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)