Pickleball serving rules.

The default pickleball serve is the volley serve: you toss or release the ball with your non-paddle hand and strike it out of the air, before it touches the ground. To be legal, that strike has to satisfy three motion rules at the moment of contact.

• — The motion must be underhand. The paddle has to be travelling in an upward arc — no overhead, no sidearm windmill.
• — The highest point of the paddle head must be below the highest point of your wrist at contact. This is the rule that retired the old "chainsaw" and pre-spin serves.
• — Contact must happen below your waist, defined by USA Pickleball as the navel — roughly 33 inches off the ground for an average adult.

Then, in 2021, USA Pickleball formally adopted the drop serve as a legal alternative. With the drop serve you release the ball from your non-paddle hand (or off the paddle face), let it bounce on the court, and strike it after the bounce. Because the bounce already constrains the geometry, the underhand-and-below-waist rules do not apply to drop serves. You can technically hit a drop serve overhand if you want to, although nobody actually does.

Either serve is legal in any game, casual or tournament. Most pros stick with the traditional volley serve because it generates more pace and spin; most beginners are better off starting with the drop serve, where the only thing you have to think about is where the ball lands.

The pickleball server's stance is governed by three small rules that combine into one simple idea: stay behind the baseline, inside your half, with a foot on the floor.

• — Both feet must be behind the baseline at the moment you strike the ball. Neither foot can touch the baseline, and neither foot can cross over it onto the court until after contact.
• — Your feet must stay within the imaginary extensions of the sideline and the centreline of the service court you are serving from. No shuffling out wide of the singles sideline, no creeping over the centre mark.
• — At least one foot must be in contact with the ground at the instant the paddle meets the ball. Jump serves are not legal.

These foot-fault rules are the easiest serving rules to break by accident, especially if you have a long step into your serve. The simplest fix is to set your back foot in a fixed spot a few inches behind the baseline and only step forward with your front foot after contact. If you watch your own feet for one game and adjust, you will probably stop foot-faulting forever.

A legal pickleball serve must clear the net and land inside the diagonally opposite service court. Three things have to be true at the moment the ball bounces:

• — The serve is hit cross-court — into the receiver's service box on the opposite diagonal. Hitting into the same-side box is a fault.
• — The ball clears the kitchen (the seven-foot non-volley zone) AND the kitchen line. A serve that bounces on the kitchen line is a fault — the kitchen line belongs to the kitchen for serving purposes.
• — The ball lands inside the sidelines and the baseline of that diagonal service court. Every other line on the court — sidelines, centreline, baseline — counts as in if the ball touches any part of it.

That second rule is the one new players miss. On a normal groundstroke, a ball that clips the kitchen line is in. On a serve, a ball that clips the kitchen line is a fault. It is the only line on the entire court that behaves this way, and it exists to stop servers from hitting unreturnable short serves that drop dead at the receiver's feet.

If you want to internalise this fast, the RALLY scoreboard assumes legal serves and gets out of your way — open it on your phone and play a real game with these rules in your head.

Until 2021, a serve that clipped the top of the net and still landed in the correct service court was a let, and you replayed it. That rule is gone. Today in pickleball, a serve that nicks the net and drops in is completely live — play on, no replay, no whistle, nothing.

The change was made for two reasons. First, judging whether a serve had genuinely touched the net was a constant source of arguments in recreational play, and a slow review point even in tournaments. Second, removing replays speeds the game up. Every serve that goes in is now a real serve, every time.

This is one of the biggest differences between pickleball and tennis. Tennis still replays service lets. Pickleball does not. If you used to play tennis and you instinctively call "let!" the moment you hear the ball ping off the net cord — train yourself out of it. The point is on.

One. That is the entire rule. There is no second serve in pickleball, ever. If your serve goes into the net, lands long, lands wide, lands in the wrong service court, lands in or on the kitchen, or commits any foot fault, the serve is over. There is no chance to reset and try again.

This is true in both traditional side-out scoring and rally scoring. The "one serve" rule is one of the few things every scoring format in pickleball agrees on. If you are coming from tennis, this is the single biggest mental adjustment — every serve you hit is effectively a second serve, so you should be aiming for consistency over pace.

Historical footnote: from the introduction of pickleball through 2020, doubles play in traditional scoring did give each individual server two attempts in some interpretations of older rulebooks, but this was never a standard "two serves like tennis" rule — it referred to both partners on the serving team getting a turn before a side-out. That structure is unchanged today. There has never been a true second-serve do-over in pickleball, and the language was tightened in the modern rulebook to make this clear.

Doubles is where pickleball serving gets its reputation for being confusing. The rule is actually short: in a normal service turn, both partners on the serving team serve before the side-out. The first server keeps serving until they lose a rally, then the second server takes over from the same end and serves until they lose a rally, and then it is a side-out and the other team gets the ball.

There is one famous exception. The very first service turn of the game uses only one server. The team that wins the right to serve first starts at 0-0-2 — the third number, the server number, jumps straight to "2" — and as soon as that server loses a rally, it is an immediate side-out. The other team then gets a normal two-partner service turn.

This rule exists to slightly disadvantage the team serving first, because serving first is a real advantage in pickleball. Without it, the first team would always get a free run of two servers before the other team ever touched the ball.

Worked example. Team A wins the spin and elects to serve. They start at 0-0-2. Their first server (we call her server 2 because the third number is "2") serves from the right-hand court. She wins the rally — Team A switches sides and calls 1-0-2. She wins again — Team A switches sides and calls 2-0-2. She loses the next rally. Side-out, immediately, because the first service turn of the game only gets one server.

Team B's first server now serves from the right-hand court of Team B's side and calls 0-2-1. He wins, switches sides, calls 1-2-1. He loses. His partner — server 2 — comes in without switching sides and calls 1-2-2. Server 2 wins, switches sides, calls 2-2-2. He eventually loses the rally. That is the side-out. Team A gets the ball back, and from this point on for the rest of the game both partners on the serving team always get a turn before a side-out.

One other thing to remember: within a single server's turn, you switch sides of the court after every point you win, and you keep serving from the alternating side until you lose a rally. The partner does not switch with you when they take over after a fault — they pick up exactly where you stopped.

Singles serving is dramatically simpler. There is no second server, no third number to track, and no 0-0-2 exception. The score is just two numbers: server's score, then receiver's score.

The one rule worth memorising is the side rule. The server serves from the right-hand (even) court when their score is even, and from the left-hand (odd) court when their score is odd. Score of 0 — even — serve from the right. Score of 1 — odd — serve from the left. Score of 4 — even — back to the right. This is how an opponent can glance across the court mid-game and instantly know what the server's score is, without anyone having to call it.

All the other serving rules — underhand or drop serve, behind the baseline, one foot on the ground, one serve only, diagonal cross-court, must clear the kitchen — apply to singles exactly the same way they apply to doubles. The only thing that changes is the sequence.

A handy checklist. Any of these will end the rally before it starts and hand the serve (or the point, in rally scoring) to the other team.

• — A foot is touching or over the baseline at the moment of contact.
• — A foot is outside the sideline or centreline extension of the service court.
• — No foot is on the ground at contact (jump serves).
• — On a volley serve, the paddle contacts the ball above the waist (the navel).
• — On a volley serve, the highest point of the paddle head is above the highest point of the wrist at contact.
• — On a drop serve, the ball was thrown or tossed instead of dropped with no added force.
• — The serve hits the net and lands in the kitchen, or fails to clear the net at all.
• — The serve lands on the kitchen line (the kitchen line is a fault on serve).
• — The serve lands in the wrong service court (not diagonally opposite).
• — The serve lands long, wide, or hits a permanent fixture before bouncing.
• — The server hits the ball twice or carries it on the paddle face.
• — The server calls the wrong score before serving and the receiver stops play before the return (in tournament play).

The drop serve is the legal alternative to the traditional volley serve, and for most beginners it is a much easier place to start. The mechanics are simple: you release the ball from your non-paddle hand (or off the face of the paddle), let it bounce once on the court, and strike it after the bounce.

• — The ball must be released, not thrown or tossed. You cannot add any downward force — it has to fall under gravity alone.
• — The ball can be dropped from any height. There is no maximum, although in practice most players drop from waist or shoulder height.
• — The ball must bounce exactly once on the court before you strike it. If it bounces twice, the serve is dead.
• — You can drop and strike from anywhere behind the baseline — the same foot rules apply as the traditional serve.

Here is the trick: because the bounce already constrains the serve geometry, the underhand and below-the-waist rules do not apply to drop serves. You can hit a drop serve sidearm, you can hit it with the paddle head above your wrist, and you can technically hit it overhead if you want to. Almost nobody does, because by the time the ball has bounced and risen back up to a comfortable striking height it is already at waist or chest level anyway.

For a new player, the drop serve removes three things at once: you no longer have to time a moving ball in the air, you no longer have to worry about the paddle-below-wrist rule, and you no longer have to worry about the contact-below-waist rule. All you have to think about is where you want it to land. There is no rules disadvantage. Use it for as long as you want to.