Sri Lanka Driving Licence Class Eligibility Checker

The Department of Motor Traffic (DMT) issues 13 driving licence classes under the Motor Traffic Act No. 14 of 1951 (as amended). Each class has three statutory gates a learner driver must pass before they can sit the practical trial: a minimum age, an optional prerequisite class with a minimum holding period, and, for the commercial and heavy classes, a current NTMI medical-fitness certificate. This tool evaluates all three gates against the inputs you provide and reports, per class, whether you are eligible today, what is still missing, and what the closest unlock looks like.

Internally the calculator runs four deterministic checks in order:

1. Already held. If a class is in your declared currently-held set, it is marked Held regardless of any subsequent gate. The check does not strip held classes from the table — it labels them so the user can see the full picture of what they may legally drive today.
2. Age gate. age ≥ class.minAge. The minimums are statutory: 17 for A1, 18 for A, B1, B, G, G1 and J, 21 for C1 and D1, and 25 for C, D, CE and DE. The reported reason includes the exact years-to-go gap.
3. Prerequisite class gate. Six of the 13 classes require another class to have been issued first: C requires C1, D requires D1, CE requires C, DE requires D. If the prerequisite is missing, the gate walks the chain — so requesting CE without holding either C or C1 reports the full chain so you can plan the progression, not just the next step.
4. Holding-period gate. yearsHeld ≥ class.prerequisiteHoldingYears. Every prerequisite class on the heavy ladder must be held for at least one year before the next step opens. The gap is reported in months so the user knows whether their next application is weeks or years away.

A fifth, non-statutory gate evaluates after the four above: an NTMI medical-fitness certificate is required for C1, C, CE, D1, D, DE and J. If you cannot obtain one, those rows return Need medical with the medical and trial fee still itemised so the planning math is intact.

Indicative fees and why they vary

Each row also surfaces an indicative cost — the sum of the DMT new-licence issue fee, the per-class practical-trial fee, and the NTMI medical-fitness test for the relevant weight tier. Light classes (A1, A, B1, B, G1, G) sit at Rs 3,050 — Rs 1,300 issue + Rs 1,000 trial + Rs 750 light medical. Heavy classes (C1, C, CE, D1, D, DE) sit at Rs 3,900 — Rs 1,300 issue + Rs 1,400 trial + Rs 1,200 heavy medical. Class J uses the light fee tier but does require a medical. The exact rupee total for a real application — including renewal-versus-new pricing, postal sub-station handling and add-class increments — is computed by the dedicated Sri Lanka Driving Licence Fee Calculator on this site.

Verification and reproducibility

Five worked examples — a 17-year-old first-time applicant, a 28-year-old three-wheeler driver upgrading, a 27-year-old bus driver progressing from D1 to D, the exact-age boundary at 21, and a 30-year-old C1 holder with no current medical — are hand-derived in the data module header before any code is written. A verifyAgainstKnownExamples() cross-check function re-runs each example against the live evaluation function on page render and the result feeds the ‘DMT verified’ badge above the calculator. If a future edit to the class table ever breaks one of the worked examples, the badge flips and the page surfaces the regression instead of silently shipping a wrong rule.

What this tool does not do

The checker is information-only: it does not book a DMT trial, request a learner permit, or pull live appointment slots — the DMT booking system has no public API and we do not store any of your inputs. Foreign-licence conversion follows a separate fee track and is out of scope for v1 (the rules differ depending on the country of issue). Renewal and late-fee maths are also out of scope here — see the dedicated licence validity calculator for those. We surface a single national fee bracket; the DMT fee schedule is uniform across districts, so there is no province-specific variation to model.

Three end-to-end scenarios — try plugging each into the checker above to reproduce the result row-by-row. The third example deliberately probes the exact-age boundary at 21, which is the most common off-by-one a home-rolled calculator gets wrong.

• Department of Motor Traffic — Driving Licence Classes (canonical class table)
• Department of Motor Traffic — Services & Fees schedule
• Motor Traffic (Amendment) Act No. 8 of 2009 — statutory class definitions and weight thresholds
• National Transport Medical Institute — medical-fitness certification

The 13-class table, age gates, prerequisite chain, holding-period requirements and medical-certificate rules used on this page were last cross-checked against the DMT sources above on 2026-05-17.