Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party are forecast to win a landslide majority of 170 seats, according to an exit poll carried out on polling day.
Labour are forecast to win 410 seats in total, compared with 131 for the Conservatives.The Liberal Democrats are forecast to win 61 seats, with the SNP on 10.
The exit poll, carried out today by Ipsos UK for Sky News, the BBC and ITV News, also suggests that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK could win 13 seats, while the Greens may win 2. Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru are forecast to win 4 seats.
Search for your postcode or constituency name to find out what the exit poll forecast is in your area.
The forecasts won’t be updated when vote counts are revealed, so keep across our live updating results page to see the real results for every constituency, and then come back here to compare them with what the exit poll said.
What is an exit poll and how does it work?
It’s different from an opinion survey. People are selected at random as they leave polling stations having just voted, and asked to complete a ballot identical to the official one.
So it asks them what they have just done, rather than what they will do in the future which normal opinion polls do.
It is intended to measure changes in vote shares from the previous election in specially chosen constituencies. This year’s exit poll included 133 polling stations, so only a small fraction of the 632 constituencies in Great Britain (Northern Ireland is not included in the exit poll).
The majority of constituencies are selected because they reflect the battle between the two main parties – Labour and the Conservatives. A smaller number represent battlegrounds between the Liberal Democrats and each of the two main parties.
The increased representation of the SNP in Westminster has meant additional polling stations have been added in Scotland in recent years to track SNP/Conservative and SNP/Labour battles.
The political and statistical experts that form the exit poll team, including Sky News election analysts Professors Michael Thrasher and Will Jennings, look to create models that explain changes in how people have voted from one election to the next, based on demographic indicators and social characteristics such as age, housing and education, for example.
In 2019, how people voted in the EU Referendum in 2016 emerged as a leading indicator that correlated with the vote swing from Labour to the Conservatives, in areas where the exit poll was carried out.
The exit poll team were able to use that to predict that the Conservative vote share was likely to have increased more in other high Leave-voting areas across the country, even in places where they didn’t ask anyone how they voted.
What do the different probabilities represent?
If the exit poll forecasts that one party has a 95% chance or higher of winning a seat, we label it as a “likely” win for that party.
If the leading party has between a chance of winning of between 80% and 94%, we list it as a “possible” gain or hold.
If no one party has an 80% chance of winning, we say the constituency is “too close to call”, although we’ll still tell you what chance each party has of winning according to the poll.
In total 133 seats are “too close to call” this year, so there’s still lots to play for as results come in.
Ballots being sorted at Macclesfield Leisure Centre, Cheshire, as the count begins. Pic: PA
How are the results calculated?
The headline numbers you’ll have seen on TV and at the top of this page are a mathematical calculation adding up the percentage chances for each party in each seat.
If one party has a 90% chance in ten seats, we would expect them to win nine of those and lose one.
The one loss from a 90% chance might look odd by itself, but the overall exit poll results work by balancing out that one unexpected loss with one unexpected win, out of ten seats where the party has a 10% chance for example.
So in total they will have won ten seats out of 20 in that scenario.
In 2019 the exit poll predicted the Conservative seat tally to within three – it initially said Boris Johnson’s party would win 368 seats but they ended up with 365. That’s a difference of less than 1%.
Forty-two individual seats, however, went in a different way to what the exit poll forecast, but they balanced each other out.