Sri Lanka Train Ticket Price — SLR 1st, 2nd & 3rd Class Fares

Sri Lanka Railways (SLR) publishes a Passenger Ticket Rates table for every station on the network: one row per destination, giving the rail distance in kilometres and the fare in 1st, 2nd and 3rd class. Read across twelve of those tables — Colombo Fort, Kandy, Galle, Jaffna, Trincomalee, Kantale, Batticaloa, Valaichchenai, Avissawella, Matara, Kankesanturai and Badulla, 4,071 rows in all — and the fare turns out to depend on one thing only: how far you travel. Sort every row by distance and the three fare columns never once step backwards. That is the function this page reproduces.

1. Find the journey distance.The calculator stores the SLR network as a tree rooted at Colombo Fort, with each station's official rail distance from Fort as printed in the SLR distance chart. For two stations on the same branch, the distance is the difference of those values; for stations on different branches the path backtracks to the junction (Polgahawela, Ragama, Maho, Gal Oya, Peradeniya, Maradana) and forward again. Checked against all twelve tables, 704 of 705 station pairs came back within 0.02 km of SLR's own figure, and the 589th within 0.01 km.
2. Read the published fare for that distance. The 93rows below the surface of this tool are the distinct (1st, 2nd, 3rd) fare triples SLR's tables show, each with the lowest and highest distance at which that triple actually appears. A 120.74 km journey — Colombo Fort to Kandy — lands in the row SLR prints from 113.14 km to 121.67 km: Rs 950, Rs 500, Rs 240.
3. Say so when the boundary is unknown. SLR does not publish where one fare row ends and the next begins, only the fares. Consecutive rows therefore leave a gap of about half a kilometre. A journey that lands inside a gap is priced at the higher row and marked as such on the result, instead of quietly picking a side.
4. Multiply by passengers and double for a return trip. SLR does not discount return tickets.

Two things are deliberately not priced here. Reserved seats on Intercity, Express and Night Mail trains, and the Observation Saloon, are published by SLR as per-route reservation charges in a separate notice, which does not say whether the printed amount replaces or is added to the ordinary fare — so this page links that notice rather than guessing. Child, student and season tickets are not published online at all; the booking counter issues them.

As a standing check, the tool replays SLR's commercial notice of unreserved 2nd and 3rd class fares from Colombo Fort — a separate publication from the station tables — through the full distance-and-fare path. All nine of its station fares come back identical. If that ever stops being true, the data here is stale and needs re-reconciling.

• Sri Lanka Railways — official site (fare schedule, timetable, station list)
• Sri Lanka Railways — List of Ticket Fare and Charges (index of the per-station Passenger Ticket Rates tables)
• Sri Lanka Railways — commercial notice: unreserved 2nd and 3rd class fares from Colombo Fort
• Sri Lanka Railways — train booking (seat reservation) charges
• Mobitel mTicket — official SLR online ticketing

Every fare here was transcribed from the Sri Lanka Railways published Passenger Ticket Rates (List of Ticket Fare and Charges) and re-verified on 2026-09-22. SLR may publish a newer revision at any time — the chart at the booking counter is always the authoritative legal fare. The encoded data covers 93 published fare rows out to 596.51 km and 65 stations across the Main, Coastal, Hill Country, Puttalam, Kelani Valley, Northern, Eastern, and Trincomalee lines.