KDU Course Fees & Eligibility — Intake 44 (2026/2027)

General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University admits undergraduates by two routes, and they are priced and gated completely differently. Officer cadets pay no course fee and clear seven published conditions. Day scholars pay the fee and clear one. Working out which of them you are in means opening three separate PDFs on kdu.ac.lk — the advertisement, the admission handbook and the fee sheet — so this page reads all three for you and prints the arithmetic.

Age. KDU states the officer-cadet band as “18 – 22 years of age (by 31.12.2025)”. The reference date is fixed to the intake, so this page measures against December 31, 2025 rather than against today — the answer must not change because you opened the page a month later. Counting whole years to that date turns the band into a closed window: 2003-01-01 to 2007-12-31. The tool decides the gate twice — once by subtracting birth year from reference year with a birthday-aware correction, and once by comparing your date of birth against that window as a plain date range — and tells you on screen when the two agree.

A/L year. The day-scholar advertisement admits 2024 or 2025candidates, then carves out one exception: for MBBS the A/L year considered is 2025. Per-programme rules beat the intake default, so picking MBBS narrows the gate and picking anything else does not. A foreign qualification returns “not enough to decide”, because equivalence is ruled on case by case by the Commissioner General of Examinations and is not a rule anyone can encode.

The rest of the officer-cadet gates. Citizenship, unmarried status and eligibility for university admission in Sri Lanka are yes-or-no. The Common General Test needs at least 30 marks out of 100. O/L English needs a grade C Credit pass, except BA TESOL, which asks for a B. Leave the Common General Test box empty and that gate reports as open rather than passing — a blank field is never read as a pass.

Fees. Two lines of arithmetic, and no modelling anywhere:

• fee per year = total course fee ÷ duration in years
• application fee = 3,000 + 1,000 × (programmes − 1)

The total and the duration are transcribed per programme from KDU’s fee sheet; only the division is ours, and it is labelled an average everywhere it appears. KDU publishes a total, not an instalment plan, and this page will not imply one exists. Of the 48 programmes, exactly one — BSc Logistics Management at Rs 1,600,000 over 3 years — does not divide evenly, so its per-year figure is rounded to the rupee and flagged as such.

What this page deliberately does not do. Per-course A/L subject requirements and the officer-cadet physical standards live only inside the two admission handbook PDFs, which this server cannot fetch. They are linked rather than paraphrased. There is no KDU cut-off mark or selection rank here either, because KDU publishes none.

Nine of the 48 programmes on the fee sheet, from the dearest to the cheapest. Every programme is priced in the tool above.

Source: KDU Proposed Course Fees, Intake 44, dated May 5, 2026. KDU publishes these as proposed fees and may revise them. Application fee is separate: Rs 3,000 for the first programme, Rs 1,000 for each one after it.

Every worked example above is replayed through the same functions the tool uses each time this page renders, and the age band is decided by two independent methods. If a transcription or an arithmetic slip ever crept in, it would show up here rather than only in a test run.

The age band is the part most likely to go wrong by one day, so it is decided twice. The first method counts completed years from your date of birth to December 31, 2025 and compares that number to 18 and 22. The second derives the closed date window 2003-01-01 to 2007-12-31 from the same constants and compares your date of birth to it as a plain date range, with no year arithmetic at all. Both are replayed over the two boundary dates and the first date outside each of them:

All 6 worked examples and all 5 boundary dates reconcile.

• Per-course A/L stream and subject requirements. They exist only inside the two admission handbooks, which this server cannot fetch. Read them in the handbook linked below — the subject rules are course-specific and paraphrasing them from memory would be worse than not answering.
• Officer cadet physical and medical standards — height, weight, chest, vision, by service and by sex. Same reason. The nearest published equivalent we do carry is the Police & tri-forces recruitment eligibility checker, which has transcribed standards for Police, Army, Navy and Air Force recruitment. Those are not KDU’s figures and should not be read as such.
• Any KDU cut-off mark, Z-score or selection rank. KDU publishes none. The UGC state-university cut-offs are published, and the university cut-off finder carries them by course and district. To work out your Z-score first, use the A/L Z-score calculator. For how a KDU degree is recognised against a UGC one, see the UGC-approved degree checker.
• Instalment schedules, scholarships, hostel and uniform costs. KDU publishes one total per programme; anything finer would be invented.
• Postgraduate and foreign-student intakes. Different fee schedules, different notices.

• KDU — Proposed Course Fees, Intake 44 (05.05.2026)
• KDU — Day Scholars 2026 / 2027 advertisement (English)
• KDU — Day Scholar Admission Handbook, Intake 44
• KDU — Enlistment of Officer Cadets, Intake 44
• KDU — Officer Cadet Admission Handbook, Intake 44
• Department of Examinations — examinations accepted as equivalent to the local A/L
• KDU online application portal

The figures on this page were transcribed on 2026-09-23. kdu.ac.lk answers this server with a Cloudflare block, so the notice text was read from mirrors that reproduce it verbatim — guruwaraya.lk for the fee table and the day-scholar rules, lankapastpapers.com and tamilguru.lk for the officer-cadet conditions — and every figure was corroborated on a second mirror before it was published here. Where a mirror and the official document ever disagree, the official document above wins. KDU publishes the fee sheet as proposed course fees; confirm the current figure with the Faculty Admissions office before you pay anything.