Polls have closed in Myanmar’s parliamentary election following a massive turnout, the first such vote in the southeastern Asian country capping decades of military rule.

Voting opened on Sunday morning with long queues of people waiting, some from before dawn, to cast their ballots.

Union Election Commission deputy director Thant Zin Aung said polling stations closed at 16:00 local time and early indications were that "around 80 per cent of voters turned out [on Sunday]".

The first official results will be announced on Monday morning.

Over 30 million people were eligible to cast their ballots in the country’s first free nationwide election in a quarter of a century.

Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) is anticipated to win the largest share of votes, although she is constitutionally barred from the presidency because her late British husband and two sons are not Myanmar citizens.

The country has been ruled by the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) since 2011.

Some 6,000 candidates from more than 90 parties hope to be elected to the 664-seat parliament in the first national elections since a nominally civilian government took office in 2011.

Twenty five percent of the parliament’s seats are reserved for the country’s unelected military representatives who are largely anticipated to support the USDP.

The NLD must take 67 percent of all contested seats in order to gain a majority.

Suu Kyi had previously said that she would circumvent a constitutional ban on her presidency by taking a post “above the president” if her party wins the polls.

“I will be above the president. It’s a very simple message,” she said in a Thursday news conference.

Myanmar’s landmark election came while Muslim candidates were barred from taking part in the election and the Rohingya Muslims were deprived of their right to vote.

Back in March, Myanmar’s parliament ratified a law barring people without full citizenship from voting. The move disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims, who are not recognized as Myanmar’s citizens.

Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims, mostly living in the western state of Rakhine, have been subject to systematic repression by extremist Buddhists since the country’s independence in 1948. In 2012, hundreds of Rohingyas were killed and about 140,000 others became displaced following a wave of ethnic and sectarian violence by extremist Buddhists.