Sri Lanka Bus Fare Calculator — NTC stage chart

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 gazetted table that divides journey distances into bands (stages) and prints a rupee fare for each stage and each bus class. The same gazette governs both the state-owned Sri Lanka Transport Board (SLTB) and licensed private operators.

1. Identify your distance in kilometres. If you do not know the road distance, the route preset menu fills it in using verified RDA / SLTB figures (Colombo–Kandy 115 km via A1, Colombo–Galle 119 km via A2 coastal road, and so on).
2. Find the stage the distance falls into. The NTC table uses an (min, max] rule — a 14.0 km trip is in stage 9 (12.5–14.0 km); a 14.1 km trip moves up to stage 10 (14.0–15.5 km). The boundary value sits with the lower stage.
3. Read the Normal column for that stage. This is the base fare; we treat it as the source of truth.
4. Apply the class multiplier for Semi-Luxury (×1.20), Luxury (×1.30), or Super-Luxury (×1.85) — NTC publishes the same values as separate columns in the gazette; we cross-checked that the multiplied-and-rounded fare matches the printed column.
5. Highway Express AC is handled differently. NTC gazettes a single route-flat fare per origin–destination pair on the E01/E03/E04 services. There is no stage table for highway buses — the calculator surfaces the gazetted route fare directly and does not pro-rate to a custom distance.

Fares are rounded to the nearest rupee — NTC does not gazette fractional values. The per-km figure shown in the result tile is derivedfor the user's reference only; it never feeds back into the fare calculation. A small cross-check function in lib/data/sri-lanka-bus-fare-calculator.ts (lookupNormalStageFareByChart) re-reads the stage table independently of the main calculator — if the two ever disagree on a Normal fare, the chart wins.

• National Transport Commission — official site (fare gazettes and revisions)
• Sri Lanka Transport Board — operates buses on NTC stage fares
• Road Development Authority — expressway route lengths (E01/E03/E04)

The stage table and highway routes on this page were reconciled to Gazette Extraordinary No. 2424/35 of 21 March 2025 on 2026-05-12. NTC may have published a newer revision since — verify against the chart printed inside the bus, which is always the authoritative legal fare. There are 37 stages covering distances up to 500 km and 6 gazetted highway-express routes encoded here.