Land Registry Sri Lanka — Find the Office That Holds Your Deed

There is no arithmetic on this page. There is a transcription and a routing rule, and the value of the page rests entirely on both being exactly what the Registrar General's Department publishes.

Where the data comes from

The RGD publishes its Land Registries directory as a page whose table is empty until JavaScript runs — the served HTML contains the column headers and nothing else, which is why no search engine has an indexable copy of this list. The rows arrive over a separate request. For each of the 25district identifiers the directory endpoint returns that district's registries with their name, address, registrar, telephone, mobile, fax and email, and every one of those fields is transcribed here verbatim. The only change made is to whitespace: the RGD's data is full of non-breaking spaces, so those become plain spaces and runs of whitespace collapse to one.

Where the RGD publishes nothing for a field — nine registries have no mobile or no fax — this page says “not published” rather than filling the gap from a secondary source. Source typos are kept as published too, because your job is to reach the office the RGD says to reach: Nuwara Eliya's fax is published with the Vavuniya area code, and Anuradhapura's first mobile is a digit short. Both are shown as the RGD shows them.

How the count is verified

The registry total is checked against a second, different RGD endpoint — the registrar roster — which reports 50 records. The transcribed rows are then counted two independent ways: as a flat list, and as the sum of the 25 per-district groups (5+4+4+1+1+2+1+3+1+2+1+1+1+1+1+1+3+2+3+1+2+1+1+3+4 = 50). All three agree, which is what the verification line inside the tool reports. This matters because several secondary sources repeat a figure of 45 registries, and that figure is wrong.

How a district becomes an office

District is the only routing key the RGD publishes. 13 of the 25 districts are served by a single registry, and there the district answers the question outright. In the remaining 12 — Colombo with 5, Gampaha with 4, Kalutara with 4, Kurunegala with 4, and the rest with two or three — the office is fixed by the Divisional Secretariat division the land lies in, and the RGD does not publish that map. Every one of the 50 records carries an empty division field, so there is nothing in the source to encode and this page does not invent one. It lists every candidate office with its town and tells you to confirm by telephone, which is the honest answer and also the fast one.

Deed and title are the same office

Land in Sri Lanka is registered by volume and folio under the Registration of Documents Ordinance (Cap. 117) unless it has been brought under Bim Saviya, the title registration scheme created by the Registration of Title Act No. 21 of 1998. Both registers are kept by the same registry in the same building, which is why 8 of the 50 offices publish two labelled telephone lines. The registration-type control in the tool therefore changes which number is highlighted — never which office is returned. Parsing those two numbers out of the single field the RGD stores them in is done on the literal labels Land and Title only. One registry, Gampaha, publishes two numbers with no labels at all; those are left as a single unlabelled line, because guessing which of the two is the title counter would send people to the wrong queue.

What this page is not: a title search. It will not tell you who owns a parcel, and no public tool can — the RGD does not expose deed or folio data. For fees, use the land registration fee calculator and the stamp duty calculator; for the extent on the plan, the land area converter; and to identify the division itself, the Divisional Secretariat finder.

Every district and the offices that serve it, so “does my district have only one registry?” is answerable at a glance. The same table is inside the tool above, where the district names are tappable filters.

Source: Registrar General's Department Land Registries directory, transcribed 2026-09-25.

• Registrar General's Department — Land Registries directory (the transcribed source)
• Registrar General's Department — Land Registration Division
• RGD online services portal — what can and cannot be done online
• Registration of Documents Ordinance (Cap. 117) — registration by volume and folio
• Registration of Title Act No. 21 of 1998 — the Bim Saviya scheme

All 50 registries were transcribed from the RGD directory endpoint on 2026-09-25and the count cross-checked against the department's separate registrar-roster endpoint the same day. The page is re-checked quarterly, because registrars are transferred and telephone lines are renumbered without notice. Registry fees and stamp duty are deliberately not repeated here — they live in the two calculators linked above, so there is one copy of each schedule to keep current.