Padworth is a lightly populated locality and civil parish in the English county of Berkshire, the nearest town to which is Tadley. Padworth is in the unitary authority of West Berkshire and its main settlement is at Aldermaston Wharf or Lower Padworth where it has Aldermaston railway station. It has its southern boundary with Mortimer West End, Hampshire. The south of the parish is wooded towards its edges and the north of the parish is agricultural with a hotel beside the Kennet and Avon Canal. In the centre of the parish is a school, Padworth College, which is a Georgian and later incarnation of its manor house.

Padworth proper is around the little Norman church and the old manor house, from 1748 home of the Darby-Griffith family but in the 20th century converted into Padworth College, an independent co-educational boarding and day school for students aged 13-19.

The two halves of the parish can be separated and named:

• Lower Padworth or Aldermaston Wharf, most concentrated along the A4 Bath Road - this area has the vast majority of homes. It is where built-up a nucleated village and low rise locality.
• Padworth Common sometimes describes all of the scattered south but strictly speaking only includes land outside of the farmland of the former manor centred on the site of Padworth College.

Lower Padworth has Aldermaston railway station. Padworth has its southern boundary with Mortimer West End, Hampshire. The south of the parish is wooded towards its edges and the north of the parish is agricultural with a hotel beside the Kennet and Avon Canal.

Grim's Ditch which runs from the mid-south of the area 0.5 miles (0.80 km) (into the southern forest of Ufton Nervet) is posited to be a 'sub-Roman' bank and ditch dug to defend Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester Roman Town) when the Anglo-Saxons began to settle the area.

The place is recorded in such documents as the Assize Rolls and national Feet of Fines (on property sale) as Peadanwurthe (10th century); Peteorde (11th century); Pedewurth (12th century); Padewrd, Padworze (13th century); Padesworth, Pappeworth (14th century).