How Is Skateboarding Scored?

Five judges score each run and each single-trick attempt on a 0.00-100.00 scale. The highest and the lowest scores are dropped, the remaining three are added and averaged to two decimal places, and that number is the score for the performance.

There is no difficulty table, no coefficient and no weighted components. World Skate's Skateboarding Judging Criteria, Release 1.0 (2025) names seven criteria for runs and four for single-trick attempts, attaches no percentage to any of them, and divides the scale into six named bands instead. The judge produces one number for the whole performance; the criteria exist to make that number defensible.

The panel itself changes with the level of the event. At international events it is five judges plus a Head Judge who does not score and takes no part in tie-breaks. At national events it is four judges plus a Head Judge who does score. Either way five numbers go into the trim, which is why the arithmetic never changes.

What changes between disciplines is the format, not the scoring. Park ranks athletes on one run. Street can be run as runs only, or as runs plus a trick phase — and it is the trick phase that produces the three-figure totals people see at the Olympics. For the judging seat itself, see how to judge skateboarding.

Scoring runs on a 0-100 range "using two decimal numbers/places", and World Skate does not leave the rest of the scale to interpretation: the criteria document publishes six named bands plus a reserved 0.00.

The bands are not evenly sized, and that is the part that surprises people reading a live scoreboard. Standard is twenty points wide and is where most runs at most contests land. Advanced and Expert are ten points each. So a 68.00 is not "nearly advanced" — it is mid-Standard, and Advanced does not begin until 70.01. Two judges who both describe a run as advanced but enter 69.00 and 74.00 are not disagreeing about the skating; they are disagreeing about where the band starts.

0.00 is not a low score. It is a nil, reserved for a non-make and for an attempt the athlete declined to have scored.

Skateboarding is judged on Overall Impression: one number for the whole performance, never a sum of parts. But the vocabulary behind that number is published, and for runs there are seven criteria, not five — and style is not one of them.

Three of the seven are routinely missing from popular explanations. Consistency is a named criterion, defined as the ability to keep landing tricks without coming off the board across the whole run; that is where a fall is priced, which is why one bail in an otherwise difficult run usually costs a band rather than a category. Flow is a named criterion, defined as connecting tricks in a continuous, fluent and aesthetically pleasing way. And repetition is a criterion too — a subtractive one: repeating tricks, trick components or the same obstacles inside one run is, in the document's words, "proportionally penalized".

None of the seven carries a weight. A judge cannot show their working as "30% difficulty plus 25% execution", because World Skate publishes no such numbers for skateboarding.

Single-trick attempts are judged on a shorter, different list: difficulty, quality of trick execution, obstacle selection, and repetition. Nothing else carries over from the run.

Format comes from the Street & Park Competition Rules, and the familiar "45 seconds" shorthand is only half right.

Park is run-only. Athletes perform a minimum of two and up to four runs of 30 to 50 seconds, and the highest-scoring run determines the round result — the others are not averaged in. Two optional mechanisms can be switched on for an event. First Wall Rebate lets an athlete who bails on the first trick restart the run, with the clock stopped and reset within 30 seconds. Golden Run gives the top five ranked athletes one additional final run, re-seeded in reverse order so the leader drops in last.

Street uses two to three runs of 45 to 60 seconds in pure run format, where again only the best run counts. Beyond that, street uses three named combined formats in which a trick phase is added.

The notation decodes as runs / single-trick attempts / scores that count. The third number is not a trick count — it is how many scores are added together at the end. The maximum column below is simple arithmetic: each counted score is capped at 100.00. Formats are covered end to end in skateboarding competition formats.

Olympic skateboarding is not a separate scoring system. It is one specific configuration of the rules above, which is why the numbers look unfamiliar even though the scale never changed.

Street at Paris 2024 was the 2/5/3 format: two 45-second runs and five single-trick attempts, with the best run and the two highest tricks added together. Maximum 300.00. Twenty-two skaters started each event, the top eight advanced, and scores were reset for the final, which ran to the same shape.

Park at Paris 2024 was three 45-second runs, ranked on the highest single run. Maximum 100.00. Five judges, highest and lowest dropped, middle three averaged — the same trim used everywhere else. Note that three runs is the Olympic configuration, not the World Skate ceiling: the competition rules allow up to four.

Tie-breaks run off the components, not a fresh performance. In street the higher run score separates tied totals, then the highest individual trick. In park it is the better second-highest run.

For Los Angeles 2028, the judging document already in force is the one World Skate lists as the Street and Park Judging Criteria — Los Angeles cycle, Release 1.0 (2025). The criteria and the scale are published; the event-level format is the organisers' to confirm closer to the Games.

Street League is a private league. It is not governed by the World Skate rules above, it publishes no public rulebook, and its scores live on a different scale — which is why an SLS winning total in the thirties and an Olympic total in the two-hundreds can describe comparable skating.

The 2026 season runs two sections. The Line section gives two attempts at a 45-second run, of which the best counts. The Single Tricks section gives five attempts, of which the best four count. Scores run 0.0 to 10.0, so the theoretical maximum is 50.0 — one run plus four tricks. SLS's own shorthand for a standout single score is the "9 Club".

Since 2023 the finals have run as a single-elimination bracket rather than a straight points ranking, a change SLS made to build head-to-head rivalries rather than to change how a trick is scored.

Because SLS publishes no criteria document, the weightings that circulate in trade coverage of the 2026 season — roughly half on difficulty and originality, a quarter on execution and style, a quarter on course use — are reported practice, not a published rule, and this guide treats them as such. What is not in doubt is the consequence of the scale: on 0.0-10.0, a sketchy landing costs a far larger share of the available score than the same landing costs on a 0.00-100.00 run.

The 2026 SLS Championship Tour runs through Sydney, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Tempe, Paris and Tokyo before the São Paulo Super Crown in December.

In the run criteria, World Skate calls difficulty "the most distinctive criterion by which skateboarding tricks are judged in any competition", and the definition explicitly includes the obstacle the trick is executed on. The same kickflip backside lipslide is a different proposition on a flat bar and on a kinked handrail, and that difference sits inside the difficulty criterion rather than in a separate one. In the single-trick phase it is broken out as its own criterion, obstacle selection.

There is still no difficulty table. Skateboarding has never published one and Release 1.0 does not introduce one. Judges hold the hierarchy by experience, and the panel calibrates it in the judges' meeting before the event.

The tiers a panel will recognise, in ascending order:

Lower — basic grinds and slides (50-50, boardslide), ollies over obstacles, straightforward kickflips.

Medium — technical grinds (smith, feeble, crooked), flip-in or flip-out of a grind, manual combinations, consistent switch skating.

High — nollie and switch flip tricks into grinds, big-spin variations, handrail and gap-to-grind tricks, 540-plus airs in park.

Progression / NBD — tricks landed for the first time, 900-plus airs, multi-flip combinations into technical grinds.

Two things stop difficulty from simply winning. Landing it is a precondition: difficulty converts into score only when the trick is completed, and a non-make is 0.00 no matter what was attempted. And repetition works against stacking one hard trick: a run built from variations of the same trick is exposed on the variety criterion and the repetition criterion at once. Trick-by-trick difficulty is covered in skateboarding tricks and difficulty.

The seven run criteria and the 0.00-100.00 scale are identical in both disciplines. What differs is the terrain, the run length and the format.

Street

Runs of 45 to 60 seconds over rails, stairs, ledges, gaps, banks and manual pads. Judging weight falls on technical precision: exact pop, a locked-in position on a grind, a stable landing on flat ground, and trick-to-obstacle fit. Street is the discipline that uses the combined run-plus-trick formats, so a street final is often two scoring phases rather than one.

Park

Runs of 30 to 50 seconds in a bowl. Amplitude above the coping is the clearest visible difficulty differentiator, and carving and pumping that holds speed through the transitions is the flow criterion in its most literal form. Course use means the whole bowl — extensions, hips, deep and shallow sections — and repeating the same aerial on the same wall is exactly what the repetition criterion exists to penalise.

Park never has a trick phase, so a park result is a single number out of 100.00 and the pressure sits entirely on putting one complete run together.

"Style is one of the judging criteria." It is not one of the seven. Style is how skaters and commentators describe what separates two identical runs, and World Skate absorbs it inside quality of execution and flow. A score defended as "82 for style" is not citing a published criterion.

"Park is three runs." Three runs was the Olympic configuration at Paris 2024. The competition rules allow two to four, of 30 to 50 seconds, and an event can also switch on First Wall Rebate and the top-five Golden Run.

"Scores are whole numbers out of 100." The scale is explicitly 0.00-100.00 to two decimal places, and the trimmed mean routinely produces results like 78.67. The two decimals are not decoration; they are what separates a podium.

"TNS applies to every trick." Score refusal is limited to the 2/5/3 format, in the single-trick phase of a street competition. There is no TNS in park, and none in the run phase.

"Harder tricks always win." In a run, difficulty is the most distinctive criterion, but it only counts once the trick is landed, and a sketchy landing is priced twice, in execution and again in consistency. A clean medium-difficulty trick outscores a barely-survived hard one regularly.

"The scoring is random and subjective." There is no formula, but there are published bands and named criteria, and the trimmed mean removes any single outlier judge structurally. A well-calibrated panel's middle three scores usually sit within a few points of each other.