Check out the latest trends measuring how people plan to vote with our interactive poll tracker.
What can we learn from the latest polls?
Peter Burns, senior political analyst at the BBC, writes that polls will inevitably focus on the strength of the Conservatives and Labor, and the difference between them.
After all, their performance in elections will almost certainly be the main factor in determining who forms the next government.
However, the truth is that not much has happened to the Big 2 over the past year.
Labor is ahead. Their average poll rating fell a bit last spring, but has remained roughly flat since then. The Conservatives have seen their numbers rise slightly, then fall again.
One party that has seen a significant change in fortunes, at least in the UK-wide polls, is Reform Britain.
Their valuations had been gradually increasing since early 2000, but accelerated in late 2023.
In recent weeks, they have been vying for third place with the Liberal Democrats.
The next UK general election must be held by 28 January 2025.
Under Britain's first-past-the-post system for parliamentary elections, it will be difficult for reformers to win seats.
However, it can still have a significant impact on the overall result.
Detailed data tables published alongside the poll show that most of the support for Reform Britain comes from people who voted Conservative in 2019.
Reformers may be attracting voters who would otherwise switch to Labor or other parties. But it is very difficult to escape the conclusion that they probably pose a greater threat to the Conservative Party.
How big is the gap between political parties?
All polls are based on a sample of people, usually 1,000 or more interviewed, and are weighted to be representative of the country.
There is always a margin of error. That means the actual percentage could be higher or lower than any poll shows.
The true support rate for each party is estimated to be within the range shown here.
Individual poll data is published online by various companies.
If a party's vote share is less than 0.5%, the numbers are rounded down and are shown as 0 in the table below.
What is Vote Tracker?
Each dot in the graph represents the vote for one party.
All this information is summarized in an average line to help understand trends.
Which polls will you use?
To get a good range of polls as an average, we use polls conducted by members of the British Opinion Research Council.
While members agree to similar rules regarding transparency, the council says membership should not be seen as a guarantee of quality.
Polls included are BMG, Deltapoll, Find Out Now, focaldata, Ipsos, JL Partners, More in Common, Opinium, Panelbase, People Polling, Redfield and Wilton Strategies, Survation, Techne, Verian (formerly Kantar Public), From WeThink. (formerly Omnisys), and YouGov.
We only include the percentage of headlines related to voting intentions. Pollsters exclude people who say they don't know or won't vote in their calculations.
Most of the included polls cover the UK, but some polls cover the whole of the UK. Those surveyed were not given the option of choosing a political party that operates only in Northern Ireland.
Also includes data that is in the public domain. Some polling companies may not publish all data for all parties at the same time.
If the polling company states who their customers are in the data table, we have included this in the table. It is common for pollsters to perform work for news organizations, television programs, and campaign groups.
What is the margin of error?
The true positions of the Conservatives and Labor may be within 5 percentage points of the average.
Nine out of 10 polls taken just before Election Day were within the range of the final national vote share from 2010 to 2019 general elections.
The gap is smaller for other parties campaigning across the UK, and even smaller for the SNP and Plaid Cymru.
How do we average the polls?
Our estimates of party support are moving averages of opinion polls.
A party's approval rating on a given day is the average of its poll results over the previous two weeks. For daily averages, we only use the latest polls from each company.
Why do different polling companies give different results?
All polls are slightly different because they interview different people. There are other factors that can lead to differences between pollsters. for example:
- Different companies find people to participate in surveys in different ways
- The exact wording of the question varies by pollster, with some polling agencies asking multiple questions to gauge voting intentions.
- Polling organizations apply “weights” to their data to try to make their results reflect the composition of the voting population. Therefore, if a particular poll has fewer female respondents than the total, the final results will give extra weight to women's responses.However, different companies consider different factors
- Initially, companies have different ways of dealing with people who say they don't know how to vote or aren't sure if they'll vote.
What do pollsters ask?
Regarding voting intentions, pollsters typically ask interviewees, “If a general election were held tomorrow, which political party would you vote for?”
Some polling companies do not allow interviewees to choose some political parties to include in the “other” category.
For example, Reform Britain, which was the Brexit party until 2021, has only been included as an option in all polls featured in the tracker since autumn 2022, while a poll published by Techne has shown that the Plaid Simru's support is included in the “other” parties.
Produced by Grace Richardson, Scott Jarvis, Becky Rush, Allison Schultz, Libby Rogers, Daniel Wainwright, Aidan McNamee, Yana Tausinski, Debbie Loizow, Preity Vaghela, Robert Cuff, John・Walton.
