Turnout: 90.70%
About this election
The 2025 Australian Senate election was held on 3 May 2025 alongside the House of Representatives, contesting 40 of the 76 seats. Held on the same day as Labor's landslide lower-house victory, it strengthened the government's hand in the upper house: Labor topped the national Senate first-preference vote and won the most seats of the contest, easing — though not removing — its reliance on the crossbench.
Senators are elected by proportional single transferable vote, with six returned per state for six-year terms at a half-Senate election and two per territory. A state seat requires a quota of about 14.3% of the vote, which keeps the Senate more pluralistic than the House. The bars and map above show first-preference vote share by party, with the senators each won at this election.
Labor won 16 of the 40 contested seats and the Coalition 13, with the Greens taking six, One Nation three, the Jacqui Lambie Network one and independent David Pocock re-elected in the Australian Capital Territory. On first preferences Labor led with 35.11% to the Coalition's 29.89% and the Greens' 11.72% — the first time in years that Labor had topped the national Senate vote. One Nation's three-seat haul marked a recovery for Pauline Hanson's party, while the Greens held their ground in the Senate even as they lost House seats.
Labor led the first-preference Senate vote in every state except Queensland, where the Coalition retained a plurality, and David Pocock topped the count in the ACT. One Nation's strength was again concentrated in Queensland and the resource states. The map above colours each state and territory by its first-preference leader; click any region for the full breakdown and the senators returned.
The new Senate, sitting from July 2025, left Labor in a markedly stronger position than at any point in its first term: depending on the final composition, the government could pass legislation with the support of the Greens alone, reducing the number of crossbench votes it needed to negotiate. Combined with its enormous House majority, the result gave the second Albanese government one of the most workable parliamentary positions any Australian government had enjoyed in years.
At an ordinary federal election the Senate is only half renewed. The six long-term senators in each state whose six-year terms are expiring face the voters — 36 seats across the six states — together with all four territory senators, whose three-year terms are tied to the House. That is the 40 contested in 2025. The other six state senators in each state keep their seats until the next election, so the chamber's balance always reflects two elections' worth of results rather than one, and a single strong or weak night moves it only halfway. The exception is a rare "double dissolution," last triggered in 2016, when all 76 seats are thrown open at once — which lowers the effective quota and lets more micro-parties in.
Under single transferable vote a candidate is elected on reaching a quota — the total formal vote divided by the number of seats plus one, then rounded up. With six senators elected per state that quota is one-seventh of the vote, about 14.3%, which is why the vote-share bars above do not translate directly into seats. A party polling around 35% secures two quotas outright and fights for a third on preferences; a small party well short of a quota can still take the last seat by harvesting preferences from eliminated candidates. This preference arithmetic is exactly why the Senate is consistently more multiparty than the House, and why independents such as David Pocock and minor parties such as One Nation and the Greens hold a share of the upper house out of proportion to their first-preference totals.
Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) — official tally room results at results.aec.gov.au.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.