Big Brother: how are Have-Nots chosen?
The slop, the cold showers and the plywood bedroom have been part of Big Brother for two decades, but the way houseguests get sentenced to them keeps changing. Here's every system the show has used and which one is running now.
The punishment has been fairly consistent since 2009. Who gets it has been decided four different ways, and the difference matters more than the slop does.
The short version is that Big Brother moved the decision from luck to power. For the first decade it was a competition result. Since 2014 it has mostly been one person's choice, which turned a dietary inconvenience into a weekly strategic weapon.
Before there was slop
Big Brother 2 through Big Brother 6 ran a food competition each week. Houseguests competed individually or in teams for access to specific foods, with the Head of Household usually hosting and eating regardless of the outcome. Whoever lost was restricted to peanut butter and jelly for the week. There was no Have-Not room, no cold showers, and no branding around it.
Read more: California could lose America’s Got Talent after 21 seasons
The competition years
Two changes arrived in stages:
- Big Brother 7 (All-Stars, 2006) — slop replaced peanut butter and jelly as the punishment food, but the food competition format stayed.
- Big Brother 11 (2009) — the food competition was renamed the Have/Have-Not competition, and the full package arrived: slop only, cold showers, metal beds in a purpose-built Have-Not bedroom, and one weekly food restriction voted on by viewers.
- Big Brother 11–15 — competition performance alone decided the split. Losing meant a week of it; winning meant nothing but comfort.
- Big Brother 16 (2014) — the Head of Household got the job instead.
That last change is the one that reshaped the game. From Big Brother 16 on, the CBS format description reads plainly.
"The reigning HoH also earns the right to name the 'Have-Nots' for the week, forcing the chosen HouseGuests to eat solely 'Big Brother slop' along with a weekly food restriction (chosen by the viewing public)."
Why that one change mattered
An HOH picking Have-Nots is picking people to weaken, insult, or leave alone, in front of the entire house, on top of two nominations. It generates its own grudges, and it costs nothing to use.
Losing a competition is bad luck. Being named by a person is information about where you stand.
The exceptions that keep turning up
The four systems above are the spine, but the show keeps bolting extras onto it:
- Volunteers — houseguests offering themselves, usually to buy goodwill from an HOH.
- Endurance forfeits — dropping out of a competition in exchange for accepting Have-Not status.
- Veto punishments — the Power of Veto competition handing out Have-Not weeks as a penalty.
- Never-Not passes — an earned exemption that makes a player ineligible for the designation.
- Seasons that skip it — Big Brother 21 ran Have-Nots for only two weeks, and neither Celebrity Big Brother season used it at all.
Big Brother 28, which premiered on 9 July 2026 with Julie Chen Moonves hosting a "Time Trip" theme, opened on the competition model rather than the HOH one: Devens' group — Chuk, Drew, Haley and Taylor — finished the first Head of Household competition with the fewest pieces on their platform and became the season's first Have-Nots.
A Have-Not sentence lasts one week, ending when the next batch is chosen. For the record: the Head of Household has never been eligible, under any of the four systems.
Earlier we wrote: Prime Video ’s new fake-dating experiment ‘The Love Hypothesis’: inside the cast