Sri Lanka Tourist SIM Card Price Comparison 2026

Four operators, four different kinds of number. Dialog prints a tax-inclusive monthly rental with a 30-day validity. SLT-Mobitel prints one tax-inclusive package value per validity window, and one of its three windows is 7 days rather than 30. Airtel prints a metered tariff in rupees per megabyte, before tax. Hutch prints no tourist price at all. None of those can be compared with another until you know how many times the pack has to be bought to cover your trip, and whether its data survives.

So the tool puts all of them on one basis: what the whole trip costs in rupees. For a trip of D days needing G GB of data, each plan p is priced in five steps.

1. Activations. a = ceil(D / validity). A 10-day trip on a 7-day pack needs two activations. Validity drives this, never data: running out of GB does not end the validity window, and buying the pack again is what resets both.
2. Trip total. total = a x price. No operator publishes a price for the SIM card or the eSIM profile itself, so nothing is added for it and the tool says so rather than printing a zero that would read as free.
3. Data available. available = a x quota, or unlimited for SLT-Mobitel Plan 03, whose data is published as non-stop subject to a fair usage policy the operator does not quantify. A plan qualifies when available is at least G, and is flagged as short by the difference when it is not. A disqualified row is shown below every qualifying row, never above one, however cheap it looks.
4. Cost per usable GB. total / min(available, G). The min matters: a plan earns no credit for quota your trip cannot reach, so a 50GB pack is not scored as better value than a 20GB pack on a 15GB trip.
5. Dollars. total / rate, at a rate you can edit. The default of 330.41 rupees per dollar is the mid-market rate observed on 2026-10-04. There is no live currency call, so nothing on this page depends on a third-party feed being up.

Tax. Dialog and SLT-Mobitel state that their tourist prices already include tax, so those six prices are used exactly as printed. Airtel publishes Rs 0.30 per MB with the footnote that rates are subject to government taxes, so the metered total is G x 1024 x 0.30 x (1 + 23.50%). One GB is treated as 1024 MB, which is the basis operators bill on; using 1,000 would understate the metered bill by 2.34%. The 23.50% is not re-typed here: it is imported from the module behind the home broadband comparison, which transcribes it from Sri Lanka Telecom's and Mobitel's own published tax tables. Voice is a different stack at 42.02%, which is why Airtel's Rs 1.50 per minute becomes Rs 2.13 once tax is applied.

Why metered data is a straight yardstick. Because the metered rate has no quota and no validity, its cost per GB is a constant: 1024 x 0.30 x 1.235 = Rs 379.39per GB, whatever the trip length. A pack therefore beats metered data exactly when its own effective cost per GB falls below that, and dividing a pack's price by Rs 379.39 gives the GB figure at which it starts winning. For SLT-Mobitel Plan 01 that is 2.2 GB, which is why a 3-day stopover using barely any data is the one case where metered data is the right answer.

What the tool does not do. It does not compare coverage or speed, because no operator publishes a deterministic dataset for either and any ranking would be opinion dressed as arithmetic. It does not price outbound roaming for Sri Lankans travelling abroad, which is a different question with a different audience. It does not list third-party travel eSIM resellers, since those are not carrier prices. And it does not invent a Hutch row.

The full catalogue as published on 2026-10-04, with each price linked to the page it came from. Prices from Dialog and SLT-Mobitel are stated tax inclusive.

Airtel's rate is published before tax. Its SMS row is printed in a unit that cannot apply to an SMS, so SMS is left out rather than guessed at. Airtel Sri Lanka is operated under licence by Dialog Axiata.

Operators with no published tourist price

• Hutch

  Hutch publishes no tourist pack. Its plan builder states that My Plan is available only inside the Hutch app, so no fixed price appears on the page, and the Tourist's packages link under Visiting Sri Lanka resolved to a 404 when this page was verified.

  Checked here

If your data runs out mid-trip

SLT-Mobitel publishes two top-ups on the same page as its tourist packs. They need an active tourist SIM, so they are a refill rather than an alternative to buying one, and they are not ranked above.

• SLT-Mobitel top-up, 8.4 GB valid 14 daysRs 652Rs 77.62 per GB
• SLT-Mobitel top-up, 20 GB valid 30 daysRs 1,343Rs 67.15 per GB

Two checks run in the page's own code every time it renders, so the arithmetic above is not something you have to take on trust.

The three worked examples, recomputed

Each case was computed by hand before the code existed. The tool runs the same inputs and reports whether it agrees to within a rupee.

The tax, by two different routes

The operators publish the data tax as three effective components that add to 23.50%: Government Levy (CESS) 2.04%, Effective VAT 18.84%, Recovery in lieu of SSCL 2.62%. Applying them one at a time and applying the single 23.50% factor must give the same rupee, and this is that check on the metered total.

• Dialog Axiata: Best Tourist SIM in Sri Lanka (three Tourists Plan tiers, rentals inclusive of tax, 30-day validity, airport stores)
• SLT-Mobitel: Tourist plans and eSIM (Plan 01, 02 and 03 package values tax inclusive, pick-up points, passport requirement, data top-ups)
• SLT-Mobitel: announcement confirming the same three tourist pack prices and the three airports
• Airtel Sri Lanka: Get A Tourist Sim (Rs 0.30/MB local data and Rs 1.50/min outgoing voice, before government taxes)
• Hutch: Customize Your Hutch Mobile Plan (app-only, so no published tourist price)
• Sri Lanka Telecom: tax rates on telecommunication services (23.50% on data, 42.02% on voice)
• Mobitel: tax table, the independent confirmation of the same two stacks
• Central Bank of Sri Lanka: daily indicative exchange rates (for the dollar column)

Every price on this page was fetched and transcribed from the operator pages above on 2026-10-04. Operator tourist pricing carries no effective date, so the page is re-verified quarterly and the next review is due by 2027-01-04. If an operator has moved a price since, email me and it will be corrected the same day.