Pickleball vs tennis

Pickleball is played on a court a little under a third the size of a tennis doubles court, with a solid paddle, a light plastic ball and a net 2 inches lower in the middle. You get one try at the serve, either an underhand volley serve or a drop serve hit off the bounce, the serve and the return must each bounce, nobody may volley from the 7-foot kitchen by the net, and in the standard game only the serving side scores, to 11, win by 2.

If you play tennis, the strokes will feel familiar long before the rules do. The serve and the score are the parts that work least like tennis, and the 7 feet nearest the net take some unlearning. The rules here come from the 2026 USA Pickleball rulebook and the 2026 Rules of Tennis from World Tennis, formerly the International Tennis Federation.

About 70%

of predicted maximum heart rate, on average, for recreational players in both singles and doubles pickleball, with more than 70% of playing time in moderate-to-vigorous heart rate zones.Webber et al., 2023

2018

the year pickleball caught up with tennis in injuries treated in US emergency departments among players 60 and over.Weiss, Dougherty and DiMaggio, 2021

Differences between pickleball and tennis

The court, the equipment, the serve and the score all differ, and pickleball adds two rules tennis doesn’t have: the return must bounce, and nobody volleys from the kitchen.

Pickleball court vs tennis court

A pickleball court is 20 feet wide and 44 feet long, the same for singles and doubles (rule 3.A.1). A tennis court is 78 feet long and 27 feet wide for singles, widened to 36 feet for doubles by the alleys (tennis rule 1). So a pickleball court is 880 square feet against 2,808 for tennis doubles, a little under a third of the area, and each side of the net is 22 feet deep instead of 39.

Tennis service lines are 21 feet from the net, and a tennis serve that lands past one is a fault. Pickleball has no short service line: the first 7 feet on each side of the net are the kitchen, and the serve has to clear it and land in a service court that runs back to the baseline. Each service court includes its baseline, sideline and centerline (rule 3.A.4.f), so a deep serve that catches the baseline is good, while one on the kitchen line is out (rule 8.C).

The net is lower in the middle: 34 inches in pickleball (rule 3.B.7) against 3 feet in tennis. At the ends it’s 36 inches at pickleball’s sidelines (rule 3.B.6) and 3½ feet at the tennis posts. Every measurement, with the space a court needs around it, is in our guide to pickleball court dimensions.

Can you play pickleball on a tennis court?

Yes, with pickleball lines and a pickleball net. USA Pickleball’s guide to lining a court says two pickleball courts can easily be added without greatly interfering with the line structure of the tennis court, and that four will fit, at a squeeze. It also suggests you use the tennis service line as a line marker for the non-volley zone line.

On a court with both sets of lines, play to the pickleball lines and ignore the tennis ones. Find the kitchen line first: it’s the line 7 feet from the pickleball net, parallel to it, and a volley with a toe on it is a fault. Its sidelines are 20 feet apart, and each baseline is 22 feet from the pickleball net.

Set up a portable net for each court rather than playing across the tennis net, which stands 2 inches too high in the middle. Our court guide has the layouts for one and two tennis courts, and the USTA’s advice for lines shared with tennis.

Paddle vs racket, and the ball

A tennis racket is strung, and the Rules of Tennis say its hitting surface shall be flat and consist of a pattern of crossed strings, on a racket up to 29 inches long and 12½ wide. A pickleball paddle is solid, made of rigid, noncompressible material (rule 3.D.4), and much shorter: its length can’t pass 17 inches, and its length and width together can’t pass 24 (rule 3.D.2). There’s no limit on thickness. Sanctioned play also needs a paddle that USA Pickleball has approved (rule 3.D.1); for a first game, any paddle will do.

A standard tennis ball weighs 1.98 to 2.10 ounces (56 to 59.4 grams) and measures 2.57 to 2.70 inches across. A pickleball is molded plastic with holes, a little bigger at 2.87 to 2.97 inches and less than half the weight, at 0.78 to 0.935 ounces (22 to 26.5 grams). USA Pickleball approves each ball’s design against its own equipment standards (rule 3.C.2); the limits here are from the International Pickleball Federation’s Equipment Standards Manual. Any approved ball can be used indoors or out (rule 3.C.1), though by custom the one with larger holes is the indoor ball and the one with smaller holes the outdoor ball.

How the serve differs

Tennis lets you serve any way you like, as long as you hit the ball before it lands (tennis rule 16), and tennis players serve overhead. Pickleball has two kinds of serve, and neither is overhead.

• The volley serve, hit out of the air with the paddle moving in an upward arc, the ball no higher than your waist and the paddle head no higher than your wrist (rules 7.C.1 to 7.C.3).
• The drop serve, dropped from a natural height, without a toss, and hit after it bounces with any swing, forehand or backhand (rules 7.D.1 to 7.D.5).

Whichever you use, you get one try. A tennis player gets a second serve after a fault (tennis rule 20), but in pickleball a missed serve is a fault like any other, and the serve moves on. A serve that clips the net and lands in the right court is played (rule 7.E), where tennis would call a let and replay it (tennis rule 22).

Tennis lets you leave the ground as you serve, as long as neither foot touches the baseline or the court before you hit (tennis rule 18). In pickleball at least one foot has to be on the ground behind the baseline when you hit, and neither may touch the court (rules 7.A.1 to 7.A.3), so a jump serve is a fault.

In tennis you serve a whole game, starting from the right and switching halves each point (tennis rule 17), then the other side serves the next game. In pickleball you keep serving until your side loses a rally, switching sides each time your team scores on your serve, and in doubles your partner serves next before the other team gets the ball. Your team’s score tells you where to stand: the player who served first for your team is on the right when the score is even (rule 5.B.3).

Pickleball scoring vs tennis scoring

Tennis scores every point, whoever served: love, 15, 30, 40 and game, with deuce when both sides reach 40 (tennis rule 5). Six games with a two-game margin win a set, and in a tie-break set, six games all goes to a tiebreak game to 7 points, win by 2 (tennis rules 5 and 6).

Pickleball counts 1, 2, 3 up to 11, win by 2, and in the standard game only the serving side scores (rule 4.A). Win a rally on the other team’s serve and you win the serve back, not a point. That’s why a game can sit at the same score for several rallies.

In doubles the score is called before every serve as three numbers: the serving team’s score, the receiving team’s, and whether this is your team’s first or second server. Every game starts at 0–0–2, because the team that serves first gets only one server on its first turn (rules 5.B.2 and 6.B.2). Tennis has nothing like the third number, and it’s the easiest one to lose track of. Rally Trace, on the App Store, keeps this score on your Apple Watch and calls it out, so nobody has to remember whose serve it is. Without a watch, our scoring guide’s cheat sheet fits on a phone screen.

If your group plays rally scoring, which the rulebook includes as an option (rule 14.A), the game feels closer to a tennis tiebreak: every rally scores a point for whoever won it.

The two-bounce rule and the kitchen

In tennis only the serve has to bounce. The receiver loses the point for hitting it out of the air (tennis rule 24), but the server can follow the serve in and volley the return. Pickleball makes the return bounce as well: The serve and the return of serve must each bounce before being returned (rule 10.A). After those two bounces, anyone may volley.

Then there’s the kitchen, officially the non-volley zone: the 7 feet on each side of the net, its line included. You can stand in it whenever you like, but you can’t volley while you’re touching it, and it’s still a fault if a volley’s momentum carries you in afterward, even once the ball is dead (rules 11.A.1 and 11.A.2). Tennis has no such zone, and closing right up on the net to put a volley away is good tennis. In pickleball, with a foot in the kitchen, it’s a fault. Our kitchen rules guide covers the cases people argue about.

Is pickleball easier than tennis?

It’s easier to pick up, because of how the game is built. A pickleball court is under a third the size of a tennis doubles court, the serve is underhand or off a bounce, the paddle is shorter than a racket and the ball is lighter, and the two-bounce rule takes away serve-and-volley.

Whether it’s easier to play well is something nobody has measured: no study we’ve found compares how long each sport takes to learn or how hard each is to master. What changes at a higher level is where the points are won: good doubles teams play from the kitchen line, and our strategy guide covers getting there.

Which is the better workout?

Tennis, by intensity. The standard reference, the Compendium of Physical Activities, rates singles tennis at 8.0 METs (multiples of the energy you use at rest) and doubles tennis at 4.5 to 6.0. It has no entry for pickleball, so it can’t rank pickleball against either; our calories guide uses doubles tennis as the nearest match.

The largest data set so far is Apple’s. In 2023, the Apple Heart and Movement Study analyzed more than 250,000 pickleball and tennis workouts recorded on Apple Watch. Tennis players’ heart rates peaked higher, at 152 beats per minute on average against 143 for pickleball, while the average pickleball workout ran longer, 90 minutes against 81.

Measured on court, pickleball is real exercise. In a 2023 study of 53 recreational players with an average age of 62, heart rates averaged about 70% of predicted maximum in both singles and doubles, and more than 70% of playing time was in moderate-to-vigorous heart rate zones. Tennis match play, in a review by Fernandez, Mendez-Villanueva and Pluim, mixes periods of maximal or near maximal work with longer periods of moderate and low intensity activity, and how hard it is varies considerably depending on the players’ level, style, and sex.

We haven’t found a study that measured the same players at both sports, so nobody can yet say how a rec pickleball session compares with a rec tennis match for the same person. Until someone does, your own heart rate in each is the best comparison you’ll get.

Is pickleball easier on the body than tennis?

Nobody knows yet, per hour played. The best comparison so far counts injuries without knowing how many people played. Weiss, Dougherty and DiMaggio looked at injuries in players 60 and over treated in US emergency departments from 2010 to 2019: an estimated 58,836 from tennis and 28,984 from pickleball. Tennis injuries stayed about level while pickleball’s grew steadily, and by 2018 the two were even. The authors had no reliable figures for how many seniors played each sport, so the counts can’t say which is riskier for any one player.

The injuries themselves looked alike. In the authors’ words, Patterns of senior tennis and pickleball injuries were mostly similar. Slips, trips, falls and dives caused most of them, 67% of the seniors’ pickleball injuries and 59% of tennis’s.

Switching from tennis to pickleball

These tennis habits are faults in pickleball, or lead to them:

• Serving overhead, or hitting the serve above your waist. Use the volley serve’s upward swing, or drop the ball and hit it off the bounce.
• Counting on a second serve, which pickleball doesn’t give you.
• Jumping into the court as you serve. Keep a foot on the ground behind the baseline until you’ve hit it.
• Following your serve to the net. The return has to bounce before your team can hit it, so stay back for it, then move up. Our third shot drop guide covers how.
• Volleying with a toe on the kitchen line, or letting a volley carry you in.
• Serving before the score has been called in full. The server normally calls it (rule 6.B), and the whole score, all three numbers in doubles, has to be called before the serve is hit (rule 6.C).

For your first few games, call the score out loud before every serve and check it against where everyone is standing. When the call and the positions don’t match, sort it out before the next serve; our scoring guide covers what to do when the score is wrong. If you’ve never played at all, how to play pickleball walks through a first game.

Keep score on your wrist while you learn

Rally Trace keeps the score on your Apple Watch. You tap the side that won each rally, and the watch works out the score, the server and which side everyone should be on, so you can think about your serve and the kitchen line and leave the count to it.

Every game you save reaches your iPhone with its heart rate and an effort score, free, so you can see which games worked you hardest. Your record with every partner and against every opponent is free too, and Rally Trace Pro adds how often you win the rally on your serve and on theirs. Get Rally Trace on the App Store before your first game.