Reform UK would be projected to win fewer seats than both Labour and the Conservatives if a general election were held tomorrow, according to a major new YouGov seat-by-seat poll that points to a fragmented House of Commons.
The YouGov MRP model projects Labour as the largest party on 241 seats, followed by the Conservatives on 130 and Reform UK on 123.
The projection marks a sharp reversal from YouGov’s model last September, when Reform was projected to win 311 seats — just 15 short of an overall majority. The latest figures instead put Nigel Farage’s party 188 seats below that projection.
The model suggests no party would come close to the 326 seats required for an overall majority. Labour would be 85 seats short, while the Conservatives and Reform would also require support from other parties to command the Commons.
The Liberal Democrats are projected to win 71 seats, the SNP 40, Plaid Cymru 15 and the Greens nine.
YouGov’s central estimate is based on nearly 17,000 respondents surveyed between August 23 and September 18 and represents a snapshot of current voting patterns rather than a prediction of the eventual election result.
The figures underline how dramatically the parliamentary picture has shifted over the past year.
Reform’s projected total is still substantially higher than the five seats the party won at the 2024 general election, but it represents a major fall from last year’s MRP. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are projected to increase their representation from the 121 seats they won in 2024 to 130.
YouGov said Reform and the Conservatives were now competing closely for support on the right, with the emergence of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain adding another party to an already fragmented political landscape.
Restore Britain was founded after Lowe left Reform and has attracted between 3% and 4% in YouGov’s recent voting-intention tracker. YouGov has previously found that about 10% of people who voted Reform at the last general election now support Restore.
The latest MRP also illustrates how relatively small changes in support can have significant consequences under Britain’s constituency-based electoral system. YouGov estimates that 37% of constituencies are currently decided by margins of five percentage points or less.
The fragmentation is particularly significant for Reform because several parties are competing for voters with similar political priorities in some constituencies. YouGov’s analysis points to the possibility that divided support can leave a party with substantial national backing winning fewer seats than its vote share might suggest.
The latest constituency projections also show a markedly different picture for Labour under Prime Minister Andy Burnham than YouGov produced for Keir Starmer last year.
Labour’s projected 241 seats would represent a loss of 170 compared with its 2024 result of 411 seats. Yet it is a substantial improvement on YouGov’s September 2025 MRP, which projected Labour on just 144 seats.
Recent national voting-intention polling also shows a closely fought three-way contest. YouGov’s September 20-21 poll put Labour on 23%, with the Conservatives and Reform both on 21%, while the Greens were on 14% and the Liberal Democrats on 12%.
The MRP therefore illustrates the difference between national vote share and constituency outcomes: relatively small shifts in individual seats can produce much larger changes in the projected composition of Parliament.
For now, the model points to a Commons in which coalition-building and agreements between parties would become central to forming a government.
But with no general election currently taking place and substantial time for voting patterns to change, the YouGov figures should be read as a snapshot of the political landscape rather than an indication of the eventual election result.
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