Sri Lanka National Debt: Who We Owe and How Much

This page publishes figures rather than producing them. Four of its five views are straight reads from Central Bank tables, and only three numbers on the whole page are arithmetic. Each one is written out below so you can redo it by hand.

Where the numbers come from

The 1990 to 2025 series is CBSL statistical table 3.05, Outstanding Government Debt. One row per year gives Treasury bills, Treasury bonds, rupee loans, other domestic debt, the domestic total, foreign debt, the total, and each of those three as a percentage of GDP. The percentage of GDP is published by CBSL, not computed here, which matters because it rests on Department of Census and Statistics GDP estimates that get revised.

The creditor list, the instrument split, the debt service table and the indicator ratios come from the statistical appendix to the Annual Economic Review 2025: TABLE 109 for composition, TABLE 110 for domestic holders, TABLE 114 for foreign creditors, TABLE 116 for the wider public debt aggregate, TABLE 117 for what was actually paid, and TABLE 118 for the published ratios. Mid-year population, for the per-citizen figure, is appendix TABLE 31.

The three calculations

1. Debt per citizen is total debt in Rs million divided by mid-year population in thousands, times one thousand. The two unit conversions cancel to that. For 2025: 29,994,688 divided by 21,756 times 1,000 gives Rs 1,378,686. It is a share of a national total per resident, not a personal liability.
2. A share of the total, for a creditor or an instrument, is the amount divided by the total the same table publishes. We never divide by a total added up from the rows, because the rows are rounded to whole Rs millions and would disagree with the source by a rupee million or two.
3. A change between two years is later minus earlier for rupees, the same difference in percentage points for a share of GDP, and the difference over the earlier year for a percentage change. A share of GDP moves in percentage points, never in percent, so the page says so.

What the page will not do

It does not print a derived GDP. Dividing 2025 debt by the published ratio gives about Rs 32.75 trillion, which is a useful internal check that the stock and the ratio belong to each other, but CBSL publishes GDP itself and a back-computed figure should not be dressed up as official. It does not convert to US dollars, because that needs a year-end exchange rate for every year back to 1990. It does not fill gaps: the creditor split starts in 2019, debt service ends in 2023, and where appendix TABLE 118 prints n/a this page prints "not published".

Who publishes these figures

Since the Public Debt Management Act No. 33 of 2024, the statutory publisher is the Public Debt Management Office of the Ministry of Finance, through its Quarterly Statistical Debt Bulletin. CBSL reproduces the same Ministry of Finance data to keep the series continuous. Its own note says so:

With the establishment of the Public Debt Management Office (PDMO) under the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (MOF), the responsibility for recording and publishing Sri Lanka's public debt now falls under the PDMO, as mandated by the provisions of the Public Debt Management Act, No. 33 of 2024. Accordingly, the Quarterly Statistical Debt Bulletin, published by the PDMO, serves as the official source for debt statistics. The Central Bank compiles and present this table based on data received from the MOF to ensure data continuity.

Every figure here is from CBSL, because the PDMO and Treasury sites either do not resolve or time out from this server, and a figure that cannot be re-fetched cannot be kept honest.

The same stock appears in two separate CBSL publications, and each table has internal totals, so a bad transcription can be caught rather than published. These 14 identities are tested on every page load:

• Passed: Table 3.05: the domestic instrument columns add to domestic debt, 1990 to 2025(worst gap 1 Rs mn across 36 years)
• Passed: Table 3.05: domestic plus foreign debt equals total debt, 1990 to 2025(worst gap 1 Rs mn across 36 years)
• Passed: Table 3.05: the domestic and foreign shares of GDP add to the total share(worst gap 0.1 percentage points)
• Passed: Appendix TABLE 109 instruments add to table 3.05 total debt, 2019 to 2025(worst gap 1 Rs mn)
• Passed: Appendix TABLE 114 creditor total equals table 3.05 foreign debt, 2019 to 2025(exact match in all 7 years)
• Passed: Appendix TABLE 118 debt-to-GDP equals table 3.05 debt-to-GDP, 2019 to 2025(worst gap 0.00 percentage points)
• Passed: Our domestic share of total debt equals the share TABLE 118 publishes(worst gap 0.04 percentage points)
• Passed: TABLE 114: multilateral plus bilateral and markets equals the published total(worst gap 1 Rs mn)
• Passed: TABLE 114: the creditor rows in each group add to that group's subtotal(worst gap 2 Rs mn)
• Passed: TABLE 114: the lenders listed under China and India add to each country's line(worst gap 1 Rs mn)
• Passed: TABLE 117: interest plus amortisation equals total debt service, 2019 to 2023(worst gap 1 Rs mn)
• Passed: TABLE 116: central government, state enterprise and guaranteed debt add to public debt(worst gap 1 Rs mn)
• Passed: TABLE 110: the domestic holder sectors add to table 3.05 domestic debt(worst gap 1 Rs mn)
• Passed: Every appendix row has one cell per year, so no row is shifted(all rows aligned to the 2019 to 2025 axis)

CBSL cells carry up to three decimals (the 2025 total is 29,994,687.874 Rs million) while both the web table and the printed appendix display whole Rs millions. That is what is transcribed, so a column of rounded integers can miss a published total by one or two Rs million out of thirty trillion. The checks allow that and nothing more.

Outstanding central government debt at the end of each year, in Rs million, with the share of GDP CBSL publishes alongside it. The bar is drawn against the largest year in the series.

Source: CBSL statistical table 3.05. (h) the 2020 arrears note, (i) excludes debt service that fell overdue after the interim policy of 12 April 2022, (j) provisional. From 2022 the figures include project loans absorbed from the Ceylon Electricity Board, Airport and Aviation Services and the Ports Authority, plus the guaranteed foreign currency debt of the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation. Debt is presented net of deposits.

Most of Sri Lanka's government debt is owed at home, so the foreign creditor list is only part of the answer to who we owe. This is the domestic side, as CBSL reports it.

Source: CBSL Annual Economic Review 2025 statistical appendix, fiscal sector, TABLE 110, Ownership of Central Government Debt. Superannuation funds are the EPF, the ETF, pension funds and provident funds, which makes the retirement savings of Sri Lankan workers one of the largest single holders of the government's own debt.

Central government debt is not the whole public sector. CBSL also publishes an outstanding public debt aggregate, which adds guaranteed debt and state enterprise loans taken without a guarantee. That series stops at 2023.

Source: CBSL Annual Economic Review 2025 statistical appendix, fiscal sector, TABLE 116, Outstanding Public Debt. The 2022 and 2023 state enterprise rows are blank in the source because those loans were absorbed into central government debt. TABLE 116 puts 2023 central government debt at 104.7% of GDP while table 3.05 and TABLE 118 put it at 104.2%: the two use different GDP estimate vintages. Both are reproduced rather than reconciled.

• CBSL: fiscal sector statistical tables, including table 3.05 Outstanding Government Debt (1990 to Latest)
• CBSL: Annual Economic Review 2025, statistical appendix (index)
• CBSL: AER 2025 fiscal sector appendix, TABLE 109, 110, 114, 116, 117 and 118 (xlsx)
• CBSL: AER 2025 real sector appendix, TABLE 31 Demography, for mid-year population (xlsx)
• Parliament of Sri Lanka: Public Debt Management Act No. 33 of 2024

The figures on this page were transcribed from those files and cross-checked on 2026-10-19. Table 3.05 carries its refresh date inside its own filename, so the link above goes to the index page that holds the current file rather than to a file that will move. The Public Debt Management Office is the statutory publisher of Sri Lanka's debt statistics, and its Quarterly Statistical Debt Bulletin is the official source; its own site does not resolve from this server, which is why CBSL is cited throughout.