Sri Lanka Liquor License Fee Calculator

The Excise Department of Sri Lanka issues a closed set of liquor licence categories under the Excise Ordinance (Cap. 52). Every category has an annual fee set by national gazette as part of the Budget Excise Notification. The calculator above is a deterministic lookup against that schedule, with a surcharge formula for late renewals and a fixed stamp duty for the licence document.

The four steps the calculator runs

1. Look up the base fee.The licence category — FL/1 through FL/22, brewery (B), distillery (BC), members' club (CC) — keys into the fee table on this page, sourced from Gazette No. 2410/12, 17 November 2024.
2. Apply the establishment-class tier. FL/1 hotel and FL/2A restaurant licences have a fee that scales with the SLTDA tourism classification of the premises. A 5-star FL/1 costs four times what a 1-star FL/1 does; a tourist-classified FL/2A costs 50 % more than a non-tourist one. Other categories have a single flat fee.
3. Compute the late-renewal surcharge if applicable. Excise Department Circular 03/2017 sets the surcharge at 10% × base fee × months overdue, capped at 100 % of the base fee. The calculator clamps months overdue to the integer range 0–12 and applies the cap, so a renewal more than 10 months late still totals the same as one that is 12 months late.
4. Add stamp duty. Schedule A of the Stamp Duty Act No. 43 of 1982 charges a flat Rs 50 per licence document. This is added once, regardless of fee tier or surcharge.

Cross-checked against the Circular 03/2017 formula

The data module exports a separate calculateLateSurchargeByCircular helper that reproduces the circular's surcharge expression directly, so the main calculator's output and the standalone formula reconcile to the rupee for every overdue-month value from 0 to 12. The worked examples below were hand-computed before the function was written and then the function's output was verified against them — if a future gazette change drifts the numbers, the worked examples in the file header will fail-fast as documented cross-checks.

Why the figures sometimes differ from older agent quotes

Fees are revised annually with the budget. Quotes more than 12 months old — from a previous Excise Inspector, an old agent receipt, or third-party blog posts that have not tracked subsequent gazettes — will be off. This page is updated within 48 hours of any new Excise Notification and the LAST_VERIFIED constant on the data module advances with each change. The current basis is Gazette No. 2410/12, 17 November 2024, last cross-checked on 2026-05-17.

What the calculator does not compute

The licence fee is the cost to hold the permit. It is not the same as excise duty on the liquor you sell, which is billed per litre or per bottle by category under separate sections of the Ordinance. Use the dedicated excise-duty calculator for that. Personal-licence categories that the Excise Department no longer issues are omitted from the dropdown — only currently-issuable licences are covered. District-level fee variation does not exist under the current gazette, so the calculator returns a single national figure.

The complete table reproduced below is the same one the calculator reads from. Every figure is sourced from Gazette No. 2410/12, 17 November 2024.

Add Rs 50 stamp duty per licence document. Late renewals: 10% surcharge per overdue month, capped at 100 % of the base fee.

Three scenarios common to small operators and hoteliers, with every step shown. Plug each input into the calculator above and the breakdown should match these figures to the rupee.

• Department of Excise (Sri Lanka) — official site, licence categories and procedure
• Extraordinary Gazettes — Gazette No. 2410/12, 17 November 2024 (Budget Excise Notification)
• Excise Ordinance (Cap. 52) — legal basis for the licence regime
• Stamp Duty Act No. 43 of 1982 — Schedule A (licence document duty)

Fees here were last cross-checked against Gazette No. 2410/12, 17 November 2024 on 2026-05-17. The page is reviewed within 48 hours of every new Excise Notification.