As the 2026 Scottish Parliament approaches, keep up to date with all the latest polling and analysis on Ballot Box Scotland’s Holyrood Hub page!
Poll Details and Context
Would you believe there’s an election due in just over five weeks? Not if you were looking at the amount of polling coming out of Scotland you wouldn’t. Despite the looming vote, Scotland’s media has gotten so bereft of cash that commissioning polling even at this crucial point in the cycle seems increasingly beyond their means. In that sense a dearth of polling is merely symptomatic of wider troubles afflicting journalism in the current era.
Musings on the health of the media aside, a nearly month-long polling dry spell has been broken by Survation (link to tables) and the Diffley Partnership. As with their previous poll, this only has Holyrood figures out of the usual VI questions: no Westminster or Independence!
The last poll in the BBS tracker was from the same source, as I have a longstanding policy of ignoring Ashcroft polling: don’t get me started on the fact it was published with a “you can’t use these numbers to do seat projections” warning. Sorry? What? Either you have reliable voting intention that can be used for projections, or it’s not reliable and you shouldn’t be publishing it in the first place!
The previous Survation covered the 20th – 25th of February 2026. Changes are shown as (vs that poll / vs last election).
Regional Vote
Change vs Last Poll
Change vs 2021
Margin of error!
The weeks between the last poll and this one don’t appear to have done much for anyone, meaning there’s very little we can take from this. Survation are still the best pollster for the SNP on this vote in the current average, and less remarkably so for the Conservatives. Labour and Reform are still stuck in a statistical tie for second place, whilst the Greens have pulled back into double digits.
Survation are typically one of the worst pollsters for the Greens these days, so even in the context of margin of error changes, they may be slightly relieved to see this. Whether the Scottish party is going to get to coattail on the post-Gorton and Denton surge of their English counterparts, we’ll need more than this poll to say.
One small additional note here: we have bid adieu to Alba, who were formally de-registered a few days after this poll concluded. They had amounted to absolutely hee haw in their five years of existence, but tended to linger around polls on 1-3% regardless. At this stage, some of the averaging going on over on the Holyrood Hub still has Alba included in it. Given how tiny their share was, I’m just letting it drip out via attrition as new polls come in, rather than bother redistributing ~1.5% to other parties.
Constituency Vote
Change vs Last Poll
Change vs 2021
Margin of Error!
Everyone gets some movement on the constituency ballot but again, none of it is statistically meaningful. The SNP are still too far ahead for any other party to win a sizeable number of constituencies, with all that entails for the (lack of) proportionality in the chamber. Depending on exactly when the next poll is and how polling firms account for it, we may expect the Green share on this side of things to plummet enormously as they’ll only be contesting about a half-dozen constituencies.
Seat Projection
Projecting that into seats might give us something like this:
Please see this page for how projections work and important caveats.
The tiny changes in this poll lead to similarly small changes in the projected seat distribution. The Greens end up back in double digits, bearing in mind their notional result in 2021 on the new boundaries is 10 rather than 8 seats; in other words, the previous poll represented a loss of seats for them. Reform have a single seat lead over Labour which could very easily be reversed if that statistical tie resolved slightly in Labour’s favour. Even so, there’s absolutely zero prospect in this poll of Anas Sarwar attaining his quite desperate sounding “moral mandate” to govern, as the SNP still sit close enough to a majority to pass anything with Green or Lib Dem support.
Possible Majorities
Note: these majorities relate simply to passing a vote in the Scottish Parliament. They do not imply the formation of a full coalition government.
- Traffic Light: Labour, Lib Dem and Green
- Independence Bloc: SNP, Green and Alba
- Grand Coalition: SNP and Labour
- Union Bloc: Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem and Reform UK
Hypotheticals
As ever, the last little bit of analysis concerns those hypothetical and more proportional voting systems that BBS likes to play about with. The use of pure FPTP at Westminster is an affront to democracy, and though Holyrood fares far better, AMS is still deeply imperfect. The examples here simply transpose the poll findings onto more proportional voting systems – the reality is that different systems would of course result in different voter behaviour.
If you find this or other Ballot Box Scotland output useful and/or interesting, and you can afford to do so, please consider donating to support my work. I love doing this, but it’s a one-man project and takes a lot of time and effort. All donations, no matter how small, are greatly appreciated and extremely helpful.
(About Donations)
