Sri Lanka Income Percentile Calculator

Sri Lanka's official picture of who earns what comes from the Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) Household Income and Expenditure Survey. The HIES 2019 round surveyed 25,000 households across the country and is the latest one with a complete published income distribution. This tool places your income on that distribution.

The DCS ranks every household from poorest to richest and splits them into ten equal groups called deciles — each decile is 10% of households. The report publishes the mean monthly income of each decile and its share of the national income pot, from Decile 1 (poorest tenth, mean Rs 11,692) up to Decile 10 (richest tenth, mean Rs 276,889). The richest decile alone takes 36.2% of all household income.

To turn your income into a percentile, the calculator anchors each decile's published mean at the mid-point of its population band (Decile 1's mean sits at the 5th percentile, Decile 5's at the 45th, Decile 10's at the 95th, and so on) and draws a straight line between neighbouring anchors:

percentile = P_low + 10 × (income − mean_low) ÷ (mean_high − mean_low)

This is the standard way to read a percentile off officially-published grouped-average data. It is deliberately conservative at the very top: the survey publishes no upper income bound, so any income at or above the richest decile's mean (Rs 276,889) is simply reported as “top 10%” rather than an invented precise figure.

The method is self-checking. Feeding the survey's own median (Rs 53,333, which is by definition the 50th percentile) back through it returns 49.8% — within 0.2 of a point of 50, confirming the interpolation stays true to the DCS figures. Because the survey measures households, the household mode is the accurate one; the per-earner mode reconstructs a household total by assuming each earner contributes a similar amount, which is disclosed as an approximation. All figures are nominal 2019 rupees, so after the sharp post-2019 inflation a given salary today looks larger in cash terms than the same rank did in 2019.

• DCS — Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2019, Final Results (decile & quintile income tables, median Rs 53,333, mean Rs 76,414, Gini 0.46)
• DCS — Household Income and Expenditure Survey statistical information index
• Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka — official site

The decile and quintile figures on this page were transcribed from the DCS HIES 2019 Final Results report and last verified on 2026-07-16. The page will be refreshed when the DCS publishes complete distribution tables from a newer survey round.