On 7 May 2026 Welsh voters will head to the polls for the next Senedd election.
It promises to be the most consequential election to Cardiff Bay since the National Assembly for Wales, as it used to be called, was established in 1999.
That is largely because of major reforms to the way the Senedd is elected.
Here's a brief guide to the changes.
What's changing?
At the moment the Welsh Parliament, or Senedd Cymru, is made up of 60 politicians.
Forty of those represent an individual constituency.
They're elected via the first-past-the-post system, where the candidate with the most votes wins the seat.
The remaining 20 Members of the Senedd (MSs) are regional politicians, with five regions represented by four regional MSs each.
These members are elected via a proportional system with the number of politicians elected from each party based on the proportion of votes each party gets.
At the next election the 40 constituencies and five regions will disappear and Wales will be divided into 16 large constituencies.
Each one will be represented by six MSs as the total number of politicians in Cardiff Bay increases from 60 to 96.
The first-past-the-post voting system will also be scrapped with all MSs being elected via a proportional system known as D'Hondt.
The method uses a mathematical formula to distribute seats based on the proportion of votes won by each party.
