Artistic swimming rules rules, for watching
Start with the rules you see all the time, then the ones that change results.
Settling an argument? Search all 16 rules
- What are the events in artistic swimming, and can men compete?
- What is the difference between a technical routine and a free routine?
- How many swimmers are in an artistic swimming team, and can a reserve be swapped in?
- How long is an artistic swimming routine, and what happens if it runs over?
- Can artistic swimmers hear the music under water?
- Why do artistic swimmers not wear goggles?
- How deep is an artistic swimming pool?
- What are figures in artistic swimming, and who still performs them?
- How is artistic swimming scored?
- What is a base mark in artistic swimming, and why does it sink a routine's score?
- What happens if a team gets a required element wrong in a technical routine?
- How are swimmers who are out of time with each other penalised?
- Can artistic swimmers touch the bottom of the pool?
- Who reaches the final in artistic swimming, and who swims last?
- How is the winner decided when an event has more than one routine?
- Who is in charge of an artistic swimming competition, and what gets a routine disqualified?
Where these rules come from
| Tag | Document |
|---|---|
| AS plus article number | World Aquatics, Competition Regulations, Part Seven: Artistic Swimming Rules, in force as from 1 January 2025. Read for this set: Articles 1 to 24 and 26 to 28 (events, sessions, programmes, entries, preliminaries and finals, figures, routine sessions, time limits, music, panels, judging, deductions and penalties, calculation, final result, officials, the Referee, the organiser's duties, swimwear, facilities, medical). In Article 18 the clauses repeat for each of the ten routine types; the solo, women's duet, mixed duet and team technical sections and the acrobatic routine section were read in full and the others checked for differences |
| AS Appendix 3 | The same Part, Appendix 3 (set numbers of elements): the senior and junior table only |
| "Part One" plus article number | The same document, Part One: Article 13 (protests), cited and not re-checked for this sport |
| R | "Why the rule exists", or a point reasoned from the rule, not stated in it |
| C | Common usage or general knowledge, not a rule |
All checked on 14 October 2026. The file is a text PDF with article numbers in the text layer.
The edition is from January 2025. The technical committee resets the required elements and the numbers of elements every four years, and the swimming part of the same regulations already has a February 2026 edition. The newer text is not saved.
Not covered: Article 25 (age group rules, apart from what Articles 8 to 12 say about figures); Appendix 1 (figures), Appendix 2 (the technical required elements themselves), Appendices 4 and 5, the hybrid and acrobatics catalogues with their difficulty values (Appendices 6 and 7), the synchronisation guide (Appendix 8) and the world ranking (Appendix 9); masters.
Not covered: Article 25 (age group rules, apart from what Articles 8 to 12 say about figures); Appendix 1 (figures), Appendix 2 (the technical required elements themselves), Appendices 4 and 5, the hybrid and acrobatics catalogues with their difficulty values (Appendices 6 and 7), the synchronisation guide (Appendix 8) and the world ranking (Appendix 9); masters.