Electoral roll: 2025

For Wales (and for England), electoral statistics are taken from data supplied to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) by electoral registration officers. Data for Scotland are similarly collected by National Records of Scotland. Data for Northern Ireland are collected by the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland.

Electoral statistics are annual counts of the number of people who are registered on electoral registers and so entitled to vote. The total number of electors consists of residential qualifiers and attainers. Attainers are people who reach voting age during the year up to the next register, that is, December 2026.

This statistical headline does not include information about Senedd and local government electors in Wales for 2025. It includes information about UK parliamentary electors in Wales only. The local government electors data for Wales collected and published by the ONS for the period 2020 to 2023 have not reflected the changes in voting eligibility for Senedd and local government elections since 2020 because the information collected from electoral registration officers does not currently include all 16‑year‑old electors and 15‑year‑old attainers in every constituency. We continue to work with the ONS to resolve this matter so that we can publish corrected statistics for Senedd and local government electors in Wales in future years. This also means we are unable to update our StatsWales tables.

See the ONS data tables for more information.

• The total number of UK parliamentary electors registered to vote as at 1 December 2025 in Wales was 2,324,400.
• This is an increase of 0.8% compared with 1 December 2023 when these data were last published, when 2,304,800 electors were registered to vote.
• The total number of UK parliamentary electors registered to vote in the UK as a whole increased by 1.9% between 1 December 2023 and 1 December 2025.

Electoral registers provide counts of the number of people registered to vote. The number of people eligible to vote is not the same as the resident population. There are various reasons for this. For example, not everyone who is usually resident is entitled to vote, some people do not register to vote, and people who have more than one address may register in more than one place. Further, there is inevitably some double counting of the registered electorate as electoral registration officers vary in how quickly they remove people from the registers after they have moved away from an area or after they have died. These factors have a differential impact from area to area. This means care needs to be exercised when comparing population estimates with the electoral roll.

The difference in who is entitled to vote at UK parliamentary and Senedd Cymru and local government elections depends largely on age, residence and citizenship conditions. Local government electors, for example, include European Union citizens resident in the UK who are not entitled to vote in UK parliamentary elections, while UK parliamentary electors include British citizens resident overseas who are not entitled to vote in local government elections.

The Senedd and Election (Wales) Act 2020 made provisions to lower the voting age in Senedd elections to 16, meaning that 16 and 17 year olds were able to vote for the first time at the Senedd elections in 2021.

The Local Government and Elections (Wales) Act 2021 made provisions to lower the voting age for local government elections to allow 16 and 17 year olds to vote.

The data for Wales for December 2020 and December 2021 exclude local government electoral registrations for 15‑year‑old attainers and 16‑year‑old electors, and do not reflect the expanded nationality eligibility introduced by the Senedd and local government franchise reforms. Additionally, 17-year-olds would have been counted as attainers. For December 2022 and December 2023, with the exception of Cardiff, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Monmouthshire, Newport and Wrexham, the counts of local government and Senedd electoral registrations published on the ONS website for areas in Wales exclude attainers aged 15 and electors aged 16.

In addition, UK parliamentary electoral registrations data for 2023 for Gwynedd, Monmouthshire, Powys, Torfaen, and Vale of Glamorgan were either not received in time for publication or received on the latest UK parliamentary constituency boundaries that came into place at the last general election, not the previous constituency boundaries. In these cases, counts for electors and attainers for December 2023 were taken from their December 2022 submissions. 

Despite ONS efforts to update the systems used to collect this data during 2025, they were not all updated in time for the December 2025 collection. In response, the ONS liaised with key data users and agreed that it would publish December 2025 statistics for Westminster parliamentary constituencies only, which were unaffected by the legislative changes at local level.

As at March 2026, the system updates are nearing completion, and the ONS fully intends that the December 2026 edition will once again include statistics for local authorities, fully reflecting legislative changes. 

Further information on who can vote in different UK elections can be found on the GOV.UK website.

Population Statistics
Email: stats.popcensus@gov.wales

Media: 0300 025 8099