What we know about the 2026 local elections so far

There were over 5,000 council seats up for election in Thursday’s vote, and around 1,150 of those were counted and declared overnight. That means more than three-quarters of the council results are still to come. Similarly, the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd were both up for re-election, and neither counted overnight. 

The vast majority of the results are still to come, and the small fraction we’ve had so far might not be representative of how things will look once the dust actually settles.

The results are bad for Labour, but so far not quite as bad as many expected

At the time of writing, Labour had held 249 council seats out of 500 that it was defending – meaning it’s lost around half of the seats it was trying to retain. That is a dreadful result, but most forecasters expected worse. Professor Steve Fisher of the University of Oxford predicted that Labour might lose as many as 1,900 of the 2,557 total seats.

Bad as they are, the early results aren’t as awful as they might be. The story is somewhat divided, though: in the North and the Midlands, Labour has fared very badly against Reform, but the early London results seem to show Labour being more resilient against the Greens than many in the city had feared.

The worst results for Labour are likely still to come. Keir Starmer has tried to head that off by speaking early, trying to establish a narrative before results from Wales, and more results from across the country, pile in. He says he is staying..His anxious MPs might have different ideas.

“They are very tough, and there’s no sugarcoating it,” the prime minister told reporters. “Days like this don’t weaken my resolve to deliver the change that I promised.” 

Starmer is trying to project a message that he gets it, but is going nowhere. If the results to come are worse than those that have come in so far, that is unlikely to be enough to appease his MPs.

Suggested Reading

British politics will only get worse

Patience Wheatcroft

Reform is doing very well, but they’re not overperforming the polls… yet

Reform has won around 360 seats in the overnight counting, almost all of them new seats – and they’ve picked up seats and councils in both Labour and Conservative heartlands. They will continue to do well throughout the day, but the figure to look out for is the Projected National Vote share, which suggests the share of the vote Reform would get if these were general elections.

So far, the results suggest that the polling is about right, and Reform is ahead in the polls, but is probably picking up less than 30% of the national vote – already down from what it was polling at last year. These early results suggest that slump in the polling might be accurate. Reform could still march to power as the number one party in a very divided field, but their momentum might already have stalled.

Suggested Reading

What would happen if Farage got into No 10? It’s even worse than you think

Ros Taylor

​​Labour / Reform swings might not be as they first appear

Those on Labour’s right might point to early results showing Labour losing worse to Reform than to the Greens as a sign the party needs to shift to the right, rather than worry about its left flank. Even if this holds up, the reality is more complicated.

A council seat shifting from Labour to Reform does not necessarily mean its voters are shifting in the same way. It can purely be an effect of who turns up to vote and who stays at home: if energised older voters turn up for Reform while disillusioned Labour supporters stay home, that looks in the results like a big swing from Labour to Reform.

The BBC’s polling guru John Curtice suggests that “a sharp fall in Labour’s performance is accompanied more often by an above average Green performance than it is by a strong Reform performance”. In other words, Labour may be losing its voters to the Greens, but its seats to Reform as a result. In some cases, that suggests the nightmare of a divided left-wing vote letting Reform through the middle is happening in at least some parts of the country.

It’s too early to say much about the Greens

The Liberal Democrats have had a better night than the Greens in some ways, having picked up slightly more council seats and having gained control of two new councils – and the early London results suggest Labour has held on to some London seats the Greens were expected to take.

However, the Greens’ best targets are yet to count and so the results might look very different by the end of the day. Norwich is perhaps the biggest target for the Greens outside of London, and the party is very keen to try to take control of the London borough of Hackney, both of which will declare later in the afternoon.

Suggested Reading

We need to talk about Zack Polanski

James Ball

…But the results are bad for the Conservatives

There is an almost universal narrative within Westminster that Kemi Badenoch is doing a good job as opposition leader. In this set of council elections, the Conservatives are trying to hold seats they last contested in 2022, a time in which they were in government and were deeply unpopular amid various scandals.

Any normal opposition party in these circumstances should be looking to win hundreds of seats. Instead, overnight, the Conservatives have lost 145, despite the government being historically unpopular. The Tories will have been happy to have taken control of Westminster council from Labour, but that is the only ray of sunshine amid an otherwise grim set of early results.