NBRO Landslide Clearance Fee Calculator (Sri Lanka)

National Building Research Organisation clearance is a separate permission from your building permit, and the council will not issue the permit without it. The National Council for Disaster Management made NBRO's concurrence mandatory for construction in the areas it identifies as landslide prone, and NBRO instructs local authorities and project-approving agencies to require the certificate from their clients. The calculation has four steps, and no step estimates anything.

1. Is clearance required at all? NBRO has declared ten districts landslide prone: Kandy, Matale, Nuwara Eliya, Badulla, Kegalle, Ratnapura, Kalutara, Galle, Matara, Hambantota. The test is the district, not the slope you can see from the road. In the other fifteen districts NBRO charges nothing because the clearance is not part of the approval. Inside Kalutara, Galle, Matara, Hambantota and the Mahiyangana, Embilipitiya, Dambulla, Galewela local-authority areas NBRO says exemptions may apply depending on the terrain — that is an inspection decision, so this tool never claims an exemption for an address.
2. Which table, and which row? Housing, religious and public buildings are banded in perches; commercial, industrial and hotel land is banded in acres. Everything is normalised to perches internally at the statutory 1 acre = 160 perches, which is only used to read the band — land area conversion is a separate tool. The bands are published as “less than 20 Perches”, “between 20 - 40 Perches” and so on, which leaves the shared endpoints ambiguous. This tool reads the first row exactly as printed (strictly below its bound) and treats every later row as inclusive of its upper bound, so 20 perches and 40 perches both fall in the 20–40 row. Each row in the table above shows the inequality being applied, and a plot sitting exactly on a boundary should be confirmed at the district office.
3. Concessions and formulas. A house built by a low-income family or a Samurdhi beneficiary is Rs 100 flat, and that row overrides the perch band entirely — the trap this tool exists to catch, because it is the single largest saving on the page. At the other end, commercial land above 5 acres leaves the table: the fee becomes the five-acre amount plus Rs 5,000 for each additional acre. NBRO does not say how a part-acre is treated, so a part-acre is rounded up to a whole additional acre here and the result says so.
4. Two published figures, both shown.NBRO prices this fee twice. Its landslide-clearance page carries an undated table — Rs 750 for a house on under 20 perches. Its Construction Clearance page states the application processing fee by linking a controlled departmental document, “Inspection Charges” NBRO/LRRMD/IB/SH/IC, Issue 01 of 1 January 2023, Revision 01 of 1 February 2023, whose page 1 charges Rs 2,000 for the same band. The band structure is identical; every amount differs. The 2023 document is later and formally approved; the web page is what a reader lands on and is the only one carrying the Samurdhi row. Nothing in either says which supersedes the other, so this page shows both, recommends budgeting the higher, and points you at the district office. Interpolating between them would be inventing a number.

Two costs sit outside the NBRO fee. The local authority charges Rs 25 for the application form and the guidelines, paid to the council. And the building permit itself — application, planning, scrutiny and Certificate of Conformity — is a separate bill, which the building approval fee calculator estimates.

Both transcriptions are checked against an independent second implementation written directly from the printed rows, across every band edge and each side of it. 18/18 checks pass, including the worked examples below and a monotonicity test that a bigger plot never costs less.

Housing, religious and public buildings in the ten declared districts, without the low-income concession. Both published figures shown.

A low-income or Samurdhi house is Rs 100 on the clearance page whatever the extent. Budget column adds the Rs 25 application form fee.

• NBRO/02/LAD — land development and subdivision. NBRO provides an estimate case by case.
• NBRO/03/LAP — projects and construction other than buildings. NBRO provides an estimate case by case.
• Any mitigation work NBRO makes a condition of the clearance. Retaining walls, drainage and slope stabilisation are a construction cost, quoted after inspection.
• The local authority building permit. Use the building approval fee calculator for that bill.

• NBRO — Landslide Clearance for Construction in Landslide Prone Areas

  The ten declared districts, the exemption areas, the Rs 25 application form fee, and the inline application-processing-fee table including the Rs 100 low-income and Samurdhi row.

• NBRO — Construction Clearance

  The four inspection request forms, the NBRO/01/LAB, /02/LAD and /03/LAP application numbers, the documents each application must carry, and that only the building application is priced by a published table.

• NBRO — Inspection Charges (NBRO/LRRMD/IB/SH/IC), Issue 01 of 1 January 2023, Revision 01 of 1 February 2023

  Page 1, the controlled LRAB charge table this page shows as the higher of the two figures.

• National Building Research Organisation — department home

  Department identity and the district office network. www.nbro.gov.lk redirects here.

Every figure on this page was read from those NBRO publications on 2026-09-26. Note that www.nbro.gov.lk now redirects to nbri.gov.lk — the department has not moved, only its domain. The schedule changes only when NBRO reissues it, so this page is re-checked every six months and after any NBRO fee revision.