At the 2018 local elections, 100 female and 588 male candidates will be running for mayors in one of the 212 Slovenian municipalities. 36 of the candidates face no opponents in their municipalities, which means they already have the mayoral seat secured.
According to the 2018 local elections web portal, set up by the Ministry of Public Administration, 87 candidates, out of whom 11 are women, are contesting for mayors in the 11 city municipalities. Maribor has the largest number of mayoral candidates - 18 people want to lead the city. Murska Sobota has only 2 candidates.

In nine of the city municipalities the current mayors want to continue with their mayoral careers. But Kranj and Ptuj will definetely get new mayors, as Boštjan Trilar and Miran Senčar will bid farewell at the end of the second round of the local elections (Kranj has eight mayoral candidates, Ptuj nine candidates).

Among this year’s mayoral candidates are also a few current MPs, despite the fact that since 2011 being mayor or deputy mayor is incompatible with being a member of parliament. Lidija Divjak Mirnik, a deputy from the ranks of the LMŠ List of Marjan Šarec, wants to become the mayor of Maribor, while Anže Logar (from the SDS Party) wants to be the mayor of Ljubljana. Igor Zorčič, the head of SMC deputy group, is a mayoral candidate in Brežice, which is not a city municipality. In the remaining 201 municipalities, which are not considered cities, there are 601 candidates contesting for mayoral seats.