General elections were held in Japan on 27 October 2024 due to the early dissolution of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the National Diet, by Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. Voting took place in all constituencies, including proportional blocks, to elect all 465 members of the House of Representatives.

The election was held one month after Ishiba took office as prime minister, after winning a heated contest in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) presidential election on 27 September, following the resignation of Fumio Kishida as party leader due to his low approval rating amid the party-wide slush fund corruption scandal. The dissolution of the Diet was held eight days after the prime minister's investiture and 26 days before the voting day, both the shortest since the end of World War II.

Amid continued public discontent with the slush fund scandal, the governing LDP and its coalition partner Komeito lost their parliamentary majority in the lower house for the first time since 2009, with the LDP suffering its second-worst result in its history, securing only 191 seats. The Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), the main opposition party led by former Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, achieved its best result in its history, increasing its seat count from 96 to 148. This was the first general election in Japan since 1955 wherein no party secured at least 200 seats.

The Democratic Party for the People (DPP) won 28 seats, surpassing Komeito to become the fourth-largest party in the chamber. The DPP emerged as a key player in the aftermath of the election as the LDP sought to negotiate their cooperation on a policy-by-policy basis in the next Diet session given the LDP's lack of a majority. Komeito suffered further losses including losing all of its seats in Osaka at the expense of the Osaka-based Ishin no Kai as well as the party's newly elected leader Keiichi Ishii losing his seat. Smaller opposition parties also gained seats, including left-wing populist party Reiwa Shinsengumi, right-wing populist party Sanseitō and the newly-formed far-right Conservative Party.

Ishiba was re-elected Prime Minister in the Diet on 11 November as head of an LDP-Komeito minority government.

Since the last general election in 2021, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was caught in a series of political crises, firstly the assassination of Shinzo Abe in 2022, which led to the heightened scrutiny against the allegations surrounding the Unification Church and its link to his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The close relationship between the party and the church caused a drop in approval rating of the Kishida cabinet, and anti-government protests and riots, leading to the first reshuffle of his cabinet on 10 August 2022 and second reshuffle in September 2023 to remove cabinet members affiliated with the church.

The Kishida government was further damaged by the party-wide slush fund corruption scandal in late 2023, which saw his approval rate drop to 23% as of 13 December 2023, the lowest such rating any prime minister had had since the LDP returned to power in 2012. By 22 December, Kishida's approval rate had further declined to 17%. On 18 January 2024, Kishida announced his intention to dissolve his Kōchikai faction as a result of the scandal. The following day on 19 January, the Shisuikai (Nikai faction) and Seiwa Seisaku Kenkyūkai (Abe faction) announced their dissolutions.

Kishida never recovered from the record-low approval ratings amid fallout from the scandal. His party lost all three seats up for election in the April 2024 by-elections, which were previously held by LDP or LDP-affiliated independents. On 14 August 2024, Kishida announced that he would step down as party president, thereby not seeking re-election in September.