The Power of Veto is a competition prize awarded once a week. Its holder can remove one houseguest from the eviction block, and if they do, the Head of Household must name a replacement nominee in that person’s place. The veto holder cannot be named as that replacement.
- What it does: takes one nominee off the block and forces a replacement.
- Who plays: six — the Head of Household, both nominees, and three more. Once fewer than six houseguests are left, everyone plays.
- How the three are chosen: a random draw. One chip in the bag reads “houseguest’s choice”.
- When the competition is: Saturday, in a standard week.
- When the ceremony is: Monday, in a standard week.
- On yourself: yes. That has been true since the fourth season, and it was not true before it.
- Who names the replacement: the Head of Household — unless a separate power says otherwise.
- Introduced: the third season, in 2002. The first two seasons had no veto at all.
When is the veto ceremony on Big Brother?
Monday. In a standard week the veto competition is played on Saturday and the veto ceremony — the meeting where the holder announces the decision — is held on Monday morning or early afternoon. Those two things are separate events, two days apart, and confusing them is the single most common mistake a new feed watcher makes.
This is the house schedule, not a published rule. Nobody prints it. It is what twenty years of feed coverage shows, and it has been stable for most of that time.
The week, in order
- Thursday — the live eviction, then the new Head of Household competition.
- Friday — the nomination ceremony. Two houseguests go on the block.
- Saturday morning — the veto player draw. A short blackout, twenty minutes or so.
- Saturday — the Power of Veto competition. The longest blackout of the week.
- Sunday — nothing formal. The whole house works on whoever is holding the veto.
- Monday — the veto ceremony. Feeds down about an hour. Nominations are locked when it ends.
- Tuesday and Wednesday — campaigning and vote counting. No competition, no ceremony.
- Thursday — the live eviction, and the whole thing starts again.
What is on television and what is only on the feeds
Almost none of it is broadcast when it happens. Sunday’s episode carries the Head of Household competition and Friday’s nominations; Wednesday’s carries the draw, the competition and Monday’s ceremony; Thursday’s eviction is the only live hour of the week. The broadcast spends the whole week three or four days behind the house and catches up on Thursday night.
The feeds do not show the four events either. They cut to a holding card before each one and come back afterwards, which is why feed watchers learn what happened from the conversation that follows rather than from the thing itself.
How long the feeds go down
Our own logs are the best answer available, because the times were written down the moment they happened. On a Saturday in 2012, the call to pick veto players came at 9:54am and the feeds were back at 10:15am — twenty-one minutes. The competition that afternoon took the rest of the day. Two days later the feeds went down at 10:45am for the ceremony and returned at 11:40am — fifty-five minutes. Six years on, in 2018, a Monday ceremony result reached the feeds at 11:33am.
So: the draw is a coffee break, the ceremony is about an hour, and the competition is the one that eats an afternoon. Individually timed formats are the worst of them, because every player runs alone and the feeds stay dark through all six turns.
The weeks that break the pattern
The first week of a season does not follow it. The premiere lands wherever the network puts it and the first cycle is compressed to catch up — one first-week veto ceremony in 2017 fell on a Sunday.
A double eviction week has no Saturday and no Monday. The first eviction closes the old week and then an entire new cycle — Head of Household, nominations, veto competition, veto ceremony, second eviction — is played inside the remaining live hour. The veto is not cut from it. What gets cut is the four days of talking that normally sit around it, and the competition has to be one that can be finished on air.
The end of the season compresses too. By the final four the veto ceremony and the eviction happen on the same live Thursday show, back to back.
Who plays in the veto competition?
Six people, and three of them are automatic. The Head of Household plays, and so do both nominees — they are the three with the most at stake, so none of them can be locked out. The other three are drawn at random from everyone else still in the house.
The draw is a physical thing. The Head of Household and the two nominees each pull a chip from a bag in front of the house. Most chips carry a name. At least one reads houseguest’s choice, and whoever pulls it picks any eligible player they like — which is why the draw is worth watching even though the feeds never show it. A chip drawn well is a favour owed, and a chip drawn badly has ended weeks.
Somebody who is not playing hosts. The Head of Household normally names them, and the job is presentational — read the rules, start the rounds, call the result — with no advantage attached to it. A Saturday in 2012 is a clean example of the whole shape: Frank called the pick as Head of Household, the six who played were Frank, Wil, JoJo, Shane, Ian and Ashley, and Joe hosted.
Once fewer than six houseguests remain, the draw stops mattering and everyone left plays.
A drawn player who cannot compete does not have to. That has happened for medical reasons, and once in a paired competition a player cleared by the medic still chose to sit out and their partner sat out alongside them. There is no published rule granting a healthy player the right to refuse, and no case of a replacement being drawn to fill the gap — the competition simply runs short.
Not everyone who gets drawn wants to win it. Throwing a veto is a real play, and the reasons somebody would rather not hold the power are on the strategies page.
What happens at the veto ceremony?
The veto holder runs it, not the Head of Household. It is short, it is scripted, and it is the moment the week stops being negotiable.
- 1. The veto holder calls the house to the living room and opens the meeting.
- 2. The nominees take the nomination chairs.
- 3. The holder names them and states that they have the power to veto one nomination.
- 4. Each nominee gets a turn to say why they should be the one saved.
- 5. The holder announces the decision, out loud, either way. Letting it lapse in silence is not an option.
- 6. If it is used, the Head of Household stands, names a replacement, and that person takes the empty chair.
- 7. The holder adjourns the meeting. From that second the nominations are final.
Nobody is obliged to use it. Leaving the nominations where the Head of Household put them is a legitimate move and a common one, and a veto that stays in the box is often the loudest statement of the week — it tells the house the holder is happy with the board, and therefore who the holder is working with.
Can you use the Power of Veto on yourself?
Yes. A nominee who wins the veto can take themselves off the block, and the Head of Household then has to put somebody else up in their place.
That was not always the rule. The original version let a nominated winner save the other nominee but not themselves. The upgraded version that allowed self-use arrived at the very end of that same first veto season under the name the Golden Power of Veto, and from the following season it became the ordinary weekly veto. “Golden” survives as part of the formal name; it no longer describes a different power.
What is a replacement nominee?
The person who goes up in the vacated chair. If the veto is used, somebody has to fill the empty slot, and the Head of Household chooses who — on the spot, in front of the room, with no time to think about it.
- The Head of Household cannot name themselves. They are immune for the week.
- The veto holder cannot be named. Winning the veto is safety in itself, whether or not it gets used.
- The person just taken down cannot go straight back up. That is the entire point of the power.
- If nobody eligible is left, the veto cannot be used at all. This is a real situation, not a theoretical one, and it is why the final four works the way it does.
Naming a replacement is the most exposed thing a Head of Household does all week. Friday’s nominations can be dressed up as pawns and promises. The replacement is made in public, after two days of lobbying, and everybody in the room can count who was left.
What is backdooring, and how does the veto make it possible?
Backdooring is putting your target on the block after the veto competition is over, so they never get a chance to win their way off it. The whole move exists because of one rule: nominees automatically play in the veto, and non-nominees only play if they are drawn.
So the plan runs backwards. Nominate two people who are not the target. Hope the target’s name stays in the bag. If it does, they sit the competition out with no way to protect themselves. Somebody friendly wins the veto and uses it, and the Head of Household names the target as the replacement — at a point in the week when there is no competition left to save them.
It was first executed in the fifth season, when the Head of Household and the nominees still hand-picked the whole veto field and keeping one person out of it was trivially easy. The random draw brought in two seasons later did not kill the move. It added the one thing every backdoor since has depended on, which is luck — the hole in the middle of the plan is the draw. Read the full history of the backdoor — the week it was invented, who ran it, and why the word is a year older than the move.
What kinds of veto competitions are there?
Every kind, deliberately. The veto is the one competition of the week that has to be winnable by anybody, so the format rotates hard — a memory game one week, a slippery physical course the next. Broadly they fall into a handful of shapes:
- Timed and individual — each player runs the course alone against the clock, fastest wins. Slow to film, long feed blackout.
- Elimination rounds — one player knocked out per round until one is left standing.
- Memory and quiz — who said what, what happened when, which of these covers is the real one.
- Puzzle and construction — a physical problem with one correct final state.
- Dexterity — small objects, awkward tools, and a mistake that costs several minutes.
- Prize and punishment — the veto is one item in a pile of prizes and penalties, and it can be traded away.
That last one breaks an assumption most people arrive with: in a prize-and-punishment competition the winner of the competition and the holder of the veto are not necessarily the same person. Players are eliminated in stages, each one opens a concealed prize — cash, a trip, a costume, a punishment, or the veto itself — and later players can generally take something already revealed. Somebody can look at the veto, decide the money is worth more, and hand the week’s only real power to whoever is standing next to them.
A few formats come back year after year. OTEV — veto spelled backwards, and a different foul-tempered creature every season — is the show’s best-known elimination veto. BB Comics, the timed memory competition built around comic-book covers of the cast, has run nearly every season since the sixteenth. Zingbot is a recurring visitor rather than a recurring format — the robot turns up, insults everybody, and gets bolted onto whatever competition production had planned that week.
What happens to the veto at the final four?
It stops being a shield and becomes the vote. With four people left, all four play. One is the Head of Household and two are on the block, which leaves exactly one houseguest who is neither — and that person casts the only vote to evict. The veto decides who that person is.
So a nominee who wins the final-four veto does not merely save themselves. They take themselves off the block, the last available houseguest goes up in their place because there is nobody else, and they walk out of the ceremony holding the only vote in the house. If the Head of Household wins it instead, they still cannot vote, and the single vote falls to whoever is left off the block.
It is also the last veto of the season. At the final three there is no veto competition at all — the three-part final Head of Household replaces it, and its winner casts the last eviction vote of the game.
Are there other kinds of veto in Big Brother?
Yes, and the important one changes who names the replacement. The Diamond Power of Veto does everything the ordinary veto does and then takes the replacement nomination away from the Head of Household and hands it to the person holding it. One power, two decisions, and a Head of Household who can only watch.
The Coup d’État is not a veto at all, though it lives in the same part of the week. It waits until the veto ceremony is finished and the nominations are supposedly locked, then removes both nominees on eviction night and replaces them.
Individual seasons have also run one-offs — a second veto handed out mid-week alongside the normal one, and a season where two vetoes were won in the same week and two nominations came off the block. One season rewound an entire completed week, wiping the Head of Household reign, the nominations and the veto result, then played both competitions again from scratch. These are twists, not rule changes. The ordinary weekly veto has worked the same way for two decades.
When was the Power of Veto introduced?
The third season, in 2002 — and it was sprung on a house that had already made its nominations. The first two seasons had nothing like it.
What that means is easy to underrate. Before the veto, a nomination was final. The Head of Household named two people and those two people went to the vote — no competition to come off the block, no ceremony, no replacement, nothing to argue about for four days except which of the two was leaving. The veto did not add a competition so much as add a second act. It made the middle of the week uncertain again, put a third name in play, and forced everybody who had already done their deals to go back and do them a second time.
- Season three, 2002 — the veto arrives. The whole house competes. A nominated winner cannot save themselves.
- End of season three — the Golden Power of Veto appears, and self-use with it.
- Season four — the golden rules become the ordinary weekly rules and have stayed that way.
- Season five — the field is cut to six, with the Head of Household and nominees choosing the extra three. The first backdoor follows almost immediately.
- Season seven — choosing is replaced by a random draw. This is the modern veto.
Veto ceremonies from the archive
Five meetings that show the power doing something other than what its owner intended. All from our own feed coverage, written the day it happened.
Shane takes himself down 23 July 2012 · Monday
Shane had won the veto on the Saturday while sitting on the block. On the Monday he used it on himself, which left Frank — the Head of Household who had nominated him — standing up to name somebody else.
Danielle. The textbook shape of the thing: the veto did not remove a nomination, it moved one.
Down at 10:45am, back at 11:40am. Fifty-five minutes, which is about as ordinary as a veto ceremony gets.
Devin uses his own veto 7 July 2014 · Monday
Devin was holding both the Head of Household room and the veto, which meant he got to overrule himself in public. He took Brittany off the block and put Zach up in her place.
The house turned on him inside the hour. Zach, in the rock room at 1:24pm: “He’s f—ed now.”
Frankie to Cody at 1:40pm: “All Zach had to do was be quiet and PowPow would have been the one sent packing.” A veto ceremony can be technically correct and still hand the season to somebody else.
The chair that could not be filled 2 July 2017 · Sunday
Alex used the veto, which left Cody a replacement to name — and the one name he wanted could not be written down, because that houseguest was carrying a protection power worth three weeks of safety. Christmas went up instead.
Cody in the HOH room at 12:40pm: “Three weeks of safety, f—ing assholes! F—ing bulls—!” He was still on it at 1:55pm: “Who gets that?! Who gets a second chance in this game and then gets 3 weeks of safety!?”
The veto opens a chair. It does not decide who is allowed to sit in it, and a separate power can close that question before the Head of Household has opened their mouth.
A Sunday ceremony, not a Monday one — this was the season’s first week, and first weeks run on their own clock.
The veto that stayed in the box 17 September 2018 · Monday
Five left, Kaycee holding the veto, and she did not use it. Nominations stayed exactly where Angela had put them, on Sam and JC. Our log has it at 11:33am.
Nothing changed on the board and everything changed in the room. Declining to use the veto is a decision announced out loud in front of everybody, and at five people left there is nowhere for the holder to hide behind it.
Sam, that afternoon: “I want to leave on a positive note if I leave.”
The last veto of a season 10 October 2024 · Thursday · final four
Chelsie was Head of Household. Makensy won the veto and used it on herself, and Rubina went up as the replacement because there was nobody else in the house to put there.
Makensy’s, and only Makensy’s. She evicted Rubina. That is the final-four veto doing what it does — it is not protection, it is the ballot.
Ceremony and eviction on the same live Thursday. By this stage of a season the Saturday-to-Monday rhythm is gone entirely.