Sri Lanka CSE Stock Brokerage Calculator

A trade on the Colombo Stock Exchange is never charged at the bare price you see on the order ticket. Five separate fees stack on top of the gross trade value — and they apply on both the buy and the sell leg. This page reproduces the CSE published schedule for ordinary equity trades up to Rs 50,000,000 (the band that covers virtually all retail orders):

1. Gross trade value = quantity × price per share.
2. Brokerage: minimum 0.64% of gross, set by the CSE Rule Book. Brokers may charge above this floor for advisory clients but never below it.
3. CSE fee: 0.084% of gross, collected by the exchange itself to fund market operations.
4. CDS fee: 0.024% of gross, paid to the Central Depository Systems for settlement and electronic share registry maintenance.
5. SEC cess: 0.072% of gross, paid to the Securities and Exchange Commission as the regulator's share of transaction revenue.
6. Share Transaction Levy (STL): 0.3% of gross per leg, levied under the Finance Act 2020 amendment and remitted to the Inland Revenue Department. Applied separately on the buy and the sell.

Summed, the floor-schedule fees total 1.120% of gross trade value per leg. The calculator applies each rate to the gross value, rounds each line item to two decimals (matching the contract-note convention your broker emails after settlement), then sums them. A second independent path — the aggregate rate formula totalFees = gross × (0.640 + 0.084 + 0.024 + 0.072 + 0.300)/100 — reproduces the same total within rounding noise. Both methods are unit-tested against worked examples reconciled to the CSE's own published trade cost illustration.

For a Buy, the calculator returns the total amount you must pay (gross + fees) and the break-even sell price — the price at which a same-day exit would recover the full buy-side cost after sell-side fees. The closed form is P = totalCost / (qty × (1 − totalFeeRate)). For a Sell, the calculator returns net proceeds (gross − fees) and the effective per-share amount you actually receive after the broker settles to your account.

Above Rs 50,000,000 the CSE allows brokers to negotiate rates below the floor for institutional orders. The tool surfaces a warning at that threshold rather than pretending the schedule still applies.

• Colombo Stock Exchange — Transaction Cost Schedule
• Central Depository Systems — Fee Schedule
• Securities and Exchange Commission of Sri Lanka
• Inland Revenue Department — Share Transaction Levy (Finance Act 2020)

The brokerage, CSE fee, CDS fee, SEC cess, and Share Transaction Levy rates on this page were last cross-checked against the CSE's published schedule on 2026-05-16. The page is reviewed after every CSE Rule Book amendment and every Inland Revenue Amendment Act that touches the STL.