Colombo National Museum Ticket Price & Sri Lanka Museum Fees

There is no modelling here, and that is deliberate. Working out what a museum costs in Sri Lanka has never been the arithmetic — it is that almost nothing online quotes the Department's own figures. Search the Colombo National Museum today and you will be told Rs 200 for locals, Rs 1,200 for foreigners, Rs 1,500 for a combined ticket. The Department publishes Rs 100, $5.00 and Rs 120 / $8.00. So every rate in this tool is transcribed from one place: the Department's admission-fee schedule, which covers all eleven museums on a single page.

1. Resolve the rate column. The schedule has a local block in rupees and one foreign block in US dollars — and nothing in between, so there is no SAARC rate to apply. Ten of the eleven museums share one card: Rs 100 adult, Rs 50 child, Rs 20 school student, Rs 50 teacher, $5.00 / $3.00 foreign. The National Museum of Natural History is the single exception and is cheaper: Rs 60 / Rs 30 / Rs 40.
2. Price admission. For a Sri Lankan party,admission = adults × localAdult + children × localChildin rupees. For a foreign party the published row is in dollars, so the sum is taken in dollars and multiplied by the rupees-per-dollar rate you enter — which is what the counter does with its own rate of the day, and why that field is editable rather than fixed.
3. Price the school party at its own rows.Unlike the Zoological Gardens' “group of 20+”, the museum schedule attaches no minimum party size to its school row, so the concession applies from the first student. It publishes no free-teacher ratio either, but it does publish a teacher rate below the adult rate, so every accompanying teacher is priced at that teacher row. A party of 42 students and 3 teachers at the Colombo National Museum pays 42 × Rs 20 + 3 × Rs 50 = Rs 990.
4. Compare one combined ticket against two singles. For the two adjoining Colombo 7 museums the Department sells a Combine Ticket, printed on both museums' rows of the schedule. Two singles cost a local adult Rs 160 against Rs 120 combined, and a foreign adult $10.00 against $8.00. The tool prices both sides and totals the cheaper one. It covers adults and children only, so a school party is still priced at both museums.
5. Add the published extras, once each. Parking is a per-vehicle charge (Rs 150 a bus, Rs 100 a car, Rs 50 a motorcycle or three-wheeler) and a video permit is a per-permit charge (Rs 2,500), so both are counted once however many gates the visit covers rather than multiplied by the number of museums.
6. Check the date.The Department's opening-hours notice gives every listed museum 9.00 am to 4.00 pm and splits them two ways: 3 open every day of the week except public holidays, and 6open Tuesday to Sunday and close on Mondays and public holidays. The public-holiday list comes from this site's gazetted holidays dataset rather than a second copy kept here, so a Poya day or a Deepavali closure is caught without anything being retyped.

The transcription cross-check

These fees give no arithmetic identity to lean on. They are not a base fee plus VAT the way the zoo's odd-looking Rs 295 and Rs 118 are — None of these fees is a 18% VAT uplift of a round base fee — Rs 100 ÷ 1.18 is Rs 84.75, not a round number. They are round rupee amounts as published, so nothing is added or stripped here. So instead of a VAT reconciliation, the module asserts the four things a mistyped digit would break, and the result drives the badge on the calculator.

A second check runs on every keystroke: the itemised total is compared against an independent single-expression recomputation of the same party. The calculator shows the result of that comparison rather than hiding it.

What this tool deliberately does not price

Six things are missing on purpose, because guessing any of them would make the rest less trustworthy. There is no SAARC rate, because the schedule has no SAARC row. There are no child age bands, because the rows carry no ages. There is no free-infant rate and no free-teacher ratio, because neither is published. There is no still-camera or research permit price — only a video permit is published. There are no hours or weekly closed day for Dutch Museum of Colombo or Rathnapura National Museum, which the Department's hours notice omits; for those two the tool says so and prints +94 11 2695366 instead of a guess. And there is nothing here for the Central Cultural Fund and Archaeology Department site museums at Sigiriya, Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, which are priced inside the site ticket and belong to the cultural-triangle tool.

All eleven museums as the Department publishes them. Local, school and teacher rows in rupees; the single foreign column in US dollars, collected in rupees at the counter's rate. Parking (Rs 150 bus / Rs 100 car / Rs 50 two- and three-wheeler) and the Rs 2,500 video permit are the same everywhere.

Read 2026-09-27. The combined Colombo ticket is Rs 120 / Rs 60 for a local adult and child and $8.00 / $4.00 for a foreign adult and child. Hours are 9.00 am to 4.00 pm at the 9museums the Department's notice lists; Dutch Museum of Colombo and the Rathnapura National Museum are not on that notice. Verify with the calculator above.

• Department of National Museums — Ticket Pricing (the admission-fee schedule for all eleven museums)
• The same page, archived 2026-05-19 — the capture the figures were transcribed from
• The same page, archived 2026-03-14 — the independent second capture used as a cross-check
• Department of National Museums — museum directory (which museums the Department administers)
• Department of National Museums — opening and closing hours of the museums
• The same hours notice, archived — the capture the hours and closed days were read from
• Department of National Museums — "Ticket charges will be change" (the last announced revision, effective 2017-07-15)
• Department of National Museums — official site
• Ministry of Buddhasasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs — the parent ministry
• Inland Revenue Department — Value Added Tax (Amendment) Act No. 32 of 2023

Why two archive links sit among the sources: on 2026-09-27the Department's site was answering every path with its “Sorry we can't find that page” placeholder, behind an expired TLS certificate. Rather than fall back on travel sites — whose contradictory figures stopped an earlier attempt at the zoo tool from shipping at all — the schedule was transcribed from two dated captures of the Department's own page, which agree on every figure for every museum. No aggregator, reseller or blog figure is used anywhere, on this page or in the code behind it. A live re-read is due by 2026-12-27.