Nepal is gearing up for elections on March 5 to elect its new government, after six months under an interim government.
The general election will be the first the country has held since deadly student-led anti-corruption protests, often termed as Gen Z protests, toppled the KP Sharma Oli-led government in September 2025.
The young republic, proclaimed just back in 2008, has since been governed by an interim government led by former chief justice Sushila Karki, which promised to hold fresh elections and hand over power within six months.
Right on time, the elections are being held to elect 275 members of parliament. But when will the Nepalis, and with them the rest of the world, know the results of the much-anticipated polls?
When will the results of the Nepal elections be declared?
Nepal’s Election Commission has promised to release the results of the 165 directly-elected seats within 24 hours of ballot boxes being collected from across the country, an exercise that typically takes at least a day.
Officiating Chief Election Commissioner Ram Prasad Bhandari told local reporters that tallying the results of the proportional representation vote could take another two to three days. This is the type of voting that will decide the fate of candidates on 110 of the 275 seats.
Some of Nepal’s polling stations are located in difficult, mountainous terrain, making the collection of ballot boxes challenging. For some, the ballot boxes need to be carried down by hand, while at other places they have to be airlifted in and out of polling stations.
The Election Commission took more than two weeks to declare the final results of the last elections in the country, which were held in 2022.
Another reason for the delay is that political parties dispatch representatives to the counting centres. These representatives have sometimes disputed issues such as results and vote validity, further delaying the process.
More about the Nepal elections
The polls in Nepal will see nearly 19 million people cast their ballots to elect their representatives to the House of Representatives, the lower house of the country’s two houses of parliament.
The first-time voters, who were said to be at the forefront of the protests that necessitated these polls, numbered nearly 800,000.
They will elect 275 members of parliament through a mixture of first-past-the-post voting and proportional representation.
The fate of more than 3,400 candidates will be sealed in the ballot boxes, nearly a third of whom are aged 40 or less.
Voting will start at 7am local time (6:45 AM IST) and continue until 5pm local time (4:45pm IST).
However, polling booths are likely to remain open later in some parts of the country to allow all those who wish to vote to cast their ballots. In the past, voting has continued till 9pm local time (8:45pm IST) in some constituencies.