The Paralympics recognize ten specific types of eligible impairment, not individual diagnoses. This means there’s no single list of qualifying conditions. Instead, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) groups impairments into broad categories, and athletes must prove their condition falls within one of those categories and meets a minimum severity threshold for their chosen sport.
The Ten Eligible Impairment Types
Every Paralympic athlete’s disability must fall into one of these ten recognized categories:
- Impaired muscle power: A condition that reduces or eliminates the ability to voluntarily contract muscles to move or generate force. This covers spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, post-polio syndrome, and spina bifida.
- Impaired passive range of movement: A restriction or complete lack of movement in one or more joints. This includes arthrogryposis and contractures from chronic joint immobilization or trauma.
- Limb deficiency: Total or partial absence of bones or joints, whether from amputation or a condition present at birth.
- Leg length difference: A measurable difference in the length of the legs due to bone shortening or growth disturbance.
- Short stature: Reduced standing height due to shortened bones in the limbs and trunk. Conditions like achondroplasia and growth hormone dysfunction fall here.
- Hypertonia: Abnormally increased muscle tension and reduced ability of a muscle to stretch, often resulting from cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, or stroke.
- Ataxia: Lack of muscle coordination during voluntary movements, affecting balance, gait, or limb control. Common causes include cerebral palsy, brain injury, and multiple sclerosis.
- Athetosis: Involuntary, slow, writhing movements, typically caused by cerebral palsy or traumatic brain injury.
- Vision impairment: Significantly reduced visual sharpness or a restricted visual field that cannot be corrected with glasses, contacts, or surgery.
- Intellectual impairment: Significant limitations in intellectual functioning and adaptive behavior, with onset before age 18.
A condition doesn’t need to appear by name on any official list. What matters is whether it produces one of these ten impairment types at a level severe enough to affect sport performance.
How Vision Impairment Is Measured
Vision impairment eligibility uses two clinical measures: visual acuity (the sharpness of central vision) and visual field (how wide an area someone can see). Athletes are tested with their best possible correction, meaning glasses or contacts are worn during evaluation.
In swimming, for example, the least impaired eligible class requires visual acuity of at least 1.0 logMAR (roughly 20/200 on a standard eye chart) or a visual field restricted to 40 degrees or less. More severe classes cover athletes whose acuity falls between 1.5 and 2.6 logMAR or whose visual field is under 10 degrees. The most impaired class is reserved for athletes with acuity worse than 2.6 logMAR, meaning they have almost no usable vision at all.
Intellectual Impairment Requirements
Intellectual impairment has three strict criteria that must all be met. The athlete must have an IQ score of 75 or below on an approved standardized test. They must show significant limitations in adaptive behavior, which covers everyday skills like communication, self-care, and social participation. And the impairment must have developed before age 18. Currently, only three sports include classes for intellectual impairment: athletics, swimming, and table tennis.
What Doesn’t Qualify
Several conditions that many people assume would be eligible are actually excluded. Deafness and hearing impairment do not qualify for the Paralympics. Deaf athletes compete instead in the Deaflympics, a separate international event with its own governing body. Pain conditions, joint hypermobility, and mental health conditions are also not recognized as eligible impairments. Having undergone an organ transplant, on its own, doesn’t qualify either.
The key distinction is that the IPC only recognizes impairments that create a verifiable, permanent physical or intellectual limitation affecting sport performance. Conditions that are episodic, invisible in their impact on movement, or treatable to the point of full function generally fall outside the framework.
Minimum Impairment Criteria for Each Sport
Having an eligible impairment type is only the first step. Each Paralympic sport sets its own minimum impairment criteria, or MIC, which define the lowest level of impairment that meaningfully affects performance in that particular sport. A partial foot amputation, for instance, might meet the MIC for wheelchair tennis but not for another sport where that level of limb loss has less competitive impact.
This is why eligibility for one sport doesn’t automatically mean eligibility for another. An athlete must be classified separately for every sport they want to compete in, because each sport demands different physical tasks that are affected by impairments in different ways.
How Classification Works in Practice
Athletes go through a multi-step classification process before they can compete. The first stage verifies that the athlete has a documented underlying health condition. Next, trained classifiers assess whether the condition produces one of the ten eligible impairment types. Then they determine whether the impairment meets the minimum severity threshold for the specific sport. Finally, athletes are placed into a sport class, a grouping of competitors with similar levels of functional limitation, so competition is fair.
In athletics, these sport classes use a letter-number system. “T” stands for track events and “F” for field events, followed by a number. Lower numbers generally indicate more severe impairments. Classes in the 10s cover impairments like hypertonia, ataxia, and athetosis. Classes in the 30s and 40s cover coordination and limb impairments, while classes in the 50s and 60s are for wheelchair and limb-deficiency athletes. Vision impairment classes fall in the 11 to 13 range, and intellectual impairment uses class 20.
The 2025 Classification Code
The IPC approved a new Classification Code in May 2024 that took effect in January 2025 for most sports. The updated code tightens the classification process by adding a distinct stage for verifying the underlying health condition, separate from assessing the impairment itself. It also introduces stronger rules around detecting intentional misrepresentation, where an athlete deliberately exaggerates their impairment to be placed in a less competitive class.
Winter sports governed by international federations on the Paralympic Winter Games program won’t transition to the new code until July 2026, meaning the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games will still operate under the older 2015 rules. For all summer sports, the 2025 code is already in effect.