Sri Lanka Traffic Fines List & Spot Fine Calculator
Pick the offences listed on your spot-fine slip and see the total payable in rupees, the Motor Traffic Act section behind each charge, and whether the case will stay at the post office or escalate to court. Sourced from the gazette extraordinary no. 2271/13 of 12 april 2022, no signup, nothing leaves your device.
How it works
Unlike the income-tax or EMI calculators on this site, traffic fines in Sri Lanka are not a function of any continuous variable. They are a flat lookup against a schedule attached to a government gazette. The Inspector General of Police gazettes the schedule, the Sri Lanka Police issue the slip, and the post office takes the money. So this tool is not a regression — it is a transparent register of 26 offences mapped to amounts and statute sections.
The active schedule comes from Gazette Extraordinary No. 2271/13 of 12 April 2022, which raised most spot fines materially over the previous 2017 revision. Every offence row carries its citation — most are the Motor Traffic Act (Cap. 203) as amended by Act No. 8 of 2009, with third-party insurance handled separately under the Motor Vehicles Insurance Act and expressway rules under the Expressway Regulations of 2014.
The calculation is a four-step deterministic walk over the offences you pick:
- For each selected offence, check whether it applies to the chosen vehicle class. Helmet rules, for example, are filtered out for cars; three-wheeler-overload is filtered out for motorcycles.
- For each remaining offence, look up the gazetted spot fine. Court-only entries (drunk driving, reckless driving) resolve to zero in the lookup — the Magistrate, not the schedule, sets their penalty.
- Sum the amounts to get the total payable. The calculator cross-checks this two ways — once by resolving each selected ID against the table, and once by iterating the full offences array with a reducer. Both must agree, or a calculation-mismatch hint appears.
- Compare the days-since-issued input against the 14-day post-office settlement window. Past the window, the action required shifts from “settle at post office” to “contact your local police station” because the file is now eligible for referral to the Magistrate's Court.
Because every amount is a flat figure, several charges issued at the same checkpoint simply add together — there is no combined ceiling and no discount for multiple offences. That is why a single stop can run into tens of thousands of rupees: driving without a licence (Rs 25,000) and using a mobile phone (Rs 25,000) already sum to Rs 51,000 once a Rs 1,000 seatbelt charge is added. Three of the heaviest documentation offences — no third-party insurance, an expired emission test certificate, and no valid revenue licence — are commonly checked together, so it is worth confirming each document is current before a long trip. If your third-party cover has lapsed, the Rs 25,000 charge under the Motor Vehicles Insurance Act is almost always more than the premium itself, which you can size up with the motor insurance premium calculator.
A few edge cases are handled explicitly so the total stays honest. Selecting the same offence twice counts it once — the slip cannot charge a duplicate line. Offences that do not match your vehicle class (a helmet rule chosen for a car, say) are kept visible in the breakdown for reference but contribute zero. The days-since-issued figure is clamped to a sensible 0–365 range; a slip older than a year is out of scope for a post-office settlement and should be raised with the issuing station directly. None of these adjustments change the underlying gazetted figures — they only stop the tool from reporting a number the post office would not actually accept.
What the calculator deliberately does not do: invent a late-payment surcharge. Sri Lankan law does not add a fixed percentage when you miss the post-office window — instead it escalates the matter to court. So past 14 days you see a warning, not a number. The same goes for the demerit-point system, which is only partly gazetted; the page will surface points once the Department of Motor Traffic publishes the full schedule.
Worked examples
Frequently asked questions
Sources & references
- Gazette Extraordinary No. 2271/13 of 12 April 2022 — current spot-fine schedule
- Motor Traffic (Amendment) Act, No. 8 of 2009 (Parliament of Sri Lanka)
- Sri Lanka Police — Department of Traffic Administration & Road Safety
- Department of Motor Traffic Sri Lanka — licence, revenue licence and emission rules
The offence schedule on this page was last cross-checked against the 2022 gazette and the Sri Lanka Police road-traffic page on 2026-05-12. The page is reviewed whenever a new schedule is gazetted by the Inspector General of Police.
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Comments & feedback
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