A conclave was held on 12 and 13 March 2013 to elect a new pope to succeed Benedict XVI, who had resigned on 28 February 2013. Of the 117 eligible cardinal electors, all but two attended. On the fifth ballot, the conclave elected Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires. After accepting his election, he took the name Francis.

The papal election process began soon after the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI on 28 February 2013. Since both Angelo Sodano and Roger Etchegaray, the dean and vice-dean of the College of Cardinals, respectively, were ineligible to participate in the conclave due to age, Giovanni Battista Re from Italy, the most senior cardinal bishop under 80, presided over the conclave.

In 1996, Pope John Paul II fixed the start date of the conclave at 15 to 20 days after the papacy became vacant in Universi Dominici gregis. The 2013 conclave was initially expected to start sometime between 15 and 20 March 2013. On 25 February, the Vatican confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI issued his apostolic letter Normas nonnullas to allow for a schedule change. This gave the College of Cardinals more latitude, once all of the cardinal electors had arrived in Rome, to start the conclave earlier or later. They scheduled the conclave to begin on 12 March.

Benedict XVI also amended the conclave law to provide for the automatic excommunication of any non-cardinal who breaks the absolute oath of secrecy.

There were 207 cardinals on the day the papacy fell vacant. Cardinals who were 80 years or older before the day the papacy fell vacant were ineligible to participate, leaving 117 electors (including Walter Kasper, who turned 80 between the day the papacy became vacant and the start of the conclave). Two of them were the first cardinal electors from their churches to participate in a conclave: Maronite Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rahi and Syro-Malankara Major Archbishop Baselios Cleemis, the first bishop from the Syro-Malankara Church to be elevated to the College of Cardinals.

Two cardinal electors did not attend the conclave. Julius Darmaatmadja from Indonesia declined to attend because of progressive deterioration of his eyesight. Keith O'Brien, the only potential cardinal elector from the British Isles, had been accused of sexual misconduct towards priests in the 1980s and said he did not want his presence to create a distraction. He had resigned as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh on 18 February and later apologised for "sexual misconduct". With 115 cardinal electors participating, the same number of electors as the 2005 conclave, this conclave saw the largest number of cardinal electors ever to elect a pope, a number later surpassed by the 2025 conclave; accordingly, the required two-thirds majority needed to elect a pope was 77 votes.

The Los Angeles Times suggested that, though a pope from Latin America was unlikely, with only 19 of 117 cardinal electors being from Latin America, the region sought more say in the Vatican affairs, as it has the world's largest Catholic population. It cited secularism and the rise of Evangelical Protestantism in Latin America detracting from the Catholic faith, along with the sex abuse scandals in Mexico, Brazil, and Chile as issues important to the region. BBC News said that, while the balloting was likely going to be hard-fought between different factions for a European or a non-European, an Italian or a non-Italian future pope, the internal differences were unclear, and that many different priorities were at play, making this election exceedingly difficult to predict. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, who was not an elector, remarked laughingly to a BBC presenter that his colleagues have been telling him "Siamo confusi"—"We're confused", as there were neither clear blocs nor a front-runner.

One Australian commentator noted that the reform of the administrative machinery of the church, the Roman Curia, was a major issue, as there was no major progressive candidate, and indeed no clear front-runners, in the dynamic between the institutional-maintenance and evangelical Catholicism. Giacomo Galeazzi of La Stampa said: "Apparently, a sort of tsunami of non-European candidates will fall upon the Roman Curia, and this could take the pontificate far away from Rome, making it more international." Italian Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio said: "It's time to look outside Italy and Europe, in particular considering Latin America."