Kenya's 2027 Election Calendar: Every Deadline From Now to 10 August 2027

Kenya's next General Election is on Tuesday, 10 August 2027. The IEBC confirmed that date in June 2026 and has not moved off it since, including after a High Court ruling in August that said the presidential poll had actually fallen due a year earlier.

What most aspirants have not read is the Gazette notice of 20 August 2026, which opened the election period. It is short. It is not exciting. And it starts a clock that has already begun costing people their candidacies.

Here is the whole calendar in one place.

The dates, in order

The three dates that actually eliminate people

Most of the calendar is administrative. Three entries are not.

10 February 2027. If you hold a public office and you have not resigned by this date, you cannot be on the ballot. Not "you will face a challenge" — you cannot be nominated. Every cycle produces a group of chief officers, parastatal heads and county executives who leave this until January, discover a contractual notice period they had forgotten about, and miss it.

8 May 2027. This is the wall for independents. You must have left your party and submitted your name and symbol by then. It is also the last day a party can resolve a nomination dispute. An aspirant who loses a primary on 6 May and decides on 9 May to run independent has already missed both doors.

30 October 2026. Your party's nomination rules must be certified by the Registrar. These rules decide whether your primary is a direct vote, a consensus meeting, or a National Elections Board decision taken in Nairobi. They are being drafted right now, mostly without input from the people they will bind. Read more in our guide to nomination rules.

What a campaign should be doing between now and October

Very little of the useful work in this window is public. It is:

• Confirming which party you are actually running under, and whether that party will still exist in March.
• Getting on the membership list of that party, correctly, with the right ID number. The list is the party as far as the Registrar is concerned.
• Opening the dedicated campaign bank account the 2027 finance rules now require, and putting one person in charge of it.
• Building the ward-level structure you will need in May 2027, when everybody else starts building theirs at the same time and the good coordinators are already taken.

That last one is the whole reason we built BallotWinners the way we did. A campaign that starts naming ward coordinators and polling agents in June 2027 is competing for the same people as every other campaign in the county, in the same fortnight. A campaign that has them named, contactable and doing weekly work from late 2026 is not.

One thing that is not on this calendar

Boundaries. The IEBC has deferred substantive delimitation until after the 2027 polls, so you will campaign in constituencies and wards drawn in 2012. That matters more than it sounds, and we cover why in the delimitation explainer.