We report on the temporal contrast performance of the PHELIX facility in view of the requirements imposed by solidtarget interaction experiments. The requirement analysis for the nanosecond and picosecond temporal contrast is derived from empirical data and simple theoretical modeling, while the realization shows that using an ultrafast optical parametric amplifier and plasma mirrors enables meeting this specification. We report on the temporal contrast performance of the PHELIX facility in view of the requirements imposed by solidtarget interaction experiments. The requirement analysis for the nanosecond and picosecond temporal contrast is derived from empirical data and simple theoretical modeling, while the realization shows that using an ultrafast optical parametric amplifier and plasma mirrors enables meeting this specification.