How to Register a Marriage in Sri Lanka: Dates and Documents

The checker does five things in order, and refuses to do three more. Every rule comes from one page — the Registrar General's Department's own “Marriage Registrations” — which is the operative administrative source for all three registers.

1. Route the register

The register is not a preference. The General register takes “Parties of any nationality or religion, provided both parties are not Muslims, can marry under the Marriage Registration Ordinance (General)” — note that it is both parties being Muslim that excludes it, not one. The Kandyan register is open to Sinhalese residing in an area subject to Kandyan law, and only Marriage Registrars appointed for those areas may register such a marriage. The Muslim register applies where “A male and a female professing Islam in Sri Lanka can marry under the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act.” — and there the shape of the whole process changes, because the Nikah comes first and there is no notice at all: “Following the Nikah ceremony, the priest who officiated the Nikah ceremony, the bride's Wali, the groom, and two other male witnesses must meet the Muslim Marriage Registrar and have the marriage registered.” Everything below branches on this answer, because only the General and Kandyan registers have a Notice of Marriage.

2. Test age and residence

The age rule is stated as “Both parties having completed eighteen years of age at their last birthday.” — 18 completed years at the last birthday, on the General and Kandyan registers, with no consent route around it. Residence is the limb people trip over, because there are four of them and the Registrar only needs one satisfied:

1. Parties having resided in the division during the 10 days immediately preceding the handing over of the Notice of Marriage. (10 days, of both parties, in the division of the Registrar taking the notice)
2. Parties having resided in different divisions, not the same division, during the 10 days immediately preceding the handing over of the Notice of Marriage. (10 days, of each party, in their own division)
3. If one the parties had not resided in Sri Lanka during 10 days immediately preceding the handing over of the Notice of Marriage, the other party having resided in Sri Lanka for 10 days. (10 days, of the party who is in Sri Lanka)
4. In neither party had resided in Sri Lanka during the 10 days immediately preceding the handing over of the Notice of Marriage, one party having resided in Sri Lanka for 4 days. (4 days, of at least one party)

The fourth limb is the one that decides flights. Where neither party has been in Sri Lanka in the preceding 10 days, one of them must have been here 4 days before the notice is handed over — so the checker prints the date that presence has to begin, counted back from the notice date, or from the latest notice date a booked wedding allows.

3. Count the notice period

The rule is one sentence: “14 days must elapse after handing over the Notice of Marriage to the relevant Registrar for the registration of a General Marriage.” The arithmetic hangs on how you count the day of handing over. This page treats it as day 0, so the fourteenth clear day is notice + 14 and the first date on which 14 days have elapsed — the earliest the marriage may be registered — is notice + 15. A Registrar counting the hand-over day itself as day 1 would reach one day earlier; the later date is the safe side of that disagreement, which is why it is the one printed. The reverse is the same arithmetic backwards: the latest notice date for a fixed wedding is the wedding minus 15days — and where that lands on a weekend or a government holiday, the checker pulls it back to a day a Registrar's counter is actually open, because a deadline nobody can meet is not a deadline.

4. Count the licence in working days

Where either party is a foreign national, an application goes to the Civil Registration Division first, and “It takes 14 working days from the date the documents are handed over to the Head Office to obtain the clearance report.” Working days exclude Saturdays, Sundays and government holidays, read from the same gazetted holiday dataset the rest of this site uses — this module keeps no holiday list of its own, which is the only way a calendar stays current across more than one tool. The 14 days run after the hand-over, so the clearance report lands on the 14th working day after the application, and the latest application date for a given notice date is the 14th working day before it. Defining it that way makes the two directions exact inverses — applying on the deadline the checker prints really does land the report on the notice date — and that property is asserted in the cross-checks rather than assumed.

5. Date the licence window and the documents

“The license issued by the Registrar General is valid for up to 03 months from the date of issue.” So the licence expires 3 calendar months after issue, clamped to the last day of a shorter month — a licence issued on 30 November 2026 expires on 28 February 2027, not 2 March. The police clearance and the certificate of civil status must each have been obtained within 6 months, measured to the day the papers are handed over, so a certificate whose 6 months expire on the notice date is still in time and one expiring the day before is not. Both edges are in the worked examples below.

The three things it will not do

It prints no rupee figure. The fee schedule belongs to the Marriage Registration Fee Calculator, and keeping one copy of a gazetted schedule current is hard enough without a second. It computes no age, guardian or consent rule for the Muslim register, because the Act fixes none and borrowing the General register's 18 years would be stating a rule that does not exist. And it never scores the prohibited degrees of relationship — the schedules are long, and a wrong verdict on whether two people may marry at all is worse than no verdict. The date arithmetic behind all of the above is held to independently written formulas at build time, and 23 of 23 checks pass.

The rules this page computes are short enough to quote rather than paraphrase, so here they are.

The Notice of Marriage must be written in duplicate, certified, and handed over to the Marriage Registrar of the division (a copy of the birth certificate and National Identity Card to verify the name and date of birth)

Four classes of person may certify it on the General register:

• Marriage Registrar of the division
• A Justice of the Peace
• A Notary Public
• A Minister (of religion)

The Kandyan register is narrower, and this is the difference most pages about Sri Lankan marriage registration miss:

Only the Marriage Registrar of that division is authorized to certify the Notice of Marriage. (A copy of the birth certificate and National Identity Card to verify the name and age).

The notice period, and the way out of it:

14 days must elapse after handing over the Notice of Marriage to the relevant Registrar for the registration of a General Marriage. If it is required to register a marriage before the lapse of 14 days, a request can be made to the Registrar for registration under a special license.

Where the two of you gave notice in different divisions:

When Notices of Marriage have been handed over to Marriage Registrars of two divisions, the marriage can be registered after the exchange of notices and the issuance of the Registrar's certificate.

And the registration itself:

After fulfilling the above requirements, the Registrar will register the marriage in the presence of two witnesses, and the third copy of the marriage certificate will be handedover to the bride.

Who may use each, whether a Notice of Marriage exists, who registers it, and who has to be there.

The Kandyan areas are the Central, North Central, Uva and Sabaragamuwa Provinces, the Kurunegala District, and named korales and pattus inside the Vavuniya, Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Puttalam Districts — 7 entries in all, reproduced in the checker above rather than reduced to a district lookup that would be wrong in exactly those places.

This is the path that costs people a trip to Colombo, so it is worth setting out in order. The couple assembles two separate bundles.

The first goes to the Civil Registration Division of the Registrar General's Department, and only the two people marrying or their close relatives may lodge it: the application form, a photocopy of the Sri Lankan party's National Identity Card, a photocopy of the foreign national's passport, a police clearance certificate for the foreign national obtained within 6 months, and a certificate of civil status obtained within 6 months — plus the divorce documents where a party was married before. 4 copies of each.

On the civil-status certificate there is a rule worth reading twice, because it is where couples from countries that do not issue one get stuck:

The certificate regarding civil status must be submitted from a state institution of the relevant country, and affidavits can only be submitted if the state institutions of the relevant country do not issue civil status certificates. The affidavit must be certified by a state institution of the relevant country.

An affidavit is a fallback, not an alternative, and it has to be certified by a state institution of that country — a solicitor's statutory declaration on its own is not what this asks for. The second bundle goes to the Registrar with the Notice of Marriage: the passport and visa and photocopies, the Health Declaration, the birth certificates, and the licence itself once it is issued.

The timing is the part the checker exists for. “It takes 14 working days from the date the documents are handed over to the Head Office to obtain the clearance report.” and “The license issued by the Registrar General is valid for up to 03 months from the date of issue.” — so the licence has to be applied for early enough to exist when the notice goes in, and not so early that it expires before the wedding. Between those two walls there is a window, and for a December wedding it opens in early November. One relief: “No fee is charged for issuing this license.”

Two things the Registrar General does not control, and this page therefore does not answer: what a foreign embassy charges for a Letter of Non-Impediment and how long it takes, and whether the marriage will be recognised in the foreign party's own country. Both are set by that country.

The procedure is governed by a circular rather than by the Ordinance itself, which is why it can change without a statutory amendment. The RGD records it as:

Circular No. 18/2021 and 2021/10/18 dated circular in this regard is effective from 2022/01/01, and its amended circular 18/2021(1) is effective from 2022/08/01.

A marriage of Christian devotees may be solemnised in their own place of worship, and the paperwork runs through two named forms people search for without knowing where they come from. Obtain the Registrar's Certificate (Registration Form B103) from the Additional District Registrar, present it to the Minister of the church where the marriage is to be solemnised, and take the Minister's certificate (B112) back to the Additional District Registrar of the Divisional Secretariat where the church is located to obtain the marriage certificate. The Notice of Marriage and the 14 days apply exactly as they do to an office registration — the church route changes where the ceremony happens, not the notice period behind it.

• Registrar General's Department — Marriage Registrations (General, Kandyan, Muslim, and the Sri Lankan / foreign national procedure)
• Registrar General's Department — Civil Registration Division, the office that issues the Registrar General's licence
• Marriage Registration Ordinance No. 19 of 1907 (as amended) — the General register, the Notice of Marriage, the special licence under s. 27(3) and the prohibited degrees
• Kandyan Marriage and Divorce Act No. 44 of 1952 — the Kandyan register and its own prohibited degrees
• Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act No. 13 of 1951 — the Muslim register, the Nikah and the Muslim Marriage Registrar
• Sri Lanka High Commission, London — Getting Married in Sri Lanka (corroborates the affidavit-in-lieu route and the papers a foreign national assembles at home)
• Newswire, 5 February 2026 — private member's bills on divorce and Muslim marriage law handed to Parliament (neither has been passed)

Every rule on this page was read against the Registrar General's “Marriage Registrations” page on 2026-09-26. The page is re-checked by 2027-03-26, sooner if the RGD reissues its foreign-national circular or the Muslim Marriage and Divorce (Amendment) Bill tabled in February 2026 is passed — it has not been. For what each step costs, the Marriage Registration Fee Calculator owns the fee schedule; for the working-day calendar behind the licence count, the Working Days Calculator holds the gazetted government holidays this page reads.