To investigate the influence of blank moisture on the forming of paperboard, press forming experiments were performed with fixed blank setup and sliding blank setup to produce paperboard trays. The trays were rated by their forming height. Different moisturisation procedures were established to achieve one or double-sided surface moisturisation or homogenous moisture distributions in the blanks. Additionally, basic influences of moisture to paper-to-metal friction and tensile properties of the paperboard were measured. Surface moisturisation increased the paper-to metal friction and therefore limited the achievable forming heights in sliding blank press forming. The elongation at break of paperboard increased with increased sample moisture content. In the fixed blank press forming test this increase was not apparent in the data.