The Big Brother eviction vote is the weekly decision that removes one houseguest from the game. Everyone still playing except the Head of Household and the nominees casts a vote to evict. The nominee with more votes leaves. If the house splits evenly, the HOH decides.
This is not the jury vote, and the two run in opposite directions. At eviction, houseguests vote against somebody — the name they say is the person they want gone. At the finale, jurors vote for the finalist they want to win. The Big Brother Jury guide covers that second vote.
- Direction: houseguests vote to evict, not to save
- Who votes: everyone still in the game except the HOH and the nominees
- The HOH: does not vote, except to break a tie
- The nominees: do not vote in the eviction they are facing
- Where: the Diary Room, one at a time, in private
- What carries it: a majority of the votes cast
- On a tie: the HOH chooses between the nominees, out loud, in front of the house
- On the live feeds: no — the feeds are down for the whole live show
How does the Big Brother eviction vote work?
Eligible houseguests are called into the Diary Room one at a time and privately name the nominee they want evicted. Nobody else hears the ballot as it is cast. When the sequence is finished the host reads the votes out and the result is announced to the house at the same moment the audience gets it.
It has not always been live. In the early seasons the votes were pre-recorded, and the switch to voting live on air came in the tenth season, roughly halfway through the run. The mechanic itself did not change — only whether the audience watched it happen.
Who votes to evict?
Everyone still in the game except the Head of Household and the nominees. That electorate shrinks every week as the house empties, but the two exclusions hold all the way down until the endgame changes the structure entirely.
Does the HOH vote?
Only to break a tie. The HOH is not one of the regular voters holding a ballot in reserve — they sit outside the count entirely, and are brought in only if the others split evenly.
Can a nominee vote?
No, not in the eviction they are facing. If the veto changes the block, eligibility follows the final block rather than the original one. Final four is the structural exception, and the Power of Veto guide explains how the veto decides who ends up holding the only vote.
What is a unanimous vote?
Every eligible voter chose the same nominee. The HOH is not part of that count, because a unanimous vote has no tie to break — which means any week that reaches a tiebreak was, by definition, a divided house, however the final number is printed afterwards.
Can a houseguest refuse to vote?
There is no abstention. No rule offers an eligible voter the option of casting nothing, and no case of a houseguest simply declining to vote and having that stand appears anywhere in the record.
Can a vote be changed once it is cast?
No — the first vote is the one that counts. It has been tested exactly once. In August 2025 a houseguest came out of the Diary Room, decided on the way back through the house that she had made a mistake, and tried to switch. The host stopped her on air and let the original ballot stand, calling it a first in the show’s history.
What happens when the eviction vote is tied?
The Head of Household breaks it, live, in front of everybody. The regular voters go first; if their ballots split evenly the tie is announced and the HOH has to choose between the two nominees out loud, as part of the same ceremony.
That is why a tie is worse for the HOH than for anyone else. Nominations can be dressed up, explained away, blamed on a deal. A tiebreak cannot. It is the one moment in the week where the person who built the block has to stand up and say which of the two they actually wanted gone, with both of them in the room.
Ties are not evenly spread across a season. They cluster on double-eviction nights and in the small late-game house, for the plain arithmetic reason that fewer voters split evenly more often. A house of twelve rarely ties. A house of five does it regularly.
One thing worth knowing when reading old results: totals are sometimes printed with the HOH’s deciding ballot folded in. A house that split 2–2 ends up recorded as a 3–2 eviction, which quietly erases the tiebreak entirely. The house vote and the tiebreak are two separate stages.
What is a penalty vote?
A penalty vote is an extra eviction vote added by production against a nominated houseguest who has broken a rule. No houseguest casts it. It is not the HOH’s tiebreak. It is a sanction that lands on the block as an additional vote to evict, and the nominee who receives one starts the night already behind.
The rule that produces them is almost always the same one. The first penalty vote in the show’s history was issued in 2007 for breaking the food restriction, and the two other documented cases — one in 2015, one in 2017 — were both Have-Not violations as well. Somebody on slop eats something they should not have, and it costs them a vote.
A penalty nomination is a different thing, and it has not really happened. Production came close in 2007 — the same houseguest was told she would also be nominated for the week — then walked it back as unfair to the other nominee already on the block through no fault of her own. Automatic nominations do exist, but they come from competition twists, not from breaking house rules.
How do houseguests count the votes before eviction night?
Constantly, and out loud, for days. The broadcast hands the audience a finished number. The feeds show how that number got built and how close it came to being a different one.
The count on the table. On 23 August 2024, Makensy laid the whole thing out for Chelsie with nothing hidden — “There’s 8 people voting today all I need is 5” — and then went one step further and named who would be left holding the decision if it went wrong: “you need 5, T’kor is the final vote. (Tie)”. That is the arithmetic, the danger number and the tiebreaker, all named hours before a vote is cast.
Counting the room and doubting it at the same time. On 6 August 2015, Steve told Vanessa he had it locked — “I have the 5 votes!” and “Freaks and Geeks are on board” — while in the same breath admitting he was going to break from what his own side expected of him: “I’m voting against the way they want me to so. We control the votes, its done.” Two things are true in one conversation, and his alliance knows about one of them.
The vote somebody thinks they have. On 14 September 2023, Cory reported back to America on a conversation with a nominee who was certain of him: “Izzy came to me and said I know I have your vote and it means the world to me.. AND I don’t feel that bad.” He was organising the opposite number the same evening. Nobody had lied outright; the vote was simply already spoken for.
Counting a whole season instead of a week. On 28 July 2021, Tiffany worked the maths forward past the next eviction entirely: “At that point it’s 6 vs 5 as long as one of us doesn’t go to Jury first we will always control the vote.. always.” The best vote-counters are not counting Thursday. They are counting the ones after it.
What the feeds cannot do is tell you the answer. They establish what the house believes, who is confident, and where a vote might move. The ballots themselves happen somewhere the cameras are not pointing.
Why don’t the live feeds show the eviction vote?
Because the feeds are down for the entire live show. They cut before the broadcast and come back afterwards, so a feed watcher follows the count right up to the blackout and then finds out what happened the same way everybody else does.
There is no promised return time, and eighteen years of logs make that plain. A cut on 27 August 2020 began at 6:44pm and was still running at 8:50pm — a little over two hours, which is about as ordinary as an eviction night gets. On 12 September 2024 the feeds went at 8:01pm and did not come back until the following morning, roughly thirteen hours, with no explanation offered to anybody.
The more useful pattern is not the length but where the blackout ends. Production tends to hold the feeds until the next Head of Household has already been decided, so they come back on a house that has finished two events while the audience was locked out. The 27 August 2020 cut ended exactly that way. When the feeds returned on 8 August 2019, at 7:06pm, two houseguests were already mid-conversation about where they now stood — the aftermath, not the event.
No live-feed archive has ever carried a Big Brother eviction vote, because there has never been one to carry. What the live feeds give you is everything on either side of it.
Which weeks break the pattern?
The endgame shrinks the electorate, and special episodes compress the clock. Neither changes what the vote is for.
What happens at final four?
One person votes. With four left, one is the HOH and two are on the block, which leaves exactly one houseguest who is neither — and that person casts the only vote. The veto page explains why the final-four veto is really a fight over who gets to be that person.
Is the final three eviction the same vote?
No. At final three there is no house vote at all. The winner of the Final Head of Household makes the last cut alone, and chooses who they sit beside at the end. That is an endgame power, not a ballot.
Do double and triple evictions vote differently?
No — the same mechanic, run twice inside one hour. Diary Room, one at a time, nominees excluded, HOH breaks a tie. The Fast Forward and Double Eviction guide covers the accelerated format itself.
Can a week end without a vote?
Yes. A twist can replace the house vote with a competition that decides the exit instead, and somebody can leave the game without a vote at all — a walk, an expulsion, a medical removal. Those exits are counted differently, and the expelled and self-evicted record keeps them separate from the people the house actually voted out.
What happens after the vote?
The result is read to the living room and the evicted houseguest walks out the front door to the exit interview. Where they go next depends on the calendar: before jury starts, home; after it starts, sequester. The Jury guide picks it up from the door, and the Live Show guide covers the broadcast built around the vote.