SLBFE Registered Agency List — Check an Agency's Licence

This page is a snapshot of the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment's own public register of licensed foreign-employment agencies, taken on 2026-10-03 and searchable without waiting for a server round trip. It is a lookup, not a calculation, so the method that matters is how a name is matched and how a licence status is derived. Both are stated here in full.

Where the data comes from

The Bureau publishes the register behind a search form at la_main.asp, which answers one district at a time. All 25 district codes were walked and the result pages parsed, 1,054records in total, every one carrying an agency name, a labour licence number, the licensee's name and title, a registered address, telephone numbers, an email address and a Valid upto date. Nothing on this page is typed by hand; the refresh is a single scripted command, which is what keeps it from going quietly stale.

Every response the register returns is headed Valid Recruitment Agencies / Agencies with Pending Licenses as at 3-October-2026. That wording is the single most important thing about this dataset, and it is why the tool has more than one green state.

Step 1, normalise, then match

Both your query and the stored names are upper-cased, their punctuation (& . , ' - /) replaced with spaces, and their whitespace collapsed. So emerald isle manpower travel matches EMERALD ISLE MANPOWER & TRAVEL SERVICES. The match is then a plain substring test against the agency name and against the licensee's name, which reproduces the official form's own behaviour, its output calls itself Agencies with name contents ‘EMERALD’. A licence-number search is exact, and zero-padded to four digits, so 763 finds licence 0763. The tool does not fuzzy-guess beyond this: on a register where the answer decides whether somebody pays a stranger Rs 85,000, a confident wrong match is worse than no match.

Step 2, derive the licence status

One field decides it: Valid upto. Comparing it against the date you are reading this on:

• Licence current, the date is today or later. The comparison is “on or after”, so a licence expiring today still reads as current, with zero days remaining.
• Expired, renewal pending, the date had passed when the snapshot was taken and the register printed < Pending Processing for Renewal ! >. 94 records.
• Expired, no renewal pending, the date had passed and the register printed < Agency Validation Expired ! > instead. 1 record on 3-October-2026, licence 0763. The Bureau distinguishes these two states, so this page does too.
• Ran out since the snapshot, the register showed the licence as current on 3-October-2026, but its date has passed since you last loaded a fresh snapshot. We do not know whether it was renewed, and we do not guess: 146 licences in this snapshot run out in December 2026 alone and most will be renewed. The card says to re-check the live register.
• Not on the register, nothing matched. The page says so in words, gives the hotline, and offers the licensed agencies in your district instead.

A licence runs A License is valid for a period of one year and renewable, per the Bureau's licensed-recruitment-agencies page, which is why these dates move constantly rather than annually in one batch: the next four months of this snapshot expire 55 in October 2026, 58 in November 2026, 146 in December 2026, 60 in January 2027.

Step 3, check the derivation twice

The Bureau publishes each licence's state twice: once as a date, and once as that printed marker. Those are independent fields, so the module derives the status both ways over all 1,054 records and requires them to agree. The district counts are reconciled the same way, against figures recorded by hand from the register before the data was generated, and ten worked examples, including a licence that expires on the snapshot date itself, a licence number that returns two rows, and a name that is not there at all, are re-run on every build.

What this page deliberately does not do

It does not score, rank, rate or recommend an agency, and it infers nothing from an agency having no published website or email. It does not filter by destination country: the register's country search answers a live job orderquestion, not a licence question, and a bundled copy of that would be wrong within days. It does not hold worker registration data, which is per-person and behind the Bureau's login. And it cites no section number of the SLBFE Act, because the English Act published on slbfe.lk is a scan with no extractable text, every rule stated above is attributed to a page you can read.

The district is the one in the agency's registered address, where the Bureau files it, not the only place it recruits. Four districts have no licensed agency registered in them at all.

Source: SLBFE licensed-agency register, 3-October-2026. 1,054 records, 959 showing a current licence. Colombo alone holds 477 and Kurunegala 224, use the checker above to filter to yours.

• Ask to see the SLBFE licence and read the labour licence number off it. Search that number here, not just the name on the signboard.
• Check the Valid upto date. A listed agency with an expired licence is a different situation from a listed agency with a current one.
• Compare the registered address and telephone numbers on the card with the office you are standing in.
• Check the salary in your contract against the SLBFE minimum wage for your destination, and have the contract itself read with the SLBFE contract checker.
• Work out what the Bureau's own fees should come to with the SLBFE fee calculator so you can tell a legitimate charge from an invented one.
• If the agency is not on the register, or something does not add up, call the SLBFE on 1989 or +94 11 2 880 500, or email [email protected].

• SLBFE: Search Registered Manpower Recruitment Agency Details (the register itself)
• SLBFE: Licensed Recruitment Agencies in Sri Lanka (licence term and licensing criteria)
• SLBFE: Law Enforcement (investigation of licensed agencies and unlicensed parties)
• SLBFE: Complaint Management (how to report an agency)
• Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment Act (English, PDF: scanned, no section cited on this page)

The register was fetched and this page's dataset regenerated on 2026-10-03. The Bureau stamped its own data 3-October-2026. Licences are renewed annually on a rolling basis, so the snapshot is re-fetched at least every 90 days, next review by 2027-01-01, and every result card links back to the live register. Found a record that does not match the Bureau's page? Email me and I will re-run the refresh.