2026 United Kingdom local elections
The 2026 United Kingdom local elections are scheduled to take place on Thursday 7 May 2026 for 4,348 council seats across 106 English local authorities and six directly elected mayors in England.
Most of these seats in England were last up for election in 2022. Some of these elections were postponed from 2025.
In December 2025, the government invited 63 councils to raise capacity concerns with ongoing Local Government Reorganisation and request a postponement of their 2026 local election, after also postponing 6 combined authority mayoral elections that were scheduled to occur on the same day. This has prompted criticism from the Electoral Commission which questioned the credibility of the reasoning given and said that it caused "unprecedented" uncertainty. The commission stated that "There is a clear conflict of interest in asking existing Councils to decide how long it will be before they are answerable to voters." In January 2026, the government confirmed 29 of the 63 council elections have been postponed.
On the same day, there will be devolved elections to the Senedd and the Scottish Parliament.
Background
The English Devolution White Paper on 16 December 2024 set out the Labour government's plans for local government reorganisation, involving the remaining two-tier counties of England being abolished with elections to new unitary authorities. Some of the elections scheduled for May 2025 were delayed by a year in order to allow reorganisation to take place. At least 13 of the 21 county councils asked the government to delay their elections. On 5 February 2025, the government announced that elections to nine councils would not take place in 2025 to allow restructuring to take place, with elections to reformed or newly created replacement authorities taking place in 2026.By November 2025, it had been announced that Surrey County Council and the districts included in it would be replaced by new unitary authorities, but the government have said that other initially-scheduled 2025 elections will take place in the existing local government structure unless there is "strong justification otherwise", with the process of creating new unitary authorities delayed. Under the current statutory calendar as set out by The Local Authorities Order 2025, elections for the areas cancelled in 2025 will take place in 2026, until a new statutory instrument is issued. Four new combined authority mayoral elections — Greater Essex, Hampshire and the Solent, Norfolk and Suffolk, and Sussex and Brighton — were delayed to 2028, having been originally scheduled for 2026.
London boroughs
Elections for all councillors in all thirty-two London boroughs will be held in 2026 in line with their normal election schedule. The previous elections to London borough councils were held in 2022, which saw Labour win its second-best result in any London election and the Conservatives return their lowest-ever number of councillors in the capital.Metropolitan boroughs
There are thirty-six metropolitan boroughs, which are single-tier local authorities. Thirty-two of them have an election in 2026. Of these, Birmingham City Council and St Helens Council hold their elections on a four-year cycle from 2022, so are due to hold an election in 2026. In 2025 Barnsley Council held a public consultation regarding the permanent adoption of the whole council election cycle, which has since been confirmed. Barnsley is going to hold its elections on a four-year cycle starting from 2026.The remaining twenty-nine councils generally elect a third of their councillors every year for three years with no election in each fourth year, on the same timetable which includes elections in 2026. Thirteen of these metropolitan borough councils have all of their councillors up for election in 2026 rather than the usual one-third, following ward boundary changes from their LGBCE electoral review. All thirteen will likely be reverting to thirds in 2027, 2028 and 2030.