Add margin above top ListView item (and below last) in Android

You wrote:

I've tried adding padding to the ListView itself, but then when you scroll the list it disappears under the edge of the padding.

Set ListView's clipToPadding attribute to false. This will enable padding around the ListView and scrolling to the end of the layout (and not only to the edge of the padding).

An example:

<ListView
    android:id="@+id/list_view"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:divider="@android:color/transparent"
    android:dividerHeight="10.0sp"
    android:padding="16dip"
    android:clipToPadding="false"/>

android:clipToPadding is an XML attribute of ViewGroup, the base class for layouts and views containers.

The related method call is:

public void setClipToPadding (boolean clipToPadding)

Space padding = new Space(this);
padding.setHeight(20); // Can only specify in pixels unfortunately. No DIP :-(

ListView myListView = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.my_list_view);

myListView.addHeaderView(padding);
myListView.addFooterView(padding);

myListView.setAdapter(myAdapter);

The above ListView will have a header and footer padding of 20 pixels.

Appendage to @Jakobud's answer...

My listView was already making use of the android:divider/android:dividerHeight properties to create transparent gaps between listView items. This allowed me to simply add the android:headerDividersEnabled and android:footerDividersEnabled properties and set the Header and Footer views to new View(Activity.this).

Slight simplification for cases where you already have dividers setup in the listView.