Pricele

Prices in Sri Lanka 🇱🇰

In Sri Lanka, mobile data costs $0.25, beer costs $1.10 and healthy diet costs $1.41. That is 8 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in LKR, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.

Sri Lanka defaulted on its foreign debt in 2022, and the rupee lost roughly half its value against the dollar within months, so its dollar prices look cheap while its work-time figures are among the most expensive in the table. The recovery has run through an IMF programme: fuel and electricity were moved to cost-reflective pricing, with fuel revised monthly by formula and power tariffs raised steeply in 2022 and 2023. VAT was raised from 15% to 18% in 2024 as part of the same repair. Hourly earnings are among the lowest in the game, which is why the gap between the two columns is so wide.

What things cost

ItemUSDWork time
Big Macno data
Coca-Cola (330ml can)no data
Cappuccinono data
Milk (1 litre)no data
Eggs (dozen)no data
Apples (1 kg)no data
Gasoline (1 litre)$1.43475 LKR1.6 h
Diesel (1 litre)$1.59528 LKR1.7 h
Electricity (100 kWh)$7.902,625.7 LKR8.6 h
Natural gas (100 kWh)no data
Cigarettes (20-pack)$9.923,000 LKR10.8 h
Beer (330ml)$1.10333.01 LKR72 min
Spirits (750ml bottle)$11.843,580 LKR12.9 h
Vape e-liquid (1 ml)no data
Mobile data (1 GB)$0.2516 min
A day's healthy diet$1.41422.73 LKR1.5 h

Most local-currency figures are printed as the source published them. The cappuccino, milk, egg, apple and petrol rows are converted from US dollars at recent exchange rates; the healthy-diet row is converted the other way. A dash means the source publishes dollars and nothing else. Work time divides the dollar price by an estimated average hourly wage, the roughest number on this page. See methodology.

How Sri Lanka compares

Relative to the rest of the game, Sri Lanka is most expensive for cigarettes, where it ranks 14th out of 61 countries at $9.92, against a global median of $4.98.

It is relatively cheapest for mobile data at $0.25, which is 54th of 61, only 7 countries in the game are cheaper.

Measured against local earnings rather than dollars, the item that takes the longest to afford here is spirits, at roughly 12.9 hours of the average wage. Dollar prices and work-time prices often rank countries very differently, and that gap is usually the more interesting number.

What the state takes

Standard rate in Sri Lanka: 18% VAT. Where these come from.

Play a puzzle

Sri Lanka comes up in the daily puzzle roughly once every 61 days, paired with a different item each time. Play today's puzzle or browse the archive of past rounds.

Other countries

Why a country's prices look the way they do

Sri Lanka prices: common questions

How much do everyday things cost in Sri Lanka?
Pricele publishes 8 everyday prices for Sri Lanka, each from a named source. Mobile data $0.25, Beer $1.10, Healthy diet $1.41. All figures are converted to US dollars so countries can be compared directly; the local-currency figure is shown alongside wherever the source published one.
What currency is used in Sri Lanka?
Sri Lanka uses the LKR. Pricele lists every price in US dollars for comparability, and shows the published local-currency figure next to it where the source gives one rather than back-converting from the dollar price.
What is the cheapest thing on Pricele's Sri Lanka list?
Of the 8 items priced for Sri Lanka, the cheapest is Mobile data at $0.25 and the most expensive is Spirits at $11.84. That is a comparison within one country's list, not a claim about value for money.
Where do Pricele's Sri Lanka prices come from?
Every row names its source and the date it was collected. They come from GlobalPetrolPrices.com, 19-Oct-2026, GlobalPetrolPrices.com, March 2026, WHO Global Health Observatory, tobacco tax survey 2024 (most sold brand), WHO Global Health Observatory, alcohol tax survey 2024 (most sold brand), Cable.co.uk worldwide mobile data pricing, 2023 and World Bank Food Prices for Nutrition, 2025 (converted at the World Bank official exchange rate). A pair only exists where there is a real sourced number: the table is deliberately sparse rather than padded with estimates, so a missing item usually means the item is not sold that way in Sri Lanka.