The Jury Gives 58 Points. The Public Gives 58 Points. How Eurovision's Split Vote Actually Works.

The points ladder arrived in 1975 and never left: 12, 10, 8, then 7 down to 1. What changed, a decade ago, is how many times each country climbs it. Since 2016, every participating country awards the full ladder twice — once for its professional jury, once for its public — and the two piles of points are never blended into one.

That's the whole machine. Each set is worth 58 points: 12 + 10 + 8 + 7 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1. A song can take at most 24 points from a single country, 12 from the jury and 12 from the public, and it can also take 12 from one pile and nothing from the other. The winner isn't the song one electorate loved. It's the song two very different electorates could both live with, added together.

The Jury Is Seven Professionals Scoring a Rehearsal

Each country fields a national jury of music-industry professionals — singers, songwriters, producers, journalists, DJs, the mix varies by country. The jury held five members through the 2025 contest; from 2026 it holds seven, at least two of them aged 18 to 25, under changes the EBU announced in November 2025. Every juror ranks the songs, judging on four published criteria: vocal capacity, the composition and its originality, the performance and staging, and the overall impression. The jurors' rankings are aggregated into one national ranking, and that ranking converts into the jury's set of points.

Here's the detail that changes what a jury score means: the jury doesn't score the live final. It scores the jury show, the full dress rehearsal staged the night before, under live conditions. A wobble on Saturday night that the rehearsal didn't have can't cost a song its jury points — and a flawless final can't win back points a rough rehearsal already spent. (The spokespersons who read out the 12 points on the night are the jury system's public face; the seven people behind each set stay in the paperwork.)

The Televote Is a Ranking, Not a Pile of Votes

The public votes during a window after the performances — by phone, by text, through the official app. One rule binds everyone: you can't vote for your own country. Voters get a capped number of votes per payment method, and from 2026 the cap stands at 10, down from 20.

Raw vote totals never reach the scoreboard. Each country's votes are ranked, and the ranking converts into the same ladder — 12 for the country's most-voted song, 10 for the next, down to 1 for the tenth. A song ranked eleventh or lower in a country gets nothing from that country, whether it missed tenth by a handful of votes or a landslide. Germany's millions and San Marino's thousands therefore produce identical weight: one set of 58 points each. The system doesn't count Europeans. It counts countries, twice.

Since 2023 there's been one extra voter in the room. Viewers in non-participating countries vote online as the "Rest of the World," and their combined ranking is aggregated into a single additional televote set — one more 58 points, awarded exactly as if the whole outside world were one more country.

The Announcement Is Built to Manufacture a Late Swing

The two piles are revealed in sequence, and the sequence is the show. First the juries: each country's spokesperson appears and reads only the 12 points aloud, while the rest of that jury's set fills in on the scoreboard automatically. Then the televote totals are announced country by country — as one combined number per song, lowest jury scorer first — so the lead can change hands minutes before the end, on arithmetic the audience watched being built.

Under the old system, the one that ran from 2009 to 2015, none of that theatre existed. Jury and televote rankings were merged inside each country first, producing a single set of points; the combined ranking hid exactly the disagreements the current format puts on screen. The 2016 split didn't change the weights — the jury still supplies half the available points, the public half. It changed the visibility. Now you can watch a song win the public and lose the room, in public.

The Semi-Finals Run on a Different Electorate

The grand final keeps the split. The semi-finals haven't always. In 2024 and 2025 the semi-finals ran on televote alone — the public picked all ten qualifiers from each show — and for 2026 the juries return to the semi-finals alongside the televote. The practical difference matters to songwriters: a semi-final jury rewards the same rehearsed precision the final's jury does, while a televote-only semi rewards the performance that lands in the room on the night. Acts have built their staging around which electorate they were facing, and the 2026 restoration of the juries changes the brief again.

The Full Ladder, Both Sets, Printed Whole

Per country, per set — jury and televote each: 1st, 12 points · 2nd, 10 points · 3rd, 8 points · 4th, 7 points · 5th, 6 points · 6th, 5 points · 7th, 4 points · 8th, 3 points · 9th, 2 points · 10th, 1 point · 11th and below, 0 points. Total per set, 58 points. Total per country across both sets, 116 points — with no more than 24 of them ever landing on the same song.