Sri Lanka Holiday Pay Calculator

Holiday pay in Sri Lanka is governed by two statutes: the Shop and Office Employees (Regulation of Employment and Remuneration) Act No. 19 of 1954, which sets the headline minima, and the Wages Boards Ordinance No. 27 of 1941, which lets trade-specific wages boards set higher floors for individual industries. The calculator implements both regimes in three deterministic steps so that the result you see on screen can be reproduced by hand against the cited legislation.

1. Derive the daily wage. For monthly-paid staff the calculator divides the monthly salary by the chosen working-days divisor — 26 by Labour Department convention for shop and office, 30 for plantation and some catering collective agreements. For daily-paid workers it uses the entered daily wage directly.
2. Apply the multiplier per holiday type.The S&O Act sets a 1.5× floor on a worker's daily rate when they work a statutory holiday or their weekly rest day; half-day mercantile holidays attract 1.5× of half a day's wage (i.e. 0.75× the daily wage). For wages-board trades that publish a higher floor — most notably Tea Plantation at 2.0× on designated festival days — the calculator substitutes the gazetted multiplier and cites the source on the breakdown line.
3. Sum and project the settlement.Per-line subtotals are added to give the total statutory holiday pay. For monthly-paid workers, the calculator also shows the projected total settlement (monthly salary + holiday pay) so you can match it directly against your next payslip. Daily-paid workers see the holiday pay alone, because it already includes the day's wage.

Why the 26-day divisor (and when 30 is right)

Most monthly-paid shop and office workers in Sri Lanka have a six-day working week, so the Department of Labour's convention is to divide the monthly basic by 26 to derive a daily rate. That keeps the daily rate stable across months of varying length — a worker on Rs 60,000/month gets a daily rate of Rs 2,307.69 regardless of whether the month has 28 or 31 days. Plantation and some catering collective agreements adopt 30 instead, because the underlying contract is structured around calendar days rather than working days. The calculator defaults the divisor based on the worker category you choose, but you can override it if your contract specifies otherwise.

1.5× is the statutory floor, not a ceiling

The 1.5× figure is the legal minimum. Plenty of private-sector contracts and collective agreements voluntarily pay 2.0× on full public holidays, and the Tea Plantation wages-board order pushes the rate to 2.0× on gazetted festival days. The calculator's worker-category selector switches the multipliers automatically; if your employer pays more than the statutory floor you should still read your gross holiday entitlement against the calculator's result and follow up with HR if the payslip is below it.

Cross-check: the weighted-formula reconciliation

The calculator computes the total in two algebraically identical ways. The main function sums per-holiday-type subtotals (count × dailyWage × multiplier for each line). A second helper — calculateTotalHolidayPayByWeightedFormula — collapses the same math into a single expression D × Σ(count × multiplier). The breakdown panel shows both and flags any mismatch greater than 0.01 LKR so that a coding bug cannot quietly drift the total off the statutory base.

What the calculator does not cover

Overtime within a normal working day is excluded — that is governed by §§ 3, 5, 6 and 11 of the S&O Act and handled by the dedicated Sri Lanka overtime pay calculator. Public-sector holiday pay (governed by Public Administration circulars), religious-festival bonuses (typically contractual rather than statutory), and the APIT/PAYE income tax on holiday pay are also out of scope. For PAYE/APIT on the additional pay, run the result through the Sri Lanka income tax calculator. And for the underlying calendar of public, bank, mercantile and poya holidays in any given year, use the public holidays calendar.

Three scenarios, hand-calculated against the cited statutes. Plug each into the calculator above — the breakdown table should match rupee for rupee.

• Department of Labour — Shop and Office Employees (Regulation of Employment and Remuneration) Act No. 19 of 1954
• Department of Labour — Wages Boards Ordinance No. 27 of 1941 (gazetted wage-board orders)
• Ministry of Public Administration — annual public, bank, mercantile and poya holiday gazette
• Department of Labour Sri Lanka — official labour standards portal

The statutory multipliers, divisors, and wages-board overrides above were last cross-checked against the cited sources on 2026-05-17. The page is reviewed when the annual public-holiday gazette is published and after any amendment to the S&O Act or relevant wages-board order.