The Best Pickleball Overgrips and Grip Tape

An overgrip is the thin strip of tape wrapped around a paddle handle, and it is the closest thing this site has to a universal pickleball gift. It fits every paddle ever made, there is no size to get right, no hand to guess, and no skill level to match. It wears out — that is the entire point of it — so a player who already owns one still wants more, and nobody has ever opened a fresh pack and thought "I already have this." For a gift buyer who knows the person plays pickleball and knows almost nothing else, that combination is rare and worth a lot.

It solves a real irritation, too, not an invented one. Sweat, dirt and hours of squeezing turn a handle slick and hard, and a slick handle makes the paddle twist on contact, which players compensate for by gripping tighter — the road to sore forearms and blisters. Selkirk, one of the sport's major paddle brands, describes a fresh overgrip in its own guide as "a simple yet highly effective maintenance tool to combat sweat, prevent the handle from twisting during fast-paced exchanges, and improve overall paddle control." Re-wrapping is also one of those five-minute chores players postpone for months, which is exactly why handing someone a stack of new grips lands better than it should for the money.

There is one distinction worth understanding before you buy, because it decides which half of this page you should shop. An overgrip is, as the retailer JustPaddles puts it, "a thin, soft, slightly padded grip that is placed over the existing grip on a paddle." A replacement grip is the thing underneath: "thicker and more padded, a replacement grip is installed directly to the actual paddle material." Overgrips are cheaper, thinner and swapped often; replacement grips last longer and are a bigger job. The practical rule for a gift is that an overgrip is the safe buy, because it goes on top of whatever is already there. Same source, same page: when you re-wrap, "do not remove the replacement grip that's currently on the handle." Most picks here are overgrips. Two are not, and they are labeled as such.

If you are worried that adding tape to someone's paddle might make it non-tournament-legal, it does not. USA Pickleball's official rulebook lists the alterations a player may make to a commercially produced paddle, and "addition or replacement of grip wrap" is explicitly one of them, alongside changes to grip size via inserts. The rulebook also states plainly that "there is no restriction on paddle weight," so the gram or two a grip adds is a non-issue even at a sanctioned tournament. You are giving a consumable, not modifying their equipment.

That leaves one genuine judgment call: what the grip should feel like. Tacky grips are slightly sticky to the touch and are the mainstream default — they feel secure and suit most people in most conditions. Dry-feel grips go the other way, absorbing moisture so the handle stays dry rather than sticky, which is what heavy sweaters and humid-climate players tend to swear by. Cushioned grips add padding and soften impact, at the cost of some feel and a slightly fatter handle. If you have no idea which your person prefers, buy tacky: it is what most paddles ship with and what most players re-buy. If they have ever mentioned sweaty hands, buy dry-feel. Both are on this page.

Here is how these picks were chosen, because a gift buyer deserves to know what this ranking is and is not. There is no testing lab behind this site, nobody wore these grips through a season, and you will not find an invented star rating anywhere on the page. What was done instead is what a careful shopper would do: prefer grips made or explicitly marketed for pickleball over ones quietly borrowed from tennis, favor brands a player would recognize from their own club, confirm every single listing was genuinely purchasable and in stock before it earned a slot, and rank them by how safely a non-player can hand one over. Where a listing states a material, a count or a benefit, it is repeated here as the listing's claim rather than as a finding of ours. Prices are never typed into this copy — they move constantly, so the live figure renders beside each pick with the date it was pulled.

One last piece of honesty about scale. A pack of grips is a stocking stuffer, an add-on, or the small thoughtful thing that goes in the box alongside something bigger. It is not, on its own, a birthday present for your spouse. If this needs to be the whole gift, pair it with something from the accessories roundup at the foot of this page, or move up to a bag or a paddle. Used as the extra, though, it is close to unbeatable: cheap, correct for everyone, and quietly appreciated every single time they pick the paddle up.