General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20265 min read

Next Indian general election

The next Indian general election is the scheduled election to choose the 543 elected members of the 19th Lok Sabha, the lower house of India's Parliament, and is expected to be held in 2029 when the current five-year term of the 18th Lok Sabha ends.¹^•² The Election Commission of India (ECI), the autonomous constitutional authority that administers elections to the Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, and state legislative assemblies, will conduct the poll.³

Key fact	Detail
Expected year	2029, when the term of the 18th Lok Sabha expires¹
Seats contested	543 parliamentary constituencies, each returning one member to the Lok Sabha³
Majority threshold	272 seats for a party or coalition to secure a majority⁴
Electoral system	First-past-the-post in single-member constituencies, with electronic voting machines⁴
Candidate qualifications	Indian citizen, at least 25 years of age for a Lok Sabha candidacy⁵
Women's reservation	The 33% reservation for women takes effect only after a delimitation exercise following the first census after 2026, and is unlikely to apply in 2029¹
Incumbent context	The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance has governed since the 2024 election, in which the BJP won 240 of 543 seats and did not secure a majority on its own⁶^•⁷

Timing and constitutional framework

Under Article 83(2) of the Constitution, the Lok Sabha continues for five years from the date appointed for its first meeting, and the expiration of that period operates as a dissolution of the House unless it is dissolved sooner.²^•⁸ The 18th Lok Sabha was elected in the 2024 general election, which was held in seven phases between April 19 and June 1, 2024, with results declared on June 4, 2024.⁹ On that schedule, the next general election falls in 2029; the PRS Legislative Research analysis of the 2026 delimitation legislation states plainly that the next Lok Sabha elections will be held in 2029.¹

Recent general elections have been conducted in staggered phases over several weeks, with each phase a single day on which constituencies across multiple states vote. The 2024 election used more than a million polling stations, and the staggered schedule allowed the government to deploy security forces and transport election officials and voting machines.⁴ Counting for all constituencies takes place on a single day, as it did on June 4, 2024.¹⁰

Electoral system

Elections to the Lok Sabha are held on the basis of adult suffrage under Article 326 of the Constitution, and the country is divided into 543 single-member parliamentary constituencies, each electing one member.³^•² The winner in each constituency is the candidate with the most votes, not necessarily a majority; this first-past-the-post method is the system prescribed by the Constitution for the directly elected houses.⁴^•¹¹ A party or coalition must reach 272 of the 543 seats to command a majority in the House.⁴

Voting is by Indian electronic voting machines, and since the 2019 Lok Sabha election the ECI has used only M3 model EVMs with voter-verified paper audit trails (VVPATs).⁴^•¹² To contest a Lok Sabha seat, a candidate must be a citizen of India and at least 25 years old.⁵

The single-member constituency arrangement dates from 1962. Before then, some constituencies elected two or three members; the Two-Member Constituencies (Abolition) Act of January 1961 ended the practice, and multi-member constituencies were abolished from 1962.²^•¹³

Delimitation and women's reservation

The composition and boundaries of the next House are the subject of pending legislation. A 2023 law mandates a 33% reservation for women in Parliament and state legislatures, but its implementation was tied to a new census and a delimitation, the redrawing of constituency boundaries.¹⁴ In April 2026, a bill to fast-track that reservation, linked to a proposal to redraw voting boundaries and expand the Lok Sabha from 543 to about 850 seats, failed to pass the lower house, and the government withdrew the delimitation proposal after opposition parties warned that boundaries based on older population data could shift political power toward faster-growing northern states.¹⁵

Under the Constitution's Article 334A, the women's reservation takes effect after a delimitation exercise following the publication of figures from the first census taken after the relevant act's commencement; the 2027 census is the relevant count.¹ PRS Legislative Research assesses that a delimitation based on the 2027 census is unlikely to be completed before the 2029 election, which would mean the reservation for women will not apply to it.¹ Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju has stated the opposite urgency, saying the delimitation exercise needs to be undertaken at the earliest, based on the latest published census figures, so that women's reservation can be implemented at the 2029 general election.¹⁶

Political context from 2024

The 2024 election produced a hung outcome at the party level. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 240 seats and the Indian National Congress 99, and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won 294 seats, above the 272 needed for a majority but far below the record 303 the BJP had won in 2019.⁷^•¹⁷ For the first time since 2014, the BJP did not secure a majority on its own, and the government has since relied on regional allies such as Janata Dal (United) and the Lok Janshakti Party (Ramvilas).¹⁷^•⁶ State election results in the years before 2029, including polls in Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Assam, are being watched as indicators of momentum for the competing coalitions heading into the national vote.⁶

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 18, 2026; Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 18, 2026; Oct 25, 2026