The long-delayed elections to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will finally take place on January 15 next year, with vote counting scheduled for January 16. Polling will also be held on the same day for 28 other municipal corporations across Maharashtra.

Among the major civic bodies going to the polls are Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Thane, Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Nashik, Nagpur and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar. Voting across all corporations will be conducted between 7:30 am and 5:30 pm.

Announcing the election schedule, Maharashtra State Election Commissioner Dinesh Waghmare said July 1, 2025, has been fixed as the qualifying date for electoral rolls, in accordance with statutory provisions. Assembly constituency voter lists as on that date have been reorganised ward-wise for the municipal polls.

The nomination process will begin on December 23 and continue until December 30. Scrutiny of nomination papers will take place on December 31, while candidates will be allowed to withdraw their nominations up to January 2, 2026. The final list of contestants along with election symbols will be published on January 3.

Waghmare clarified that candidates will be required to submit a caste validity certificate at the time of filing nominations. With the election announcement, the Model Code of Conduct has come into force across the concerned civic jurisdictions.

The spending limit for each candidate has been capped at ₹15 lakh.

Final ward-wise electoral rolls were released on Saturday. Details of polling station locations will be issued on December 20, while polling station-wise voter lists will be published on December 27.

As many as 29 municipal corporations will be contested in this phase, offering a total of 2,869 seats. Around 3.48 crore voters are eligible to participate in the elections.

The State Election Commission has confirmed adequate availability of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), including nearly 44,000 control units and close to 88,000 ballot units. For Mumbai alone, arrangements have been made for over 11,000 control units and nearly 23,000 ballot units across more than 10,000 polling booths.

Jalna and Ichalkaranji are among the newest municipal corporations in the state. The terms of several civic bodies had expired between 2020 and 2023, with the majority completing their tenure in 2022. Since then, many corporations, including the BMC, have been administered by appointed officials in the absence of elected representatives.

In the previous BMC elections held in 2017, no party secured a clear majority in the 227-member council. The undivided Shiv Sena emerged as the largest party with 84 seats, narrowly ahead of the BJP’s 82. The BJP later extended support to Shiv Sena for forming the civic leadership. Congress, the undivided NCP and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena also won seats, though Shiv Sena retained its dominance.

This time, the BJP and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena will contest the Mumbai civic polls as allies. The opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi — comprising the Congress, Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (UBT) and Sharad Pawar’s NCP faction — is preparing for a high-stakes contest in the country’s wealthiest municipal body.

The municipal elections are being conducted following a Supreme Court directive to complete all pending local body polls in Maharashtra by January 31, 2026. Earlier this month, elections were held for municipal councils and nagar panchayats across the state.

However, the Bombay High Court has put the declaration of results from those local body elections on hold after hearing petitions arguing that phased counting could influence the final outcomes.