2026 general election · seat projection
From party vote to seats
Everything else on this site is measured. This page is modelled: it takes the poll trend and its uncertainty and runs the party vote through the 120-seat allocation 20,000 times, using the Sainte-Laguë method New Zealand actually uses. What comes out is not a single projected Parliament but a range of them — which is the honest thing a poll can say about seats.
Other seat tools run the maths once, on the midpoint. Running it across the whole confidence interval is the difference between “Te Pāti Māori: 6 seats” and “a party polling below 5% that stays in Parliament only because it holds electorate seats.”
Data as at23 July 2026· from the poll aggregate
Electorate assumptions
The party vote is polled; electorate seats are not. The model assumes each party holds the electorates it currently holds — flip the pivotal ones to see the seat maths change.
Seats, if the election were now
House of 121–125 seats · 120 + overhang
Each bar is the 90% range across 20,000 simulations — the party’s seats land inside it in 9 runs out of 10. The tick is the median. A single projected number would hide exactly the uncertainty that decides who governs.
On the 5% line
Under MMP the difference between 4.8% and 5.2% is the difference between a handful of seats and none. The simulations put a number on it.
- Te Pāti Māori polls 2.6% — below 5% — but holds electorate seats, so it stays in the House and takes 6 seats. Turn its electorates off above to see it fall out.
- TOP polls 4.2%, right on the line. It wins seats in 8% of simulations — 0–6 seats — and none in the rest.
Reaching a majority
A government needs more than half the House — 62 of a 123-seat House at the median, more if overhang grows it. These are the current government and opposition blocs. The percentages are arithmetic across the simulations, not a forecast that any of these parties will choose to work together.
National, ACT and NZ First
The three parties that formed the government after the 2023 election. Shown as the current governing bloc; the arithmetic below is not a prediction that they will govern again.
Labour, Green and Te Pāti Māori
The three opposition parties of the 54th Parliament. Shown as the current opposition bloc; again, the arithmetic is not a prediction.
Build any combination
Pick parties to see the seats they would hold together and how often that clears a majority.
No parties selected.
Wasted vote
The share of the party vote cast for parties that win no seat — votes that elect nobody. It rises when a party sits just under the threshold and falls the moment one crosses it. Rarely reported, though it decides how proportional the result actually is.
The electorate assumptions
Seats a party holds largely regardless of the national vote — the ones that floor the allocation and can create a lifeboat or an overhang. A major party’s general electorates track its party vote and are not floored, so National and Labour receive their proportional entitlement.
- Green· 3 locked electorates
The Greens won 3 electorates in 2023 — Auckland Central, Wellington Central and Rongotai (3 electorate + 12 list = 15). Pivotal only as a lifeboat safeguard: were the Greens ever drawn below 5%, holding electorates would keep them in the House.
Electoral Commission - ACT· 1 locked electorate
ACT won one electorate, Epsom (David Seymour), in 2023 (1 electorate + 10 list = 11). Pivotal: if ACT's party vote falls below 5%, Epsom is the lifeboat that keeps the party in Parliament.
Electoral Commission - NZ First· 0 locked electorates
NZ First won no electorate in 2023 (0 electorate + 8 list = 8). Pivotal: with no electorate lifeboat, NZ First is in the House only if its party vote reaches 5% — the sharpest threshold question on the board.
Electoral Commission - Te Pāti Māori· 6 locked electorates
Te Pāti Māori won 6 of the 7 Māori electorates in 2023 — Hauraki-Waikato, Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, Tāmaki Makaurau, Te Tai Hauāuru, Te Tai Tokerau and Waiariki (6 electorate + 0 list = 6). The most pivotal input: below 5% on the party vote, these electorates are both the lifeboat that keeps the party in and the source of the overhang that grew the House to 122 in 2023.
Electoral Commission
The House
120 seats nominally — 64 general electorates, 7 Māori electorates and 49 list seats — before any overhang. A party that wins more electorates than its party vote earns keeps the extra seats, and the House grows past 120, as it did to 122 in 2023.
Statistics New Zealand · determined 25 October 2024What this model does not do
- The projection draws each party's party vote from its own uncertainty independently. It does not model the joint structure — the shared national polling miss (about 61% of election error is common across houses, see the design factor) or the fact that shares compete for the same voters. Knife-edge coalition and wasted-vote probabilities are therefore approximate and will read a little more certain than they should.
- Electorate wins are assumed, not projected — there is no electorate-level polling here. The model floors the allocation only at the swing-independent seats a party holds largely regardless of the national vote: Te Pāti Māori's Māori electorates, ACT's Epsom, the Greens' urban seats. A major party's general electorates move with its party vote and never exceed its proportional entitlement, so they are not floored; National and Labour receive their entitlement. This is why every overhang the model produces comes from a small party, as every recent real overhang has (Te Pāti Māori in 2023, the Māori Party in 2008).
- The reader can flip the pivotal electorates on and off, but the model cannot foresee a seat changing hands that the reader does not toggle.
- The 2026 boundaries are redrawn from 2023 (64 general electorates, down one in the North Island). The locked seats that decide the maths — the 7 Māori electorates and Epsom — all persist on the new map.
- The 2026 House composition is cited to a secondary source pending a direct link to the Government Statistician's determination in the New Zealand Gazette (25 October 2024).
The method — the kernel trend, the confidence band it is drawn from, and the Sainte-Laguë allocation — is set out on the methodology page. The party vote behind it is the poll tracker.
Seat totals and electorate results are official figures of the New Zealand Electoral Commission. House composition for 2026 is the Government Statistician's determination. Party-vote inputs are the poll aggregate (see the polls dataset). Bloc membership reflects the composition of the 54th Parliament. Simulation: 20,000 draws, fixed seed 20261107, so the projection is reproducible.