Basketball Three-Point Line and Shot Clock Rules

How far the three-point line is in basketball, how long the shot clock runs and what it resets to — in the NBA, under FIBA and in NCAA men’s play, each quoted from that body’s own rulebook with its article number and edition. The three do not agree.

Three rulebooks, read on 12 October 2026

The same line, moved, by the same two bodies

There is no such thing as the three-point line

This page is about basketball, the five-a-side game played to a basket ten feet above the floor. It has no single rule-maker: the Fédération Internationale de Basketball (FIBA) publishes the Official Basketball Rules used by most of the world, the NBA publishes its own rulebook for its own competition, and the NCAA publishes separate rules for United States college play. Where a number on this page is one of theirs rather than plain arithmetic, the body and the edition are named beside it.

A basketball rule belongs to a competition and to a season. The NBA plays “periods of regulation play … twelve minutes” (Official Rules, Rule 5 Section II-1) where FIBA plays “4 quarters of 10 minutes each” (Official Basketball Rules 2024, Art. 8.1), so a 48-minute and a 40-minute game are both normal and a figure normalised to one does not compare with one normalised to the other. The same is true of every number on this page. Ask how far the three-point line is and there are at least three current answers: the NBA’s arc is twenty-three feet nine inches from the middle of the basket under Rule 1 Section I item 4 of its own Official Rules; FIBA’s is “An arc of radius 6.75 m measured from the point on the court beneath the exact centre of the opponents’ basket” under Art. 2.5.4 of the Official Basketball Rules 2024; and the NCAA men’s is “22 feet, 1 3/4 inches from the center of the basket” under Rule 1 Section 7 Art. 1 of its 2025-26 book. The NBA’s is about half a metre further out than the other two, which is more than it sounds — a foot and seven inches of extra distance on every attempt from the arc.

Two of those three turn out to be the same line in different units, and checking it is a satisfying piece of arithmetic. Twenty-two feet one and three-quarter inches is 6.75005 metres, and twenty-one feet seven and seven-eighths inches is 6.60083 metres; FIBA’s stated 6.75-metre radius, truncated by lines 0.90 metres inside each sideline on a court that Art. 2.1 gives as fifteen metres wide, puts the corner at 6.60 metres. So the NCAA men’s arc is FIBA’s arc, converted, to within a millimetre. That is worth printing because it checks both sources at once, and because the two bodies express it so differently — one states a corner distance, the other states a setback from the sideline and leaves the corner to be worked out. Neither the NBA nor FIBA states a corner distance from the basket as a number at all, so where this page gives one it is marked as derived.

The shot clock is the clearest case of three bodies disagreeing outright. The NBA and FIBA both run twenty-four seconds — “The shot clock shall start at 24 seconds” at Rule 7 Section I, and “must attempt a shot for a goal within 24 seconds” at Art. 29.1.1 — and both reset to fourteen after an offensive rebound, under Rule 7 Section IV-d-1 and Art. 29.2.7. NCAA men’s basketball runs thirty seconds, “Use a 30-second shot clock” at Rule 2 Section 11 Art. 1, and resets to twenty rather than fourteen under Rule 2-11.6.d.1. A page saying “the shot clock is twenty-four seconds” without saying whose would be wrong for every college game played.

And the rules move. The NBA shortened its arc to twenty-two feet all round for three seasons from 1994-95 and restored twenty-three feet nine inches for 1997-98 — both of those datings come from contemporaneous press reports rather than from rulebook text, because the league does not publish its superseded editions where this page could read them, and they are marked as such. The NCAA men’s line moved too, and that one is documented in the governing body’s own text: its 2016-17 rules book gives twenty feet nine inches at exactly the rule number that now gives twenty-two feet one and three-quarter inches, a move of sixteen and three-quarter inches between two editions of the same book.

What is deliberately missing. No NCAA period structure is printed anywhere on this page: it lives in Rule 5 of the rules book, and both PDF editions read for this page truncated in Rule 4, so it was not read. The college men’s game is widely reported as two twenty-minute halves and that may well be right; it is not quoted here, because every other figure on this page is a quotation and one guess among them would undermine the lot. The WNBA, the NCAA women’s game and FIBA 3×3 have their own rules and are not covered, for the same reason — their texts were not read, and one of them returned an empty page. For the statistical consequence of these differences see the per game and per 36 minutes calculator on why a per-40 figure and a per-48 figure are not comparable, the possessions and pace calculator on why pace is quoted per 48 minutes, and the effective field goal percentage calculator on the scoring rule that makes a made three worth one and a half twos.

Frequently asked questions

Related calculators

References

1. National Basketball Association. Official Rules, Rule No. 1 (Court Dimensions and Equipment), Section I item 4: the three-point area has “parallel lines 3′ from the sidelines” and “an arc of 23’9” from the middle of the basket; Section II item 5, each ring’s upper edge 10 feet above the floor. The court’s length and width are NOT in this page’s roughly 3,000 characters of rule text — they appear only in its diagram image — and are quoted as rule text nowhere in this batch. official.nba.com, read 12 Oct 2026.
2. National Basketball Association. Official Rules, Rule No. 5 Section I items 2-3 (two points inside the arc, three outside) and Section II items 1-2 (“All periods of regulation play in the NBA will be twelve minutes.”, five-minute overtimes); Rule No. 7 Section I (“The shot clock shall start at 24 seconds”) and Section IV-d-1 (reset to 14 seconds after a missed attempt “that contacts the basket ring”). official.nba.com, read 12 Oct 2026.
3. Fédération Internationale de Basketball. Official Basketball Rules 2024, v1.0 — approved at Mies, 26 April 2024, “Valid as of 1st October 2024”; read 12 Oct 2026. Art. 2.1 (the 28 m by 15 m court); Art. 2.5.4 (the 6.75 m three-point arc and the 0.90 m sideline setback); Art. 8.1 and 8.7 (four 10-minute quarters, five-minute overtimes); Art. 16.2.1 (the 1, 2 and 3 point values); Art. 29.1.1 and 29.2.2/29.2.3/29.2.7 (24 seconds, reset to 14). The court diagrams returned as captions only, so no figure here is from one.
4. National Collegiate Athletic Association. 2025-26 NCAA Men’s Basketball Rules, dated August 2025, read 12 Oct 2026; its preface states that “All NCAA member institutions are required to conduct their intercollegiate contests according to these rules”. Rule 1 Section 7 Art. 1 (the three-point line); Rule 2 Section 11 Art. 1 (“Use a 30-second shot clock.”); Rule 2-11.6.d.1 and d.3 (reset to 20 seconds). The fetched text truncated in Rule 4, so Rule 5 — the halves — was not read and is printed on no page here.
5. National Collegiate Athletic Association. 2024-25 NCAA Men’s Basketball Rules, cover dated August 2024. Read as a SECOND, INDEPENDENT EDITION so neither the distance nor the shot clock rests on one fetch: Rule 1 Section 7 Art. 1 and Rule 2 Section 11 Art. 1 give the same figures as the 2025-26 book, and Rule 1 Section 2 Art. 2 gives the court as “sidelines of 94 feet in length and end lines of 50 feet in length”. Also truncated before Rule 5. Read 12 Oct 2026.
6. National Collegiate Athletic Association. 2016-17 NCAA Men’s Basketball Rules, Rule 1 Section 7 Art. 1: the three-point line “shall be a distance of 20 feet, 9 inches, from the center of the basket.” Read specifically to date the change, because the same rule number in the same body’s 2024-25 and 2025-26 books gives 22 feet 1 3/4 inches. Read 12 Oct 2026.
7. Boone K. “What the shortened NBA 3-point line of the mid-1990s says about the future of long-range shooting.” CBS Sports. “The NBA decided to redraw the arcs so that they sat 22 feet away from the basket across the board”, “moving the line ahead of the ’94-95 season”, with “each of the three seasons with the shortened 3-point line”; before it, “The arc typically stretches to 23 feet, nine inches, but is not uniform.” Read 12 Oct 2026.
8. “NBA tries to perk up offenses.” Deseret News, 5 October 1997. Contemporaneous report that for 1997-98 the three-point line “will be lengthened to its original distance of 23 feet, nine inches” from “currently 22 feet from the basket”, corners at 22 feet. Used to date the restoration of the longer arc, which the CBS Sports piece does not give. Read 12 Oct 2026.