Elections are at the heart of representative democracies. However, while the study of national election campaigns is a prominent research field in comparative politics, we still know little about sub-national political actors’ behaviour. We start closing this gap by analysing issue salience in sub-national election manifestos in federalised countries. Our main argument revolves around the legally defined distribution of competences and the interdependence between the national and the state level. More specifically, we hypothesize that parties at the sub-national level will put more emphasis on topics for which they have the main legislative competences. Our research design takes the multi-level character of party competition at the regional level into account. We expect that a party’s government status at the national level, as well as the national electoral calendar affect sub-national parties’ issue emphasis in election manifestos. To test our hypotheses, we rely on a dictionary coding approach and analyse parties’ issue-based content of 610 sub-national election manifestos in Germany and Austria between 1990 and 2019. We find descriptive support for our expectation that German parties put more emphasis on regional topics than Austrian parties. The empirical results from our multivariate analyses corroborate this finding. Furthermore, we find support for our expectation that sub-national parties emphasise sub-national topics more when their national party organization is in government. These results have important implications for our understanding of the interdependence in European multi-level political systems.