ball from the next court rolls across the service box. A child walks behind the back glass and distracts nobody, which is no let; a ball bag topples through the open gateway and stops against a player's foot, which is. The convention is that the let must be called at once, by the pair that was disturbed. Playing on, losing the rally and then asking for it to be replayed is not on offer.

Singles and the six-metre court

A singles court exists. It is the same 20 metres long but only six metres wide where the doubles court is ten. The current Rules of Padel describe only the doubles court, so the singles version is a builders' and clubs' convention rather than a rulebook specification. The walls, the serve, the bounce and the scoring all carry over without amendment.

• 20mLength of every court
• 10mWidth for doubles
• 6mWidth for singles
• 6.95mService line from the net (doubles)

In metres. Length, doubles width and service line are from the Rules of Padel; the singles width is the usual build standard, not a rulebook figure.

A handful of clubs in England have built one, usually where a site could not fit a full-width court or a coach wanted a lane for individual lessons. It is a decent training tool. As a game it loses most of what makes padel what it is, because with four metres of width gone and no partner to cover the lob, the patient exchange between a pair at the net and a pair at the back never takes shape.

Playing singles on a full doubles court is another thing again, and scarcely works: ten metres is too much for one person to defend when the walls keep every ball alive. Clubs occasionally run it as a fitness drill with half the court marked off. Official competition is doubles, in Britain as everywhere else, and the LTA's rankings and its ratings are built on results in pairs. How those grades and numbers are arrived at is explained in our guide to the LTA padel rating system.

The racket, the wrist cord and the ball the rules require

The rules of play fill most of the book. The equipment rules are brief, and one of them is enforced in every match.

The racket is solid, with no strings. Its face is perforated with holes, and the rulebook caps its size at 45.5 centimetres long, 26 wide and 38 millimetres thick. Within those limits manufacturers vary the outline and the balance a good deal, a subject with its own page on round, teardrop and diamond racket shapes.

At the end of the handle is a cord or strap, and the rules make its use compulsory. It goes round the wrist before the point starts, and the cord may be no longer than 35 centimetres. A player who drops the racket or snaps the cord during a rally loses the point on the spot. The reasoning is simple once four people are imagined inside a glass box ten metres wide, two of them at the net with their heads at racket height: a racket that slips out of a sweating hand during a smash must not travel. Club players are careless about this and umpires at tournaments are not.

The ball looks like a tennis ball and is very nearly one. It is fractionally smaller and carries a little less internal pressure, so it comes off the floor lower and off the glass more slowly. The difference is small enough that people playing with tennis balls for an afternoon will have a recognisable game, and large enough that a regular player can tell within three shots. Balls lose pressure quickly, and on a cold evening in an unheated hall a tired set barely rises above the knee. In competition, the organiser stipulates the ball and when it is changed.

On footwear and clothing the rules ask only for suitable sportswear and rule out swimwear; anything stricter comes from a competition's own regulations. The surface settles the shoe question. Many British courts are artificial grass dressed with sand, and a sole with a herringbone or omni pattern grips it far better than a smooth indoor one.

Where the rules of padel came from: Acapulco, Marbella and the LTA

In 1969 a Mexican businessman, Enrique Corcuera, adapted a court at his house in Acapulco. The story usually told is that he raised walls around it to keep the ball out of the vegetation and the neighbouring plot, found that the rebounds improved the game, and wrote some rules to make use of them. Nearly every feature that separates padel from tennis can be traced to that enclosure: the solid bat that suits a small space, the serve below the waist, the ball that may be played off the wall.

It reached Europe through one of his guests. Alfonso de Hohenlohe, who had developed the Marbella Club on the Costa del Sol, played on Corcuera's court and built two of his own in Marbella in 1974, modifying the design as he did so. An Argentine member of the same circle, Julio Menditeguy, took the game home the following year. Those two countries made the sport. Spain supplied the clubs and, in time, the professional tour; Argentina supplied a remarkable share of the best players for the next three decades.

The International Padel Federation was founded in 1991, with Spain and Argentina among the founding nations, and the first world championships followed in 1992. The federation's rulebook is the document every national body now works from, and its revisions, the star point of 2026 being the most recent of any size, pass straight into the domestic game.

Britain came to all this late. For many years the game here was organised by a small volunteer body, largely people who had met it in Spain, and courts were rare. The change came at the end of the 2010s. The LTA took over as governing body for padel in 2019, absorbing the existing British organisation, and has since been recognised as the governing body for padel across Great Britain, responsible for its competitions, its coaching qualifications, its rankings and the British teams. Tennis clubs that had spent years wondering what to do with a redundant grass bank or an ageing third court found an answer.

There is a judgement to make about that arrangement, and it is a favourable one. A sport whose rules, scoring and vocabulary are borrowed so heavily from tennis loses little by sharing a governing body with it, and gains a network of clubs that already had land, floodlights and members. The comparison between the two games, shot by shot, is drawn out in our guide to padel against tennis. The practical question of finding a court is covered in where to play padel in the UK, and both sit within the wider England sport hub alongside the rest of our tennis coverage.

The rules themselves have changed remarkably little since Acapulco. A pair, a wall, a ball that has to bounce before it reaches the glass. Everything else is detail.