Bus Ticket Price List 2026 — Sri Lanka NTC Bus Fares

These are the full-ticket fares the National Transport Commission put in force from 2026-07-06, for the whole route end to end. A part journey is charged by fare stage and costs less. Where NTC publishes no fare in a class for a route, the cell is left empty rather than filled with a guess — it usually means no operator runs that class on that route.

Normal-class full tickets in this table run from Rs 108 (Avissawella to Eheliyagoda, NTC route 470) to Rs 2,504 (Tangalle to Jaffna, route 32-4/87).

439routes are listed, in NTC's own order. Use your browser's find (Ctrl+F, or ⌘F) to jump to a town, or the search box at the top of the page.

Source: NTC inter-provincial full bus fares, effective 2026-07-06. Checked 2026-10-01.

Expressway bus fares (highway services)

Expressway fares are route-flat: one price for the route, whatever the distance you ride on it, and they do not pro-rate to a part journey. These are all 51 of the expressway services NTC publishes a fare for. Twenty-six of them come from its route-page PDF, which also names the interchanges each one uses; the rest come from its expressway full-fare table, which prints a route and a fare and no interchange detail. Both are linked below.

Source: NTC expressway bus fares, effective 2026-07-06. Checked 2026-10-01.

Sri Lanka bus fares are not set per kilometre — they are set per stage. The National Transport Commission (NTC), under the National Transport Commission Act No. 37 of 1991, publishes a chart that prints a rupee fare against each fare stage, for each class of service, and a second table giving the full-ticket fare for each inter-provincial route end to end. The same fares bind the state-owned Sri Lanka Transport Board (SLTB) and licensed private operators alike.

There is one thing NTC does not publish: how many kilometres a fare stage covers. Its chart prints a rupee amount against stage 1, stage 2 and so on to stage 350, and the conductor charges the stage your journey falls into — but no NTC publication says where one stage ends and the next begins on the road. That is why this page has no distance box. There is no published rule to apply, and inventing one produces a number that looks official and is not.

Until 23 September 2026 this page did have one. It asked for kilometres and returned a rupee figure from a 37-row table of its own, with fixed class multipliers of ×1.20, ×1.30 and ×1.85 applied on top. None of that came from NTC. The rupee values matched no NTC chart — not the one in force from 2026-07-06, where stage 1 is Rs 34.00, nor the pre-revision chart NTC prints beside it — and NTC publishes no class multipliers at all; it publishes a separate fare per class, route by route. Checked against the corridors NTC does publish a full ticket for, that estimator came out at roughly 1.5 to 1.95 times the real fare: about Rs 770 for Colombo–Kandy against NTC's Rs 521, and about Rs 1,675 for Colombo–Anuradhapura against NTC's Rs 861. It has been removed rather than re-tuned, because re-tuning it without a sourced kilometres-per-stage rule would only move the error somewhere less visible.

What is left is quoted from NTC, every figure of it:

1. Inter-provincial full tickets. 439routes, each with the fare for the whole route end to end in normal, semi-luxury and air-conditioned luxury class. Where NTC publishes no fare in a class, this page leaves the cell empty rather than filling it — it usually means no operator runs that class on that route. That is NTC's whole inter-provincial table — every route the 6 July 2026 revision prints — and the source PDF is linked below.
2. Expressway services. All 51 E01/E03/E04 routes NTC prices, each at its route-flat fare: one price for the route, whatever distance you ride on it, and it does not pro-rate to a part journey.
3. NTC's own route number, on every row. NTC publishes several routes between the same two towns, over different roads and at different fares, so the number is what lets you find a figure in the source and check it. Colombo–Kandy is route 1; Colombo–Kegalle, which is part of the same corridor, is route 1-1 at its own published fare.
4. The minimum fare. Stage 1 on the normal-service chart is Rs 34.00 from 2026-07-06, up from Rs 30.00. That figure is read off the first page of NTC's chart, which is large print; the remaining 349 stages are a scan with no text layer and are not transcribed here.

If your journey is a part of a route rather than the whole of it, the fare is lower than the figure here, and the chart posted inside the bus is the one that decides it. Ask the conductor for the stage, not for a per-kilometre rate — there isn't one.

The classes, and why there is no markup to calculate

Normal (SLTB / private stage bus)

The standard public bus: no air-conditioning, no reserved seating. SLTB and licensed private operators charge the same published fare.

Semi-Luxury (non-AC)

Cushioned seating and more luggage room, without air-conditioning. NTC publishes a semi-luxury fare only on the routes an operator actually runs it.

Luxury (air-conditioned)

Air-conditioned inter-city service with reserved seating on most routes. Again, published route by route rather than as a markup on the normal fare.

Expressway (highway) service

Buses running on the E01/E03/E04 expressways. The fare is route-flat — one price for the whole route, which does not pro-rate to a part journey.

Why fares change — and how often

The single biggest driver of an NTC fare revision is the diesel price. Bus fares in Sri Lanka are pegged to a fuel-cost formula: when the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation raises or cuts the diesel price, the NTC recalculates the per-stage table and gazettes a new chart, usually within a few weeks; there is also an annual revision, which is what the NTC annual bus fare revision effective 6 July 2026 is. Fares can move either way: the minimum normal-service stage fare went from Rs 35 down to Rs 30 after a fuel-price cut in an earlier revision, and up to Rs 34 in this one. If you want to see how a diesel-price swing feeds through to the cost of driving the same route yourself, the Sri Lanka fuel cost calculator works the trip out litre by litre, which is a useful sanity check against the bus fare for short hops.

What this page will not tell you

• A fare for a journey NTC has not published. Search for a town pair that is not in the inter-provincial table and the tool says so and stops. Most short hops are like this: they are priced off the in-bus stage chart, which NTC publishes only as a scanned Sinhala image of 350 stages.
• A rupees-per-kilometre rate. The old version of this page showed one, derived from its own estimate. It described nothing real — the fare is a stage lookup, not a rate — so it is gone with the estimator.
• A part-journey fare. The figures here are full tickets, end to end. Board halfway and you pay less, by an amount only the printed chart settles.
• Concessions. Student season tickets and disabled-passenger concessions are administered as separate season tickets and identification cards through SLTB and the Department of Social Services, not as a percentage off the published fare. The FAQ below explains how each is actually administered.

One practical note: fares are set nationally, so the same class of bus over the same route costs the same wherever in the country you board it. What differs between routes is the road distance and the class of service an operator actually runs — which is why NTC's table has empty cells, and why this page keeps them empty. If you are planning travel around public holidays, when buses run reduced timetables, the Sri Lanka public holidays calendar is worth a glance before you set out.

• National Transport Commission — official site (fare gazettes and revisions)
• Sri Lanka Transport Board — operates buses on NTC stage fares
• NTC — inter-provincial full bus fares, effective 6 July 2026 (PDF)
• NTC — expressway bus service fares, effective 6 July 2026 (PDF)
• NTC — expressway full fares, every service, effective 6 July 2026 (PDF)
• NTC — normal service fare stage chart, 350 stages (PDF, Sinhala)
• Ministry of Transport — inter-provincial full bus fares, English edition (PDF, earlier revision)

The 439 inter-provincial route fares and 51expressway fares on this page were transcribed from NTC's tables for the NTC annual bus fare revision effective 6 July 2026. Both PDFs were downloaded again on 2026-10-01and every row compared against them, matched on NTC's own route number: all 490 agree to the rupee. NTC may publish a newer revision at any time — the chart printed inside the bus is always the authoritative legal fare.