Early the following year she was selected as the parliamentary candidate for Montgomeryshire, which Alex Carlile and later Lembit Öpik had held for the Liberal Democrats from 1983 to 2010.

Dodds was elected as the Welsh Liberal Democrats Leader in November 2017, defeating Aberaeron Councillor Elizabeth Evans by 13% in an all-member ballot.

[11] The female MPs with the shortest continuous service are Labour's Ruth Dalton in 1929, at 92 days, and the Scottish National Party's Margo MacDonald who subsequently equalled that in 1973–74.

[18] This information came to light in November 2024 after the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby resigned over his failure to report prolific child abuser John Smyth.

[18] Dodds said she would "continue fighting for the people of Wales" as the party's Welsh leader and that she "accepted at the time that there were shortcomings in organising meetings about this case" and "acknowledged" them in the report.

[17] In the Senedd, Jane Dodds has been critical of Welsh Labour's running of the NHS, campaigning against long ambulance waiting times, particularly in rural areas such as her own constituency of Mid and West Wales where services are generally poorer than their urban counterparts.

[20][21] Dodds has called for a priority in investment in social care across Wales in order to reduce stress on A&E services and ambulances being backed up because patients cannot be discharged from emergency departments.

[24] Since being elected to the Senedd, Jane Dodds has focused heavily on improving access to dental care in Wales stating that dental care in Wales has "all but collapsed" and that Welsh Labour have allowed a "two-tier system where the well-off can afford to go private and those, who are probably in the highest need, on lower incomes are left waiting in agony for treatment, unable to register for an NHS dentist".

[25][26] To solve the dentist crisis, Dodds presented a plan calling for a number of measures including: training more dental nurses and hygienists and widening the scale of work they are allowed to carry out; increasing per-capita spending from the current £47 to match the levels of Scotland (£55) and Northern Ireland (£57); setting health board targets for waiting times and appointments and integrating primary dental care more closely with other NHS primary care.

She has also called for the cutting of red tape on planning rules for offshore wind in order to boost moves towards a "green industrial revolution".

[31] Dodds has opposed potential cuts by the Welsh Labour Government to bus services in Wales, a move which she has stated would leave rural communities like hers even more isolated.

[34] Jane Dodds has supported proposals to re-open the Aberystwyth-Carmarthen rail line pointing out that it would cost a fraction of the Barnett formula consequentials Wales should in her opinion receive from HS2.

She has criticised Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru for not backing STV and opting for closed lists under current Senedd reform plans.