Which bank gives the highest fixed deposit interest rate in Sri Lanka?

For a 12-month deposit paid at maturity, Commercial Bank, HNB, NDB and Seylan all publish 10.00% p.a., ahead of People's Bank at 8.50% and BOC and NSB at 7.25%. For monthly interest at 12 months, Commercial Bank, HNB and NDB tie at 9.55%. Over five years at maturity, HNB and NDB publish 13.00%. Rates move every few months, so check the effective date on each row and confirm at the branch.

How much interest will I get for a Rs 1,000,000 fixed deposit for one year?

At 10.00% p.a. paid at maturity, a Rs 1,000,000 deposit earns Rs 100,000 gross. The bank withholds 10% Advance Income Tax, so Rs 10,000 goes to the Inland Revenue Department and Rs 90,000 reaches you — a maturity value of Rs 1,090,000. At 8.50% the same deposit earns Rs 85,000 gross and Rs 76,500 net.

Is fixed deposit interest taxed in Sri Lanka, and at what rate?

Yes. From 1 April 2025 banks deduct Advance Income Tax at 10% of gross interest at source, under IRD Notice PN/IT/2025-01. For a resident it is an advance credited against your final tax bill, not a final tax. A resident individual whose total assessable income for the year does not exceed the personal relief of Rs 1,800,000 may file a self-declaration with the bank and receive interest gross.

Is it better to take FD interest monthly or at maturity?

It depends on whether you will spend the interest. A 12-month deposit at 9.55% paid monthly has an effective rate of 9.98%, higher than its nominal rate, but only if every monthly payment is reinvested at the same rate. If you live on the monthly income, you earn the 9.55%. That is why banks price the at-maturity option higher: across the seven banks here the gap runs from 0.25 to 3.50 percentage points, and it widens with the tenure.

What happens to my fixed deposit if the bank fails?

The Sri Lanka Deposit Insurance and Liquidity Support Scheme, run by the Central Bank, compensates up to Rs 1,100,000 per depositor per institution, counting principal and accrued interest together. Anything above that ranks as an ordinary claim. Splitting a large deposit across several licensed banks raises the insured share; splitting it across branches of the same bank does not.

Do Sri Lankan banks compound multi-year fixed deposits?

Not on at-maturity deposits. A 5-year deposit at 12.50% p.a. pays 62.50% in total — simple interest — not the 80.2% annual compounding would give. Every bank's own published Annual Effective Rate confirms this: Commercial Bank prints 10.20% against its 60-month 12.50%, which is exactly the geometric annualisation of the simple total.

Do senior citizens get a higher FD rate in Sri Lanka?

Sometimes, and only where the bank publishes one. BOC, HNB and Seylan publish distinct rates for depositors over 60 — Seylan across every tenure, BOC and HNB at 12 months only. Commercial Bank, NDB, NSB and People's Bank publish no age-restricted rupee FD rate, so a senior depositor is quoted the standard rate. The comparison flags which is which rather than assuming a senior premium exists.

What is the minimum amount to open a fixed deposit in Sri Lanka?

People's Bank and NSB open rupee fixed deposits from Rs 5,000, and NSB from Rs 1,000 on several tenures. Some products carry much higher floors: NSB's 48-month deposit needs Rs 1,000,000, Seylan's 5 STAR and Shakthi deposits need Rs 100,000, and Seylan's monthly-interest option needs over Rs 25,000. The comparison shows the minimum on any row you do not meet.

How does the Central Bank's AWFDR compare with these rates?

The Average Weighted Fixed Deposit Rate for July 2026 was 9.20%, and the average on new fixed deposits opened that month was 8.83%. The AWFDR covers the whole outstanding book, including deposits opened years ago, so it lags what is on offer today. Use it to judge whether a quoted rate is genuinely competitive.

Why are some banks missing from this comparison?

This table carries a rate only where the named bank publishes it on its own site. Nations Trust publishes a dated rate sheet that omits rupee fixed deposits entirely. Sampath and DFCC render their deposit rates only inside a client-side viewer with no downloadable sheet. Rather than copy those figures from an aggregator, the page lists the institution, says why there is no number, and links to its page. 7 of 10 listed institutions publish usable rates.

Are licensed finance companies included?

No. Finance companies advertise the highest headline rates in Sri Lanka, but they carry a different risk profile from licensed banks and revise their sheets far more often. Putting both in one table sorted by rate would put an LFC on top without that distinction, which would mislead. Only licensed commercial banks and state banks are compared here.

How often are these rates checked?

Every rate was read from the bank's own site on 2026-09-22, and each row carries the effective date the bank itself stamps on its sheet, so you can see which figures are fresh and which are months old. The table is re-read quarterly and after any Central Bank policy-rate change. Banks revise rates without notice — confirm at the branch before you deposit.

Sri Lanka · Finance

FD Rates in Sri Lanka — Fixed Deposit Interest Rate Comparison

Every rupee fixed deposit rate 7 Sri Lankan banks publish themselves, ranked by tenure and payout — with the interest you keep after 10%Advance Income Tax and the true effective rate, so a monthly-interest deposit compares honestly against an at-maturity one. Each row carries the bank's own effective date.

By Induwara Ashinsana— Executive Director, Ryzera TechnologiesUpdated Sep 22, 2026

Compare published FD rates7 banks

Deposit amount (Rs)

How much you want to place in one deposit, at one bank. Every rupee figure below is computed on this amount.

Quick amounts

Tenure

Interest paid

Interest accrues and is paid in one sum with the principal at the end of the term.

Depositor

Under 60Senior (60+)

Advance Income Tax (AIT)

Bank deducts 10% AITSelf-declaration filed — no AIT

Banks deduct 10% of gross interest at source. For a resident, that is an advance credited against your final tax bill, not a final tax.

Institutions

Best published rate

10.00%

Commercial · 1 year

Effective rate (AER)

10.00%

9.00% after AIT

Interest after AIT

Rs 90,000

on Rs 1,000,000

Paid at maturity

Rs 1,090,000

after Rs 10,000 AIT

Ranked by published rate

Bank	Rate p.a.	AER	Net interest	You receive
Commercial no date published	10.00%	10.00% — matches the AER the bank publishes	Rs 90,000	Rs 1,090,000
HNB 2026-09-11	10.00%	10.00% — matches the AER the bank publishes	Rs 90,000	Rs 1,090,000
NDB 2026-08-24	10.00%	10.00% — matches the AER the bank publishes	Rs 90,000	Rs 1,090,000
Seylan 2026-07-22	10.00%	10.00% — matches the AER the bank publishes	Rs 90,000	Rs 1,090,000
People's 2026-06-09	8.50%	8.50% — matches the AER the bank publishes	Rs 76,500	Rs 1,076,500
BOC 2026-06-08	7.25%	7.25%	Rs 65,250	Rs 1,065,250
NSB 2026-06-02	7.25%	7.25% — matches the AER the bank publishes	Rs 65,250	Rs 1,065,250

A beside an AER means the figure computed here matches the one the bank prints on its own sheet. Rupee amounts are net of AIT where you asked for it, and exclude any account fee.

Not published for this tenure and payout

Nations Trust Bank — Nations Trust publishes a dated interest-rate sheet covering savings, call and money-market deposits, but it lists no rupee fixed-deposit rates at all. The rate is quoted at a branch.
Sampath Bank — Sampath's deposit rates render only inside a client-side viewer on its rates page, and no downloadable rate sheet was published when this snapshot was taken. Rather than copy the figures from an aggregator, this table carries none. Check the bank's own page.
DFCC Bank — DFCC publishes a downloadable savings-account rate sheet but no equivalent for rupee fixed deposits; the FD figures load only inside its rates viewer. No number is carried here without a readable source.

A higher rate is not always more money

Rs 1,000,000 · 10.00% · at maturity

Rs 100,000 gross interest · AER 10.00%

Rs 1,000,000 · 9.75% · paid monthly

Rs 97,500 gross interest · AER 10.20%

The monthly deposit pays Rs 2,500 less cash over the year, yet its effective rate is higher — because each Rs 8,125 payment can be put back to work for the rest of the year. That AER only exists if you actually reinvest it. If you live on the monthly interest, the number that matters to you is the 9.75%, not the 10.20%.

Against the marketThe Central Bank's average weighted fixed deposit rate (AWFDR) for July 2026 was 9.20%. Commercial's 10.00% sits +0.80 pp above it. New deposits opened that month averaged 8.83%.

Deposit insurance

At maturity this deposit would be worth Rs 1,090,000, which sits inside the Rs 1,100,000 compensation limit — principal and accrued interest together are covered at this institution.

How it works

This page does two separate jobs, and keeping them apart is what makes it trustworthy. The first is a registry: a dated snapshot of the rupee fixed deposit rates that 7 Sri Lankan licensed banks publish on their own sites, read by hand on 2026-09-22. No figure here comes from an aggregator, a news article or an older version of a bank's sheet, and where a bank publishes nothing for a tenure or a payout mode the table says so rather than filling the gap. The second job is arithmetic, which depends on no external data and is exact.

Write r for the published nominal annual rate, P for the deposit and t for the tenure in years.

At-maturity deposits accrue simple interest: gross = P × r × t. A six-month deposit at 9.75% pays half of 9.75%, and a five-year deposit at 12.50% pays 62.50% in total — not the 80.2% annual compounding would give.
Monthly-payout deposits pay P × r ÷ 12 each month and return the principal untouched at the end. Nothing compounds inside the deposit.
Advance Income Tax of 10% of gross interest is withheld at source under IRD Notice PN/IT/2025-01, so net = gross × 0.9. With a self-declaration on file the deduction is nil.
The annual effective rate (AER) is what makes tenures and payout modes comparable. At maturity it is (1 + r·t)^(1/t) − 1; for monthly payout it is (1 + r/12)^12 − 1, assuming every monthly payment is reinvested at the same nominal rate.

That AER formula is not asserted here — it is tested. Six of the seven publishing banks print their own Annual Effective Rate beside their rates, and those printed figures are never used in a calculation on this page. Instead each one is recomputed from the bank's nominal rate and compared. All 91 of the 91 published AER figures in this registry reproduce, the worst gap across seven banks being 2.2 basis points. That is also how the simple-interest reading of multi-year deposits is confirmed: if banks compounded annually, the long-tenure rows would diverge by hundreds of basis points, and they do not.

Rows are ordered by published nominal rate and by nothing else — no safety rating, no sponsorship, no recommendation about which institution to choose. Where a bank publishes a separate senior-citizen rate it is used; where it does not, the standard rate is shown and flagged as such rather than quietly inflated. Each row also carries the minimum deposit the bank states, the effective date it stamps on the sheet, and a link to that sheet, so any figure on this page can be checked against its source in one tap.

Two benchmarks frame the table. The Central Bank's AWFDR covers the whole outstanding deposit book, so it lags what is on offer today; its AWNFDR series, covering new deposits only, is the fairer comparison. And the deposit insurance limit of Rs 1,100,000applies per depositor per institution, principal and accrued interest together — which is why the page warns the moment a deposit's maturity value crosses it.

Worked examples

Rs 1,000,000 for 12 months at 10.00%, paid at maturity

Commercial Bank, HNB, NDB and Seylan all publish this rate

Gross interest: Rs 1,000,000 × 10.00% × 1 year = Rs 100,000
Advance Income Tax: 10% × Rs 100,000 = Rs 10,000
Net interest: Rs 100,000 − Rs 10,000 = Rs 90,000
Paid at maturity: Rs 1,000,000 + Rs 90,000 = Rs 1,090,000
AER: (1 + 0.10 × 1)^(1/1) − 1 = 10.00% — at exactly one year the effective rate equals the nominal rate
After tax: (1 + 0.09)^(1/1) − 1 = 9.00%

Rs 1,000,000 for 12 months at 9.75%, paid monthly

The comparison that justifies this page

Monthly gross: Rs 1,000,000 × 9.75% ÷ 12 = Rs 8,125.00
Monthly AIT: 10% × Rs 8,125.00 = Rs 812.50
In your account each month: Rs 7,312.50
Over twelve months: gross Rs 97,500 · AIT Rs 9,750 · net Rs 87,750
AER: (1 + 0.0975 ÷ 12)^12 − 1 = (1.008125)^12 − 1 = 10.20%
So this deposit pays Rs 2,500 LESS cash than the 10.00% one above…
…yet carries the HIGHER effective rate — but only if every Rs 8,125 is reinvested at 9.75%.
Spend the monthly interest and you earn 9.75%, not 10.20%.

Rs 2,000,000 for 12 months at 8.50%, paid monthly, self-declaration filed

Edge case — no AIT deducted, and above the deposit insurance limit

Monthly gross: Rs 2,000,000 × 8.50% ÷ 12 = Rs 14,166.67
Self-declaration on file (assessable income ≤ Rs 1,800,000): AIT = Rs 0
In your account each month: Rs 14,166.67
Over twelve months: Rs 170,000 interest, none of it withheld
AER: (1 + 0.085 ÷ 12)^12 − 1 = 8.84%
Had AIT been deducted: Rs 12,750.00 a month and Rs 153,000 for the year
Deposit insurance: Rs 2,000,000 exceeds the Rs 1,100,000 limit, leaving Rs 900,000 uninsured at that one bank

What each bank publishes

Rate transparency varies more than the rates themselves. This is what each institution disclosed when the snapshot was taken on 2026-09-22.

Institution	Type	Effective date	Published rate rows
Bank of Ceylon	State	Effective from 08.06.2026	15
People's Bank	State	w.e.f. 09 June 2026	15
National Savings Bank	State	W.E.F. 02/06/2026	13
Commercial Bank of Ceylon	Commercial	no effective date shown on the LKR deposit table	13
Hatton National Bank	Commercial	last reviewed 11.09.2026	15
Seylan Bank	Commercial	w.e.f. 22.07.2026	26
National Development Bank	Commercial	last updated 24.08.2026	15
Nations Trust Bank	Commercial	rate sheet updated 15.09.2026	none
Sampath Bank	Commercial	no machine-readable rate sheet	none
DFCC Bank	Commercial	no machine-readable rate sheet	none

7 of 10 listed institutions publish usable rupee fixed deposit rates. A rate row is one tenure at one payout mode for one depositor class, so a bank with a separate senior-citizen table carries more rows than one without. The three institutions with none are listed with the reason rather than dropped, because knowing a bank will not show you its rate online is worth knowing before you telephone a branch.

Frequently asked questions

Sources & references

Every rate on this page was read from the named bank's own website on 2026-09-22. Rates are revised without notice — treat this as a dated snapshot, tap through to the bank's sheet before acting on any figure, and confirm at the branch before you deposit. This page is information, not financial advice, and recommends no institution over another.

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