Blog/Squash Rules
SQUASH RULES - THE SERVE

Squash Serve Rules:
Common Faults
and How to Avoid Them.

The service box, the wall lines, and the five faults that cost recreational players free points every match.

The short answer

A legal squash serve must be hit from inside the service box with at least one foot grounded, strike the front wall between the service line and the out line, and land in the opposite back quarter of the court. Miss any of these and it is a fault.

Because PAR scoring awards a point on every rally, a serve fault is not just a lost serve - it is a lost point outright.

The 5 most common faults

1
Foot fault
At least part of one foot must be touching the floor inside the service box, without touching a line, at the moment of contact. Stepping outside or onto the line at contact is a fault.
2
Serving below the service line
The ball must strike the front wall on or above the service line (roughly 1.83m high). A serve that hits below it is a fault, regardless of where it ends up.
3
Serving above the out line
The front wall also has an out line near the top (4.57m). Any serve that hits above this line is out, even if it would otherwise have been a good serve.
4
Ball landing in the wrong quarter
After hitting the front wall, the ball must land in the back quarter of the court diagonally opposite the server. Landing short, or on the same side, is a fault.
5
Serving from the wrong box
The server always serves from the box on the same side of the court as their current score is even or odd - alternating sides after winning each point, similarly to tennis.

Why the wall lines exist

The service line and out line on the front wall force the serve to travel through a narrow vertical band - high enough to clear the tin, low enough to stay under the out line. This keeps the serve honest and prevents a server from simply blasting the ball as hard as possible with no aim, which is exactly the kind of low-skill serve the rule is designed to discourage.

Practising serves against these exact lines, rather than just "somewhere on the front wall", is the fastest way to stop giving away free points.

Keep the score straight while you fix your serve

Every fault in squash directly changes the score under PAR scoring, so keeping an accurate scoreboard matters more than in sports where a fault just means a re-serve. Scorepion tracks squash scoring automatically from your Apple Watch or Wear OS watch, so nobody has to remember whose point it was after a disputed serve.

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Common questions

What are the basic squash serve rules?
The server must stand with at least one foot inside the service box, hit the ball so it strikes the front wall above the service line and below the out line, and the ball must land in the opposite back quarter of the court.
What is a foot fault in squash?
A foot fault happens when the server does not have at least part of one foot touching the floor inside the service box, without touching any line, at the moment of contact.
What happens after a squash serve fault?
A single fault results in loss of the point in modern PAR scoring, since every rally awards a point regardless of who served.
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