Padel Sets

Two rackets and three balls, nearly always. That is the core of every padel racket and ball set on sale in the UK, from the £40 marketplace box to the branded duo packs that specialist shops put together at the end of a season. Beyond that the contents wander. Some sets add a drawstring bag, some add a cover per racket, the better ones add a strip of frame protector tape and an overgrip, and a few of the four-racket family packs add a second tube of balls.

What no set includes is shoes, and shoes are the thing a new player most often gets wrong. UK courts are sand-filled artificial grass laid on porous asphalt, and running trainers skate on the sand like a shopping trolley on a wet car park. The wrist cord, on the other hand, is already sorted: the rules make a non-elastic cord of up to 35 cm compulsory, so every racket arrives with one fixed to the handle.

So read a set listing for what is missing as much as for what is there. One tube of balls is one tube. It goes soft within a few sessions, and a set that ships with a single tube has quietly handed you your first top-up order.

Sometimes, and the exceptions are worth knowing. When we looked in November 2026, Padel Nuestro's UK site listed a duo pack of two HEAD Evo Speed 2025 rackets with two protector tapes and a Shockout overgrip at £109.95, against a list price of £191.10. Our single Head Evo Speed costs about £57, so two of them come to about £114 before any tape or grip. On that day the pack was the better deal by roughly the price of the extras it included. It was also out of stock, which is the other thing about clearance duo packs: they exist because a season ended, and they vanish when it is cleared.

The marketplace end is a different story. In October 2026 the Amazon UK search for a padel set returned unbranded sets of two at £40 to £60, often rated under four stars, and one set with faces of ABS plastic rather than fibreglass sitting at 2.6 stars from 85 ratings. A branded single beginner racket outsold every one of those boxes. Buyers worked it out; you do not need to repeat the experiment.

Our rule of thumb: a branded duo pack at or below the price of the two rackets bought singly is a good buy, whatever extras it carries. An unbranded set is a garden toy, and a fine one for a holiday villa or a summer of hitting on the drive, but not the thing to learn on if you mean to play at a club.

A padel starter set earns its keep when two people start on the same day at roughly the same level. A couple who booked a taster session and loved it. Two friends who have been hiring rackets at £3 a go and are tired of the club's bent ones. A parent who wants to play with a teenager who has just outgrown a junior frame. In each case one order, one parcel and matching kit is exactly the point.

It falls apart when the two people are not alike. Put a 5 ft 2 beginner and a 6 ft 3 former tennis player on the same 360 g round racket and one of them will hate it within a month; the tennis player wants a teardrop with more weight in the head, and the beginner wants the lightest, softest frame going. Build the pair as two different rackets instead. Nothing about the word set requires them to match.

Skip the set, too, if one of you already owns a racket. The second racket on its own, plus a tube of balls, is the whole purchase. And skip any set that does not name the racket inside it: if a listing cannot tell you the weight, the core or the face material, it is asking you to trust a photograph.

Each pair below is two real rackets from our catalogue plus one tube of balls, priced as the basket would price it. All four clear the free-delivery line with room to spare, so add the second tube, the overgrips and the covers without paying postage on them.

The first pair is the lowest-priced branded padel set of 2 we would put our name to. The Dunlop Nanomax Lite 2025 is last season's light beginner racket, about 350 g with a soft EVA core, and at about £45 it costs less than many unbranded rackets sold in pairs. The second and third pairs are the round, forgiving rackets most coaches would hand a new adult player. The fourth is the one people forget is allowed: two different rackets for two different players.

If you cannot decide between the pairs, decide on the person rather than the racket. The one who wants to learn to place the ball takes the round frame; the one who already hits hard off the forehand takes the teardrop. The racket finder asks six questions and does this for you.

Padel is a doubles game, which makes the padel racket set of 4 more logical than it first sounds. Four rackets is a whole court. A family that plays together, a flat that books the same Thursday slot, or the regular four who are tired of one person always forgetting a racket: each of them can buy the court's worth in one go and never borrow again.

The budget version is four Dunlop Megamax round rackets. We will be honest about the Megamax because its own page is: Padelful scores the 2025 version 5.8 overall, which is low next to the best starters, and it is a trial racket, a spare or a lesson-block racket rather than one you keep for years. As a set of four for a family that plays a few times a summer, that is precisely the brief. Pair it with a dozen balls, which means four tubes, and nobody plays with a dead ball.

With children in the four, mix the sizes. Junior frames weigh about 300 to 350 g, and a child swinging an adult racket learns to hit late and from the wrist, which is a habit that takes years to undo. The kids padel racket page sizes them by age and height.

For adults, two round or gently teardrop rackets in the 350 to 365 g range, with a low or even balance, a soft EVA foam core and a fibreglass face. That combination gives the biggest sweet spot and the least sting on a mishit, and in the first month nearly every shot is a mishit. Carbon faces and hard cores come later. None of this is a rule, by the way: the International Padel Federation limits a racket's length, width, thickness and holes and says nothing at all about weight, balance or core, so every level band you read anywhere is retail convention.

Then two tubes of balls, one overgrip three-pack to share, a protector strip per racket and, if the rackets will live in a car boot or a shared rucksack, a cover each. That is the beginner padel set we would actually hand someone, and with two of our beginner rackets it comes to roughly £110 without covers and about £180 with them.

For the long version of why round beats diamond for a first racket, read how to choose a padel racket. For the full shortlist of starter frames, from Dunlop and Wilson to Nox, adidas and Babolat, the beginner padel rackets page lists every one we sell, and the control padel racket page covers the round shapes.

Balls first, because a session ends when the balls die, not when you are tired. Buy two tubes, or a dozen if you play weekly; the padel ball page explains which balls suit cold British courts and which are built for heat. A padel ball holds roughly 10 to 11 psi when new, against about 14 for a tennis ball, so it softens faster than people expect once the tube is opened.

Overgrips second. A new racket's factory grip turns slick within weeks, and a three-pack at about £4 to £7 from the padel grip page keeps both handles tacky for a couple of months. The HEAD Padel Pro overgrip is a thin 0.60 mm wrap, so it does not fatten the handle.

Then the protection. A strip of tape along the top of the frame, such as the Bullpadel frame protector three-pack at about £5, guards against the glass. A cover, from the padel racket cover range at about £4.50 upwards, guards against keys and sand in the boot. Different jobs, both cheap.

What can wait: the bag. Two rackets in two covers travel perfectly well in any rucksack until the day you start changing shoes at the court, and at that point the padel bag page has two-racket backpacks from about £20. What should not wait for long is proper footwear; the padel shoes page explains the soles.

The set builder at the top of the page is a padel starter kit in four taps. It holds a shortlist of rackets for each level, puts the most useful ball, overgrip and protector in the basket by default, and keeps a running total with a note of how far you are from free delivery (two rackets will always clear it).

Prefer to start from a budget rather than a level? The kit builder on the homepage works the other way round: choose beginner, intermediate or advanced, choose a budget band (under £100, £100 to £200 or over £200), slide the ball from full control to full power, and it shortlists rackets before offering balls, a grip, a protector and a bag. Both builders put real stock into the same basket, so use whichever suits the way you think.

A small trap for anyone searching our catalogue. Set Padel is a racket brand whose name happens to be the word you typed, and its rackets are sold one at a time. The Set Padel Amarok 2025 at about £70 and the Set Padel Akela at about £72.50 are single rackets, and the Set Padel Amarok Backpack at about £21 is a single backpack. Buy two Amaroks and you have, technically, a Set Padel set. We will allow it.

None of their rackets comes boxed with balls or a second racket, so if you came here for a padel set and landed on a Set Padel product page, the builder above is what you were after.

A set is a lovely present for two people who play together, and a risky one for a single player who already owns a racket they like. If the person you are buying for plays already, the padel gifts page sorts ideas by budget and by player, from overgrip multipacks to ball pressurisers, and it is usually the better place to start.

For a couple or a family about to start, a set is hard to beat. Choose round, light rackets unless you know better, include a second tube of balls, and remember that anything unused can come back within 30 days, so a racket that turns out to be the wrong weight is not a disaster. With 1.5 million people now playing padel in Britain, according to the LTA, the odds are decent that the people you are buying for will be on court before the balls go flat.

A set built here ships as one tracked UK parcel and arrives in 3 to 4 working days. Delivery is free over £40, which any pair of rackets clears, and £3.95 below. The delivery page has the detail.

Unused items can come back within 30 days for a refund, and you can return one racket from a pair without sending back the other, which no boxed set allows. If anything arrives damaged, tell us within 48 hours with a photo. The returns page covers the rest, and the contact page is where to find us.