5 Common Errors in Trampoline Tariff Calculation
A trampoline routine's tariff, more formally its Degree of Difficulty or DD, is the total technical value of the skills in it, scored under the FIG Code of Points. A Barani in pike scores exactly the same as a Barani in tuck: 0.6. That surprises people, since pike is supposed to be worth more than tuck. It is, most of the time, just not on this skill. That's the shape of nearly every tariff-sheet mistake below: not a disagreement about rules, but an arithmetic error from applying a rule that doesn't actually work the way it seems to at a glance.
Tariff is only one part of a competition score. The other pillars are Execution (E-score), Time of Flight (ToF), and Horizontal Displacement (HD), none of which this article or Trampigo's calculator computes. Getting your DD right doesn't guarantee a good total score. It just means you're not losing points to a math mistake before a judge ever looks at your form.
How a Skill's DD Is Actually Built
Under FIG Code of Points 2025-2028 (Trampoline Gymnastics, Part II, the exact edition Trampigo implements), every skill's DD is the sum of up to five components:
- Somersault value: rotation, from a fixed table of completed-somersault values, not a flat rate.
- Twist value: 0.1 per half-twist (180°).
- Twist-excess bonus: extra credit for twisting heavily on a multi-somersault skill, past a threshold.
- Position value: 0.1 per completed somersault, for pike or straight only, with exceptions.
- Backward Skills Bonus: extra credit for backward-direction skills, indexed by completed somersaults.
The five errors below are each a wrong assumption about one of these terms. For the full breakdown with interactive charts, see the DD guide.
Error 1: Treating Somersault Value as a Flat 0.1 per Quarter
A tuck double back somersault's somersault value alone is 1.0, not the 0.8 you'd get from multiplying 0.1 by its eight quarter-somersaults. That's before twist, position, or backward bonuses even enter the picture. The gap exists because FIG's somersault-value table isn't linear. It rewards completing a full rotation with a jump, not just accumulating quarters:
| Completed somersaults | Rotation | Somersault value |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 360° | 0.5 |
| 2 | 720° | 1.0 |
| 3 | 1080° | 1.6 |
| 4 | 1440° | 2.2 |
A quarter-somersault below a full rotation (a "3/4 front," for example) is still worth a flat 0.1 each, and any leftover quarters past the last completed somersault also add 0.1 apiece. It's only the completed-rotation values themselves that break from the linear pattern. Miss this and every single, double, and triple somersault in a routine comes out undervalued.
Error 2: Missing the Twist-Excess Bonus on Multi-Somersault Twists
A double straight with three half-twists on each somersault (six half-twists total, notated 833/) scores 2.1. Add up its somersault value, twist value, position value, and backward bonus by hand, skip the twist-excess bonus, and you land on 1.9, two tenths short:
| Component | Value |
|---|---|
| Somersault value | 1.0 |
| Twist value (6 × 0.1) | 0.6 |
| Twist-excess bonus (2 half-twists past the 4-twist threshold × 0.1) | 0.2 |
| Position value (straight, 2 completed somersaults × 0.1) | 0.2 |
| Backward Skills Bonus | 0.1 |
| Total | 2.1 |
Twist value itself is flat: 0.1 per half-twist, no threshold, no exceptions. The twist-excess bonus is what's missing above. It kicks in on a skill that combines multiple somersaults with heavy twisting, past a threshold that gets stricter as somersault count goes up:
| Somersaults | Twist-excess threshold | Bonus rate past threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Double (2) | 720° (4 half-twists) | 0.1 per half-twist |
| Triple (3) | 360° (2 half-twists) | 0.2 per half-twist |
| Quad (4) | none, every half-twist bonuses | 0.2 per half-twist |
The gap only widens on triples and quads, where the bonus rate doubles to 0.2 per half-twist.
Error 3: Assuming Pike or Straight Always Pays Off
The intro's Barani is the extreme case, but the rule behind it is easy to over-apply. Pike and straight positions add 0.1 per completed somersault over tuck, but only once rotation has completed a full 360°, and never on a twisting single somersault, regardless of shape:
| Skill | Tuck | Pike |
|---|---|---|
| Plain front somersault (no twist) | 0.5 | 0.6 |
| Barani (front somersault + half-twist) | 0.6 | 0.6 |
A twisting single is one of the cases where position value drops to zero entirely, which is why the Barani doesn't gain anything for pike. Position value also never applies to tuck or straddle, and never to a straight jump (zero rotation). Assume the pike or straight bonus is universal, and a routine full of twisting singles looks 0.1 higher per skill than it actually is. For the full point breakdown across every shape, see Tuck vs. Pike vs. Straight.
Error 4: Forgetting the Backward Skills Bonus
The tuck double back from Error 1 isn't actually worth 1.0. Add its backward bonus and it's 1.1:
| Completed somersaults | Backward Skills Bonus |
|---|---|
| 1 | 0.0 |
| 2 | 0.1 |
| 3 | 0.2 |
| 4 | 0.3 |
That bonus is easy to forget because direction isn't a field a gymnast enters separately. Trampigo infers it from twist parity, the same way the Code of Points defines it: an odd total half-twist count means the gymnast lands facing the opposite way they took off (forward), an even count, including zero, means backward. The backward bonus applies to every position, tuck included, indexed by completed somersaults as shown above. Skip it and every backward multi-somersault in a tuck routine comes out undercounted, even though nothing about the shape or twist changed.
Error 5: Confusing a Skill's DD With the Routine's DD
Three triple somersaults, each with 1080° or more of rotation, a triple back in tuck (1.8), a triple back in pike (2.1), and a forward triple with a half-twist on the last rotation (1.7), add up to 5.6 on their own. Score the same three elements as part of a women's routine and the total is 5.9:
| Category | Threshold | Elements over threshold | Routine bonus | Total for these 3 elements |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women's | 2 | 1 | +0.3 | 5.9 |
| Men's | 5 | 0 | +0.0 | 5.6 |
The extra 0.3 is a routine-level bonus, not a skill-level one: 0.3 for each element with 1080° or more of rotation beyond a category-specific threshold, 2 elements for women's routines, 5 for men's. Sum every skill's DD by hand and you get close, but it isn't the routine total until the category bonus is added on top, as a separate final step. The exact same three skills contribute a different total depending on category too, which is the gap that shows up when a tariff sheet built for one category gets copied to the other without re-checking the threshold. Trampigo's routine builder applies this automatically and shows both categories side by side whenever they diverge, so you don't have to remember to check both.
Checking a Tariff Sheet by Hand
Work through a skill's five components in the order the calculator itself computes them, not the order the errors above happened to unfold in: somersault value, then twist value, then twist-excess bonus, then position value, then backward bonus. Checking in that order catches the twist-excess bonus before you've moved on to position, which is exactly where Error 2 hides on a real sheet.
Add the category bonus last, once, after every skill's DD is summed, never folded into a per-skill total. And re-run the whole check whenever either the skill list or the category changes. Changing one without the other is how a saved routine's men's and women's totals go stale.
These are all illustrative examples for building intuition about the math, not a substitute for reading the Code of Points itself when a specific skill's classification is in question.
Sources and Ruleset Note
This article uses FIG Code of Points 2025-2028, Trampoline Gymnastics, Part II, sections B (principles) and C (difficulty examples), the full document is linked from the DD guide. It's the exact edition Trampigo's calculator implements. Every number above was generated by running that code, then checked against the Code of Points' own worked difficulty examples. This covers individual trampoline scoring for both men's and women's categories. It doesn't cover synchronized trampoline, execution deductions, time of flight, or horizontal displacement.
Build your routine in the Trampigo DD calculator and watch every component, somersault, twist, position, and both category totals, update as you add skills.