Sri Lanka Tourist Arrivals by Country and Month

The Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority publishes one spreadsheet per year, “Tourist Arrivals from All Countries”: one row per source market, one column per month. This tool holds the 3 most recent, transcribed cell by cell. There are no rates and no model here. The only arithmetic is aggregation, and the only place it can go wrong is the comparison window.

Period total

For a chosen market and year the tool sums that market's published months:

periodTotal(market, year) = sum of arrivals(market, year, m) for every published month m

For 2026 that is January to September, because those are the months SLTDA has released. The coverage label on the tool is derived from the dataset, so when October appears it moves on its own.

Year on year, matched on the month window

This is the one rule that decides whether the answer is right. The 2026 file covers nine months. Setting it against the full twelve months of 2025 would understate every market by roughly a quarter, so the prior year is always truncated to the same months:

priorTotal = sum of arrivals(market, year − 1, m) for m in monthsPublished(year)

On the all-countries figure the difference is stark. The matched comparison is 1,693,679 against 1,725,494, a change of -1.84%. Compare the same nine months against full-year 2025 (2,362,521) and you get a fictitious collapse of about 28%. When the prior period is zero or the market has no row that year, the tool shows the absolute change and leaves the percentage out rather than dividing by nothing.

Share and rank

Share is that market's period total over the all-countries total for the identical window. Rank is 1 + the number of markets strictly larger, so equal markets share a rank and ranks skip. The workbook's own Rank column is ignored on purpose: it is alphabetical rather than a size order, and it repeats values (rank 189 appears twice in the 2026 file). The window matters here too. The Russian Federation is 6th over Jan to Sep 2026 at 82,991, but 3rd ranked on full-year 2025 totals.

How the transcription is checked

A spreadsheet can be added up two independent ways: down the country rows and across the month columns. Both are computed and then compared against the total SLTDA prints on its own Total row, and the row count is checked too. All 3 years agree exactly:

• 2026: 1,693,679 by rows, 1,693,679 by columns, 1,693,679 printed in the file, 192 country rows. Reconciled.
• 2025: 2,362,521 by rows, 2,362,521 by columns, 2,362,521 printed in the file, 195 country rows. Reconciled.
• 2024: 2,053,465 by rows, 2,053,465 by columns, 2,053,465 printed in the file, 193 country rows. Reconciled.

Country spellings drift between the workbooks, a quieter trap than the arithmetic: “Cote Divoire” against “Cote d'lvoire”, “Gambia, The” against “The Gambia”. Markets are therefore keyed on a normalised slug with an alias table, because keying on the printed label would silently report “no prior-year data” for markets that have it. One case cannot be repaired: the 2024 file carries a single combined Congo row where the later files split the two Congos, so those rows carry a note instead of a guess.

No forecasts, no projections, no estimate for the unpublished months of 2026, no daily series and no tourism earnings. If SLTDA has not published a month, it is not here.

The largest ten markets, each against the same months of the previous year. Use the tool above for all 192 markets.

Source: SLTDA all-countries workbooks for 2026 and 2025, both both cut to the same 9-month window. Verified 2026-10-04.

All three years cut to the widest window they share, which is the9 months SLTDA has published for every one of them.

• SLTDA: Tourist Arrivals from All Countries (the index of yearly workbooks)
• SLTDA: all-countries workbook for 2026 (192 markets, total 1,693,679)
• SLTDA: all-countries workbook for 2025 (195 markets, total 2,362,521)
• SLTDA: all-countries workbook for 2024 (193 markets, total 2,053,465)
• SLTDA: Monthly Tourist Arrivals Reports 2026 (SLTDA's own methodology)
• SLTDA: Statistics hub

Figures were last cross-checked against these workbooks on 2026-10-04. SLTDA adds a month roughly every five weeks, so the page is reviewed monthly and says so above once it is overdue.