Non-oriented electrical steel is by far the most widely used soft magnetic material.It has evolved over the past 100 years and is likely to remain prominent for decades to come despite the challenge for greater market share from emerging materials.However complex ways in which the steels are magnetised in modern electrical equipment are rapidly becoming more common in many applications so it is useful to review the parameters which control their magnetic properties and consider the growing need for optimising the magnetic properties under more challenging magnetisation conditions such as high flux density,rotational magnetisation or non-sinusoidal flux density.The presentation reviews the reasons for the dominating influence of composition(silicon content),grain size,internal stress,impurities,sheet thickness and texture.Although the generality of the well know method of analysing losses in terms of hysteresis,classical eddy current and excess losses is often questioned today,it is still a useful approach for attempting to understand the factors influencing the losses in non-oriented steels.However,the effectiveness of the approach under these more challenging magnetising conditions is discussed.It is likely that users will demand far more versatility from non-oriented materials in the future in terms of effective operation under wide ranges of magnetisation conditions which make the relevance of established Standard ways of grading materials at a fixed frequency and flux density questionable when selecting best material for a given purpose.The inference of this situation on material development is briefly discussed.Finally the possible impact of future developments in controlled textures or resistivity gradients through the sheet thickness on the performance of energy efficient non-oriented materials operating on under more complex magnetising conditions is considered.