A 4 minute read, written in October 2026 and read over again on 19 October 2026
Padel serve faults and lets: every case, drawn
Since the FIP's rules took effect on 1 January 2026, neither foot may touch the service line at the moment of contact, staying clearly behind it is the only option, and the ball must be struck at or below the waist. Three habits from the old rules still show up at club level every week, and this covers every case, faults and lets both.
Three rules club players still get wrong
Since the FIP's rules took effect on 1 January 2026, neither foot may touch the service line at all, the ball must be struck at or below the waist, and a player who drops or throws their racket into the path of the ball loses the point immediately. All three catch out players who learned an older, looser version of the serve.
None of them are obscure. They come up most weekends, usually on the second serve, when a player under pressure creeps forward or reaches up a little higher than they should.
What changed on 1 January 2026 was mostly precision. The general shape of the serve, underarm, bounced first, into the diagonal box, is unchanged, but the FIP tightened exactly how the foot and the contact point are judged, which is why players who learned the sport even a couple of seasons ago sometimes serve with confidence and still get called for something they never used to be.
The foot fault, exactly
At least one foot has to stay behind the service line at the moment of contact, and neither foot may touch the line itself, only the ground clearly behind it. The back foot is the usual culprit: it drifts forward as a player reaches to bounce the ball, and by the time they strike it, the toe is resting right on the paint, 6.95 metres from the net.
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Watch for it on a low, rushed serve especially. Players compress their stance to keep the contact height down and lose track of where their feet have ended up. A simple fix is to pick a spot half a step further back than feels necessary and serve from there for a whole session, until staying off the line stops needing conscious thought.
Contact height and the bounce
The ball has to be bounced behind the service line and struck at or below waist height. That is a more generous line than most players think, roughly belt height rather than knee height, but a serve struck clearly above it, often when someone half volleys a bad bounce instead of restarting, is a fault every time.
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The safest habit is simply not to serve off a bad bounce at all. If the ball comes up awkwardly, let it go, collect it, and start again rather than reaching up to save the point, because a rushed high contact is exactly the shape of serve the 2026 rules were written to stop.
When the serve clips the net
A serve that clips the net or the net post and still lands in the correct box is not a fault. It is a let, exactly as in tennis, and it is replayed rather than counted against the server. Plenty of club players assume any contact with the net on a serve is dead, and give up on a point they were entitled to replay.
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A let costs the server nothing beyond the interruption: it is not a first serve used up, just a serve that did not count at all. It is worth calling out loud the moment it happens, because a serve that clips the cord is easy to miss from the receiver's side of the court.
Faults with the racket
If you lose your grip and the racket flies out of your hand and touches the ball, you lose the point on the spot, whether or not you meant to hit it. A spare racket left lying on the court is treated completely differently: if the ball hits it during play, the ball is still live. One is a mistake happening in the moment, the other is furniture.
Your call
The serve is floating slowly towards you and you could easily step in and volley it out of the air. Are you allowed?
The return of serve must bounce. It is the one ball in padel you are not allowed to volley.
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The distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because both situations look identical from the stands, a racket on the court and a ball near it. What decides the call is whether the racket was still in someone's hand a moment earlier, not where it ends up.
Serving out of turn
If the wrong player serves, or a pair serves out of their agreed order, the mistake is simply corrected the moment anyone notices, and every point already played stands. Nobody replays a game from the start over a serving mix up, which surprises players who assume any error voids what came before it. The full serve guide and rules of padel cover the rest of what has to happen before the ball is even in the air.
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It is worth keeping a rough mental note of whose turn it is, especially in a doubles format where you rotate partners across several matches in an evening. The mix ups almost always happen in that exact situation, not in a normal match against the same pair all night.
Today's Scenario will not check your foot position, but it checks the same habit underneath it, reading the moment correctly before you commit. Play it with that in mind, and settle the close calls with the rules referee instead of an argument.