Sri Lanka Road Numbers: Find Any A, B or E Road

Sri Lanka numbers its national highways in three classes, and the Road Development Authority publishes the whole set as one gazetted table: route number, road name and road length in kilometres. This page bundles that table, all 773 rows of it, and does four things with it. Nothing on this page is estimated.

1. Reading the number you typed

A number is upper-cased and stripped of spaces and punctuation, so "a 9", "A-9" and "a9" all become A9. A typed A number is then zero-padded to three digits and tried against the AA sub-list first, then AB, then AC, because the RDA prints all three as Class A: A9 resolves to AA009. B and E numbers are padded the same way, so "b157" becomes B157 and "e3" becomes E003. Exact gazetted codes always match directly. Anything that cannot be a route number comes back with a message naming what to type instead, never a blank result.

2. The sign form

Only AA001 to AA035 carry a plain A number on road signs, rendered here as A plus the integer: AA009 shows as A9. AA000, and every AB and AC road, is shown by its gazetted code alone, because the RDA list publishes no public A number for those and inventing one would be a guess. Class B and Class E roads use their gazetted numbers on signs as they are.

3. Length and share of the class

Lengths are reproduced exactly as the RDA prints them, with no rounding and no unit conversion, which is why AA009 reads 321 km and E003 reads 25.80 km. The share of a class divides the road length by the class total printed on the same RDA page, not by a total this page computes:

share of class = road length / published class total × 100

So AA009 is 321 / 4,217.42 = 7.61% of Class A, and E003 is 25.80 / 312.586 = 8.25% of all expressway length. Using the published totals rather than our own sums means the percentage on screen is one you can repeat from the source page.

4. Matching towns to roads

A gazetted road name states the road's endpoints and a few waypoints, so it doubles as a place index. Each name is split on the " - " separator, on commas, slashes and brackets, then on bare hyphens where both sides are long enough to be separate towns. Short compounds stay whole, so Ja-Ela and Hali-Ela remain single places instead of becoming a meaningless "Ela". Generic road words are dropped. That leaves 1,064 places the gazetted names actually state.

Matching is on whole words, never on substrings, and the difference is large. Searching Ella as a substring returns 48 roads, pulling in Wellawaya, Avissawella, Mawanella and Hanwella. Matching whole words returns the correct two: AA023 and B113. The two-town lookup is the intersection of two such sets, which is why Colombo and Kandy return one road rather than every road that names either town.

The connecting-roads list is derived from shared place names, not from geometry, because the gazetted list carries no coordinates. Roads that share a place name usually do meet, but B164, "Jaffna Junction - Sri Maha Bodhi", is in Anuradhapura and still appears under Jaffna. The page says so rather than implying the roads touch.

Cross-check on the transcription

The RDA publishes the per-road rows and the class totals separately on the same page, so summing the rows and comparing is a real second opinion on whether the transcription is complete: a dropped or doubled row shows up as a non-zero difference. The 773 rows here sum to 4,217.42 km of Class A against the published 4,217.42 km, an exact match, and to 12,622.113 km overall against the published 12,622.105 km. The 0.008km difference is in the RDA's own printed Class B total, which sits that far below the sum of its own B rows. There are no duplicate route numbers, and the two gaps in the gazetted sequence, E005 and B313, are absent here as they are on the source page.

Row counts are the roads bundled on this page. Published totals are the figures the RDA prints on the same page, and every percentage in the tool divides by one of them.

Source: RDA gazetted list of national highways, last updated 2026/06. The RDA's About page quotes a different A plus B figure, 12,262.839 km as at end 2024. This page uses the gazetted list, because that is where the per-road rows come from.

• RDA: National Highways (Class A, B and E Roads), Gazetted List
• RDA: About the Road Development Authority, responsibility for the National Road Network
• Road Development Authority: official site

The 773 rows on this page were transcribed from the gazetted list and reconciled against its published class totals on 2026-10-04. The source page carries a "Last update" stamp of 2026/06. The list changes only when a gazette adds, renumbers or removes a road, so the next scheduled re-check is 2027-04-04.

Out of scope, deliberately: maps and routing, because the gazetted list has no coordinates; Class C and D provincial and local roads, which have no single national table to cite; live closures and roadworks; and road-class setback distances, which the RDA publishes under a separate procedure. Bus route numbers are a different system altogether, covered by the bus route number finder.