The 70th Eurovision Song Contest closed on Saturday 16 May 2026 at the Wiener Stadthalle with the most lopsided scoreline of the contest's modern era. Bulgaria's DARA, performing Bangaranga from running-order slot 12, finished on 516 combined points — 204 jury + 312 televote. Israel's Noam Bettan, performing Michelle from slot 3, finished second on 343 points (123 jury + 220 televote). The difference between first and second place was 173 points.
18+ | New customers only | T&Cs apply | Please gamble responsibly
That single number broke a record that had stood since Turin 2022, when Kalush Orchestra's Stefania beat Sam Ryder's Space Man by 165. It is now also recorded on Wikipedia's List of Eurovision Song Contest winners as the largest margin of victory in absolute points across the contest's full 70-year history under any scoring system.
Betfred — Bet £10 Get £50 in Free Bets on Eurovision 2027
The hero number — and why the era qualifier matters
173 points is, narrowly, the largest first-to-second gap in the contest's full 70-year history. Wikipedia's editorial layer already records it as such. But the more rigorous comparison is to the ten Grand Finals run under the current 50/50 jury-plus-televote scoring system, introduced in 2016. Pre-2016 results used several different scoring methods — points caps were lower, ties were resolved differently, juries and televoters submitted combined rather than split sets — and direct margin comparisons are not arithmetically clean. Within the 50/50 era, however, the comparison is exact.
Every Eurovision Grand Final winning margin since 2016
| Rank | Year | Winner | Song | Winner total | 2nd place | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2026 | 🇧🇬 Bulgaria — DARA | Bangaranga | 516 | 🇮🇱 Israel · 343 | 173 |
| 2 | 2022 | 🇺🇦 Ukraine — Kalush Orchestra | Stefania | 631 | 🇬🇧 UK · 466 | 165 |
| 3 | 2017 | 🇵🇹 Portugal — Salvador Sobral | Amar pelos dois | 758 | 🇧🇬 Bulgaria · 615 | 143 |
| 4 | 2018 | 🇮🇱 Israel — Netta | Toy | 529 | 🇨🇾 Cyprus · 436 | 93 |
| 5 | 2025 | 🇦🇹 Austria — JJ | Wasted Love | 436 | 🇮🇱 Israel · 357 | 79 |
| 6 | 2023 | 🇸🇪 Sweden — Loreen | Tattoo | 583 | 🇫🇮 Finland · 526 | 57 |
| 7 | 2024 | 🇨🇭 Switzerland — Nemo | The Code | 591 | 🇭🇷 Croatia · 547 | 44 |
| 8 | 2019 | 🇳🇱 Netherlands — Duncan Laurence | Arcade | 498 | 🇮🇹 Italy · 472 | 26 |
| 9 | 2021 | 🇮🇹 Italy — Måneskin | Zitti e buoni | 524 | 🇫🇷 France · 499 | 25 |
| 10 | 2016 | 🇺🇦 Ukraine — Jamala | 1944 | 534 | 🇦🇺 Australia · 511 | 23 |
2020 cancelled (COVID-19); 9 prior Grand Finals + Vienna 2026 = the 10 contests run under the 50/50 system. Margins sourced from the official EBU scoreboards, cross-checked against Aussievision's November 2025 audit of Eurovision entries that won by the greatest margin.
What 173 actually looks like
To put the gap in context: the previous record-holder Kalush Orchestra in 2022 was a wartime sympathy vote that produced a 439-point televote landslide (Ukraine's televote alone exceeded the United Kingdom's combined jury-plus-televote score by more than 130 points). DARA's win was not a sympathy vote — it was a structural sweep across both halves of the scoreboard.
- Jury vote: Bulgaria 204 (1st), Australia 165 (2nd) — margin 39 over Australia, 51 over France in third.
- Televote: Bulgaria 312 (1st), Romania 232 (2nd), Israel 220 (3rd) — Bulgaria's 312-point televote is strong but not era-defining; Ukraine 2022 (439), Käärijä 2023 (376), Sobral 2017 (376) and Måneskin 2021 (318) all scored higher single-country televote totals. The record is in the cross-pool combination: top of both halves of the scoreboard simultaneously.
Winning both halves of the vote is rare. In the previous nine 50/50 Grand Finals it happened twice: Sobral 2017 and Loreen 2023. DARA is now the third double-vote winner of the era — and the first to do so by a margin exceeding 100 points on the jury side combined with the largest televote of the era on the public side.
The cross-show evidence the market under-priced
The signal that 2026 was going to break the margin record was visible on Thursday 14 May, three days before the Grand Final. In Semi-Final 2's televote Bulgaria received twelve points from eight separate competing countries plus the Rest-of-the-World online aggregate — nine sets of 12 from one show. No country in any 50/50-era semi-final televote has received more. The previous high was Israel's 5+RoW in SF1 2018 and Italy's 4+RoW in SF1 2021.
| Show | Country | Sets of 12 from public |
|---|---|---|
| SF2 2026 | 🇧🇬 Bulgaria | 8 competing + RoW |
| SF1 2018 | 🇮🇱 Israel | 5 competing + RoW |
| SF1 2021 | 🇮🇹 Italy | 4 competing + RoW |
| SF1 2026 | 🇮🇱 Israel | 5 competing |
| SF1 2017 | 🇵🇹 Portugal | 3 competing + RoW |
Bulgaria's nine 12-sets in SF2 translated directly into Grand Final televote dominance — the same pools voted again on Saturday and produced an identical ranking pattern. UK outright pricing on Bulgaria moved from roughly 25/1 pre-rehearsal to 15/1 on Grand Final morning. With hindsight, the strength of the SF2 pool signal should have compressed Bulgaria to 8/1 or shorter.
Records broken or matched on the night
| Record | Holder | Eurovision 2026 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Largest winning margin (50/50 era) | Ukraine 2022 — 165 | Bulgaria — 173 | Broken |
| Largest winning margin (all history, absolute points) | Ukraine 2022 — 165 | Bulgaria — 173 | Broken (per Wikipedia) |
| Most televote points (50/50 era) | Ukraine 2022 — 439 | Bulgaria — 312 | Not broken |
| Most jury points (50/50 era) | Portugal 2017 — 382 | Bulgaria — 204 | Not broken |
| Highest winner total (50/50 era) | Portugal 2017 — 758 | Bulgaria — 516 | Not broken |
| Most sets of 12 in one televote pool (semi-final) | Various — 5+RoW | Bulgaria SF2 — 8+RoW | Broken |
Portugal 2017 still holds the highest absolute winner total (758) because Sobral collected points from a larger remaining field with looser top-end concentration. Bulgaria 2026 doesn't beat the absolute total but does break the spread record — a measure of how far ahead the winner was, rather than how many points were on the table in total.
What this means for the 2027 outright market
For UK bettors, the data lesson from 2026 is concrete. The strongest single predictor of a large-margin Eurovision win in the 50/50 era was not pre-contest Spotify streams, not running-order slot, and not jury rehearsal-show pace — it was televote-pool dominance in the semi-final. Five of the ten 50/50-era winners (Ukraine 2022, Portugal 2017, Israel 2018, Italy 2021, Bulgaria 2026) topped a single televote pool with at least 4+RoW sets of 12 in their semi-final. Of those five, three (2022, 2017, 2026) finished with the three largest winning margins in the era.
For 2027 in Sofia, a semi-final televote-pool dominance signal above 5+RoW should compress the post-SF outright price to single figures. The book that prices it slowest — historically Bet365 on margin-record candidates — is the one to take.
Related
- Grand Final recap — Bulgaria 516, Israel 343
- DARA's 9-televote-12s SF2 sweep — the strongest pool dominance of the era
- Eurovision 2026 records broken / set in Vienna
18+. Please gamble responsibly. BeGambleAware.org. GAMSTOP. When the fun stops, stop.