How many government examinations are held in Sri Lanka in 2026?

The Department of Examinations, Sri Lanka has published 113 public-service examination sittings across the 10 monthly calendars issued so far for 2026, covering 180 sitting days. Of those, 40 are Efficiency Bar examinations, 28 Open Competitive, 22 Limited Competitive and 19 promotion examinations. The remaining 2 months are not yet issued.

When is the Efficiency Bar examination for the Sri Lanka Grama Niladhari Service in 2026?

Both Grama Niladhari Efficiency Bar examinations, Grade II (serial 05) and Grade III (serial 06), were held on Sunday 10 May 2026 at Main Towns, per the May 2026 calendar. The service's Grade III recruitment examination was held on Sunday 29 March 2026, All Island. No further Grama Niladhari sitting appears in any calendar the Department has issued for 2026.

What is the difference between an Open Competitive and a Limited Competitive examination?

An Open Competitive examination is open to the general public who meet the advertised qualifications. A Limited Competitive examination is restricted to serving public officers, usually officers already in a lower grade of the same service, competing for promotion into a higher one. Some examinations are published as “Open / Limited Competitive”, meaning the Department runs both schemes on the same paper, and this page labels those as both.

Where will my government examination be held?

Each row shows the Department's own venue string, not a guess. Across 2026 those are 16 distinct venues: “Colombo” for most, “All Island” or “Islandwide” for the large recruitment papers, “Main Towns” for island-scale service examinations, and named towns (Galle, Matara, Kandy, Jaffna, Ratnapura, Kurunegala, Badulla, Anuradhapura, Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Kegalle, Ambalangoda) for provincial sittings. Your exact centre comes on your admission card, which the Department issues separately.

When does the Department of Examinations release the next month's examination calendar?

The Department issues each month's calendar roughly three to five weeks before that month begins, signed by the Commissioner General of Examinations. As at 2026-10-03, the 10 calendars from January to October 2026 are out and November and December 2026 are not. Unissued months show as “not yet published” here rather than as an empty result.

Why does a month say “amended” on this page?

4 of the 2026 calendars, February, June, July, September, were re-issued by the Department as an amended edition after first publication. This page uses the amended issue in every case and ignores the superseded one, which is the whole reason the dataset records both resource ids. June and July each lost a sitting in amendment, which is why a count of 115 taken from the original issues is 113 once the amendments are applied.

Does this page show application closing dates or gazette notices?

No. The Examination Calendar prints four columns only: serial number, examination name, sitting date(s) and venue. Closing dates and eligibility conditions are published separately in the gazette and in the Department's own notices, so putting them here would mean inventing them. Sitting dates are what this page is for.

Does this include the O/L, A/L and Grade 5 Scholarship examinations?

No. Those are school examinations and are published on a different schedule. They are covered paper-by-paper by the Sri Lanka Exam Time Table on this site, linked under Related tools. This page is only the public-service examinations from the monthly Examination Calendar.

Can I add these dates to Google Calendar or my phone?

Yes. The export button under the results downloads an .ics file of whatever is currently filtered, with one all-day event per published sitting day and a reminder the day before. Import it into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. A multi-day examination becomes one event per day, so a run with a gap in it stays correct.

How accurate are the weekdays and the countdown?

Both are integer calendar arithmetic rather than timezone-dependent date maths. Sri Lanka has been on a fixed UTC+05:30 with no daylight saving since 15 April 2006, so the weekday comes from Sakamoto's algorithm and the day count from Julian Day Numbers, each cross-checked against a second independent implementation over every date in the dataset. The reference day is today in Asia/Colombo, not your device's timezone.

Sri Lanka · Education

Sri Lanka Government Exam Calendar 2026

Every public-service examination the Department of Examinations, Sri Lanka has scheduled for 2026, Efficiency Bar, Open and Limited Competitive and promotion papers, with the published sitting date, the weekday, the venue and a countdown. Search by service, filter by month, export to your calendar. 113sittings, every one traced to the Department's own PDF.

By Induwara Ashinsana— Co-Founder, Ryzera TechnologiesUpdated Oct 3, 2026

Find your 2026 government examination

113 sittings · verified 2026-10-03

Search the examination name or venue

Punctuation and capitals are ignored, so “teachers service” finds “Teachers’ Service”. Up to 80 characters.

Month

Examination type

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Open Competitive Examination for Recruitment to the Executive Category of Grade III Post of Assistant Registrar General of Companies in the Department of the Registrar of Companies - 2026

Date: Sunday 4 October 2026
Venue: Colombo
Serial: October 2026 · 03
Label: Open Competitive

Sittings shown

103 already held and hidden

Sitting days

A multi-day examination counts every published day

Labels

3 Efficiency Bar · 2 Open Competitive · 2 Limited Competitive · 1 Promotion · 2 Other

October 202610 sittings

03
Open Competitive Examination for Recruitment to the Executive Category of Grade III Post of Assistant Registrar General of Companies in the Department of the Registrar of Companies - 2026
Sun 4
ColomboOpen Competitive
04
Limited Competitive Examination for Filling the Vacancies in Grade III Posts of Sri Lanka Architectural Service - 2025 (2026)
Sat 10
ColomboLimited Competitive
05
Competitive Examination for Promotion of the Officers in Grade I of Sri Lanka Technological Service to the Special Grade - 2024 (2026)
Sun 11
ColomboPromotion
06
Daham Pasal Final Certificate Examination - 2026
Sat 17Sun 182 days
All IslandOther
07
Catholic Daham Pasal Final Certificate Examination - 2026
Sat 17Sun 182 days
All IslandOther
08
1st, 2nd and 3rd Efficiency Bar Examination’s for Management Assistant (Non Technical) Grade I, II, and III Officers of Category 2 in the Ministry of Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education - 2026
Sun 18
ColomboEfficiency Bar
09
Limited Competitive Examination for Recruitment to the Posts of Range Forest Officer in Trainning Grade of the Sri Lanka Technological Service in the Department of Forest Conservation - 2023 (2026)
Sat 24
ColomboLimited Competitive
10
2nd Efficiency Bar Examination for the Officers of the Sri Lanka Teachers’ Service Serving in National and Provincial Schools - 2026
Sat 24
All IslandEfficiency Bar
11
2nd Efficiency Bar Examination for the Pirivena Teachers, Appointed Teachers Approved under the Private Schools Accredited by the Government and Appointed Teachers Approved under the Assisted Special Schools - 2026
Sat 24
All IslandEfficiency Bar
12
Open Competitive Examination for Recruitment to the Post of Company Inspector - 2026
Sat 31
ColomboOpen Competitive

Official October 2026 calendar:English PDF සිංහල PDF தமிழ் PDF

November 2026not yet published

The Department of Examinations, Sri Lanka has not issued the November 2026 examination calendar yet. It usually appears three to five weeks before the month starts, at doenets.lk/examcalendar. Nothing on this page predicts it.

December 2026not yet published

The Department of Examinations, Sri Lanka has not issued the December 2026 examination calendar yet. It usually appears three to five weeks before the month starts, at doenets.lk/examcalendar. Nothing on this page predicts it.

12 all-day events, one per published sitting day.

What the Department has published

Every row above is transcribed from the Department of Examinations, Sri Lanka's own monthly Examination Calendar, exam name, serial number, sitting day(s) and venue exactly as published, with each month's official English, Sinhala and Tamil PDF linked beside it. Issues were last re-checked against doenets.lk/examcalendar on 2026-10-03. Sitting dates only: the Examination Calendar does not print application closing dates, admission-card details or results, so neither does this page. Weekdays and countdowns are integer calendar arithmetic in Asia/Colombo, cross-checked against a second formula. Dates can change, confirm anything you are travelling for against the official PDF.

How it works

This is a transcription tool, not an arithmetic one, so the methodology is about fidelity. Every figure on this page comes from the Department of Examinations, Sri Lanka's own monthly Examination Calendar, each issue signed by the Commissioner General of Examinations (A.K.S. Indika Kumari Liyanage). Here is every step, so you can check it.

Enumerate the issues.The Department's CMS serves its full resource index as JSON at /cms/api/resources?type=EXCA, tagged by year. Taking the 2026 tag returns 13 issues covering 10 months, filenames are never guessed.
Apply amendments.Where a month has both an original and an “(Amended)” issue, the amended issue is in force and the original is superseded. February, June, July, September 2026 were each re-issued; both resource ids are recorded in the dataset so the substitution can be audited rather than taken on trust.
Extract the four published columns.Each in-force English PDF was text-extracted with layout preserved and its Serial No., Name of Examination, Date(s) of Examination and Venue of Examination columns read row by row. A column-slicing parser was written first and rejected: multi-line venues (“Galle / Matara”) and wrapped day lists made it bleed values between rows. Every row is therefore a hand transcription, verified back against the extracted text.
Paraphrase nothing.The examination name is the Department's own wording, including trailing year qualifiers such as “- 2025 (2026)” and its own typographic quirks (“Ist”, “Trainning”, “Garde II”). The serial number and the venue string are the Department's own. No examination is assigned a service, grade or eligibility condition the Department did not print.
Parse the dates as a list, never a range.The Date(s) column holds day-of-month numbers for that issue's month, singly (03) or as a comma list (18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23). Each becomes an explicit date in that month. Nothing is interpolated: the April Oriental Studies runs skip the 24th, so they are stored as 6, 9 and 12 published days, not as spans of 6, 10 and 13. The 113 sittings on this page cover 180 sitting days on that basis.
Label by the published name, in this order.A sitting earns a label when its name contains the matching phrase, and it can earn two, a “Limited Competitive Examination for Promotion to the Supra Grade” is both, and a reader filtering on either should find it. A name matching nothing is “Other”, which is where the departmental and external-body examinations land.
- Efficiency Bar, the published name contains “Efficiency Bar”.
- Open Competitive, it contains “Open Competitive”, “Open / Limited Competitive” or “on Open Basis”.
- Limited Competitive, it contains “Limited Competitive” or “under the Limited Scheme”.
- Promotion, it contains “Promotion”.
- Other, none of the above matches.
Across 2026 that gives 40 Efficiency Bar, 28 Open Competitive, 22 Limited Competitive, 19 promotion and 13 other labels. They sum above 113 because labels overlap.
Weekday and countdown by integer arithmetic.Sri Lanka has observed a fixed UTC+05:30 with no daylight saving since 15 April 2006, so a sitting date is a plain calendar date. The weekday comes from Sakamoto's algorithm and the day count from Julian Day Numbers (Fliegel–Van Flandern), with a sitting today reading 0 and tomorrow 1. Each is cross-checked against a second independent implementation over every date in the dataset, and the reference day is today in Asia/Colombo rather than your device's timezone, so a reader in Dubai or Melbourne sees the Sri Lankan day their examination is actually held on.
Treat an unissued month as a state, not as zero. A month is published, amended or not yet published. November and December 2026 are in the third state, so a search for a November sitting says the calendar does not exist yet instead of implying nothing is scheduled.

The dataset carries a LAST_VERIFIED stamp of 2026-10-03and is registered in this site's data-freshness registry on a monthly cadence, so a missing next month is surfaced rather than left to rot quietly.

Worked examples

“What government exams are left this month?”

Month: October 2026 · no search · still-to-come

The October 2026 issue (resource 2459) prints serials 01–12 → 12 sittings.
Labels across those 12: Efficiency Bar 5 (serials 01, 02, 08, 10, 11),
Open Competitive 2 (03, 12), Limited Competitive 2 (04, 09),
Promotion 1 (05), Other 2 (06, 07). 5+2+2+1+2 = 12.
First sittings: serials 01 and 02, published day 03, venue Galle, Matara.
Last sitting: serial 12, Company Inspector, published day 31, Colombo.
Weekday of 2026-10-31 (Sakamoto): 2026 + 506 − 20 + 5 + 6 + 31 = 2554;
2554 mod 7 = 6 → Saturday.
Days away from 2026-10-03: JDN(2026-10-31) − JDN(2026-10-03) = 28.
Result: 12 sittings; the last is Saturday 31 October 2026, 28 days out.

“When is my Grama Niladhari examination?”

Search: grama niladhari · whole of 2026

Three published sittings carry that service's name, not two:
March serial 12, Grade III recruitment, day 29, All Island.
May serial 05, Grade II Efficiency Bar, day 10, Main Towns.
May serial 06, Grade III Efficiency Bar, day 10, Main Towns.
Weekday of 2026-05-10: 2026 + 506 − 20 + 5 + 0 + 10 = 2527;
2527 mod 7 = 0 → Sunday. 2026-03-29 → 2548 mod 7 = 0 → Sunday.
Result: 3 sittings, Sunday 29 March and two on Sunday 10 May 2026.
All three are past as at 2026-10-03, so “still to come” shows none
AND says all 3 matches have already been held, not a blank table.

Edge case, a multi-day run with a gap in it

Month: April 2026 · search: oriental

April serials 05, 06 and 07 are the Oriental Studies Society papers,
Islandwide, with published day lists of increasing length:
05 Preliminary 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 → 6 days
06 Intermediate 18–23, 25, 26, 27 → 9 days
07 Final / Gen. Degree 18–23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 → 12 days
24 April is absent from serials 06 and 07.
A min–max range would report 6, 10 and 13 days, wrong by 1 and 1.
Result: 6, 9 and 12 day chips on screen, and 6, 9 and 12 all-day
events in the .ics export. 27 events for the three rows together.

Sri Lanka government examinations by month, 2026

How many public-service examination sittings each 2026 calendar holds, and the state of that month's official issue.

Month	Sittings	Issue state	Official PDF
January 2026	17	Published	English
February 2026	11	Published, amended	English
March 2026	12	Published	English
April 2026	10	Published	English
May 2026	17	Published	English
June 2026	9	Published, amended	English
July 2026	9	Published, amended	English
August 2026	7	Published	English
September 2026	9	Published, amended	English
October 2026	12	Published	English
November 2026	—	Not yet published	—
December 2026	—	Not yet published	—
Total published	113	10 of 12 months · 180 sitting days

Source: Department of Examinations, Sri Lanka monthly Examination Calendar, read 2026-10-03. Amended issues supersede their originals.

Frequently asked questions

Sources & references

Each month is also published in Sinhala and Tamil at a parallel URL, linked beside that month's results in the tool above. Every sitting on this page was re-checked against the issue in force on 2026-10-03, and the set is reviewed monthly as the Department releases the next calendar. Signed by A.K.S. Indika Kumari Liyanage, Commissioner General of Examinations.

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Comments & feedback

Spotted a bug or want an improvement? Tell us, our team reviews every comment, and good ideas get built. Comments are public and anonymous.

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