Sri Lankan Passport Validity Period and Expiry Checker

The page answers two questions that come from two different places. How long your passport lasts is set by the Department of Immigration and Emigration. Whether that is enough for one specific trip is set by the destination, and almost every border authority asks for validity beyond your travel date rather than a book that has simply not expired yet. Those two answers are computed separately and then compared.

Step 1: the expiry date

If you type the printed expiry date, that date is used unchanged. It wins because some books are printed as the issue date plus ten years minus a day, and the printed date is the one an airline reads. Otherwise the expiry is computed as the issue date plus the validity period for your passport type, with the day of month preserved and 29 February clamping back to 28 February in a non leap year. The validity periods come straight from the department: 10 years for an N series book, 3 or 10 years for a child under 16 as the parents request, and 2 years for an Emergency Certificate.

A computed expiry is cross-checked by a second, independent method before it is shown. Rather than calendar arithmetic, the cross-check adds up the real length of every year in the span, 365 days or 366 where a 29 February falls inside the window, and adds that many days to the issue date. The two methods were run against every issue date from 1995 to 2027 at all three validity lengths, 36,159 cases, and they agree on all of them, including the awkward one: a book issued 29 Feb 2024 expires 28 Feb 2034 by the calendar, and the 3,652 day count lands on the same date.

Step 2: the validity your destination needs

Each destination carries one of three rules, taken verbatim from its own authority:

• Months from entry. The required date is your arrival date plus the stated months. Nine of the destinations here use six months this way; the Maldives uses one month. Length of stay does not change the answer.
• Months after departure. Used by the Schengen area, which needs three months past the date you leave the area, so the length of the trip moves the answer. A second test applies alongside it: the book must have been issued within the previous ten years. Both have to pass.
• Valid for the stay. The required date is your departure date and nothing more. The United Kingdom, Canada and the United States all work this way for a Sri Lankan passport, which is the opposite of what most travel sites say.

The verdict is a single comparison: your expiry date on or after the required date is a pass. Equality passes, because the rules are written as “valid for six months” rather than “more than six months”. When it fails, the shortfall is the whole number of days between the two dates.

Step 3: the last day to apply

The department publishes 30 working days for normal service and same day for the urgent service. When a trip fails, the tool counts 30 working days back from your travel date, skipping Saturdays, Sundays and every gazetted public holiday, and names the holidays it skipped so you can check the count yourself. The holiday list is the gazetted one already used by the public holidays calendar on this site, which covers 2026 and 2027; for a travel date beyond that the countback skips weekends only and the page says so. Thirty working days is a published processing time, not a promise, so treat the date as the latest sensible day rather than a safe one.

The status badge turns to “Expires soon” once the passport has under 6 months of validity left, because six months is the most common requirement among the authorities checked here. Below that threshold most of the destination table fails whatever your travel date.

Validity and fees as published by the Department of Immigration and Emigration. Validity is fixed at issue and cannot be extended on an N series book.

Source: Department of Immigration and Emigration, general information on passports and issue of passports, read 2026-10-13. Diplomatic and official passports also run 10 years, so the ordinary option checks them correctly.

Every rule in the table is read from that country's own border authority, with the URL and the sentence recorded. Where the authority could not be read, the destination is not in the table at all rather than carrying a figure copied off a travel blog. These 6 were attempted on 2026-10-13 and dropped:

• Saudi Arabia. The KSA visa portal and the Visit Saudi travel-regulations page both returned errors to our servers, so the six-month figure could not be confirmed from the primary source.
• Kuwait. The Ministry of Interior visa portal renders its terms in the browser only, and the Kuwait government e-services page refused our request.
• Bahrain. The NPRA eVisa site publishes conditions behind its per-nationality eligibility form, which cannot be read without submitting an application.
• Australia. Every Department of Home Affairs visa page refused our requests. Home Affairs guidance is that the passport should cover the period of stay, with six months recommended, but we will not table a rule we could not read ourselves.
• South Korea. Neither the K-ETA portal nor the immigration service publishes a minimum-months rule, and Sri Lankan nationals need a visa rather than a K-ETA, so no rule could be confirmed.
• Japan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes no minimum-months condition at all, only that the passport be valid at landing. Inferring a valid-for-stay rule from the absence of a statement is weaker than quoting one, so Japan is left out rather than tabled on a negative.

For Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, pick “Other or not listed”, which applies the six month rule. Six months is what all three are widely published as requiring, and it is the conservative answer in any case, so the verdict you get will not be too generous. Confirm with your airline or the mission in Colombo before you book.

The Sri Lankan side of the calculation:

• Department of Immigration and Emigration: general information on passports (validity periods)
• Department of Immigration and Emigration: issue of passports (processing times and fees)
• Central Bank of Sri Lanka: gazetted holidays, used for the working-day countback

Each destination rule, with the date it was read:

• United Arab Emirates (Dubai, Abu Dhabi): Government of the UAE, official portal, read 2026-10-13
• Qatar: Ministry of Interior, State of Qatar, read 2026-10-13
• Oman: Royal Oman Police, eVisa FAQ, read 2026-10-13
• Singapore: Immigration and Checkpoints Authority, Singapore, read 2026-10-13
• India: High Commission of India, Colombo, read 2026-10-13
• Malaysia: Immigration Department of Malaysia, read 2026-10-13
• Thailand: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kingdom of Thailand, read 2026-10-13
• China (mainland): Chinese Visa Application Service Centre, read 2026-10-13
• Nepal: Department of Immigration, Nepal (Immigration Office, TIA), read 2026-10-13
• Maldives: Maldives Immigration, read 2026-10-13
• Schengen area (EU, incl. Italy, France, Germany): Federal Foreign Office, Germany, and the European Commission, read 2026-10-13
• United Kingdom: GOV.UK, Standard Visitor visa, read 2026-10-13
• United States: US Customs and Border Protection, Carrier Liaison Program, read 2026-10-13
• Canada: Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, read 2026-10-13

The Schengen rule's statutory basis is Regulation (EU) 2016/399, the Schengen Borders Code, Article 6(1)(a). The European Commission's own visa page states the three month part of it; the ten year part is quoted above from a member state's foreign ministry, because the Commission page omits it.

Rules were last checked on 2026-10-13 and are due a re-check by 2027-01-13. A border authority can revise entry conditions without notice, so confirm anything you are about to buy a ticket on.