Some very very strange behaviour was appearing in my Android application. I was extending Button to replace the standard. In my own button I set: - TextAppearence (text 16px, bold..) - BackgroundDrawable (to an selector that replaced the standard button, that used images of 60px) - Gravity: LEFT|CENTER_VERTICAL. Whenever the text was enough to make the button have 2 text lines, if it had the property Gravity.CENTER_VERTICAL, a top padding would appear! This kept me overflowing and googling for weeks... (set paddingTop, singleLine, and other simple solutions didn't work of course!) Finally got the solution!!! @Override protected boolean setFrame(int l, int t, int r, int b) { int fixedTopSize = 5; return super.setFrame(l,fixedTopSize, r, b-t); } By overriding this method on the extended Button finally i got it to work without the irritating top padding... still i don't understand why this happens. Any ideia?