No. Neither of the property price series the Central Bank of Sri Lanka publishes covers the country. Both of them are Colombo District series.
That is worth stating flatly at the top, because a district figure and a national figure are different claims, and only one of the two has actually been published.
What the two series cover
The Land Price Index has been published for Colombo District, twice a year, since 1998. The Central Bank’s Land Valuation Indicator for the district was 10.6% higher in H2 2025 than a year earlier.
The Condominium Market Survey has been published quarterly since the third quarter of 2017. Its new condominium price index for the district was 18.5% higher in the first quarter of 2026 than a year before.
Both are district series. Neither becomes a national one by being described as one.
65% is a majority, not a country
On the Central Bank’s own figures for the first quarter of 2026, Colombo District accounted for 65% of the condominium sale transactions recorded.
That number does two jobs at once, and they pull in opposite directions.
It justifies the focus. When 65% of condominium activity happens inside one district, that district is the sensible place to run a survey, and running one there is a reasonable use of public statistical effort.
It also marks the limit precisely. The other 35% happened somewhere that is not Colombo, and no published index describes any of it. Condominiums are in any case only one slice of the property market. Houses and land outside Colombo District sit outside both series entirely.
The seven districts, and what exists for each
A1 works across seven districts. Set against the two Central Bank series, the coverage looks like this.
| District | New condominium price index | Land price series |
|---|---|---|
| Colombo | Covered | Covered |
| Gampaha | Not covered | Not covered |
| Kandy | Not covered | Not covered |
| Kurunegala | Not covered | Not covered |
| Galle | Not covered | Not covered |
| Matara | Not covered | Not covered |
| Nuwara Eliya | Not covered | Not covered |
One row out of seven. That is not a complaint about the Central Bank, which states its coverage plainly in the publications themselves. It is a warning about what happens to a qualifier once a number leaves the release and enters a conversation.
The same problem, one level down
A national figure that is really a district figure has a smaller sibling, and in daily practice the sibling causes more trouble: a district figure treated as a street figure.
Colombo District is not one market. It runs from Colombo 7 through Wellawatte and Nugegoda out to Kaduwela, Malabe and Piliyandala. Those places do not compete for the same buyer, they do not share a price per perch, and nothing obliges them to move in the same direction in the same quarter. An index covering all of them reports one number for all of them. That is what an index is for, and it is also what an index cannot help.
So an owner in Colombo reading a Colombo figure is a step closer to relevance than an owner in Matara, and still some way short of an answer. The question a price has to survive is narrower than a district: which street, which building, which floor, what extent, and what has sold nearby lately.
Averages describe populations. Prices describe properties. Confusing the two is the same error at every level of zoom, and the correction is always the same, go and look at the comparable evidence.
Portal averages are a different instrument again
Where an official index runs out, the numbers that fill the gap usually come from the listing portals. Those measure something else.
A portal’s published average of its own Colombo house asking prices stood at roughly LKR 117.6 million when observed in August 2026. That is a portal’s figure, drawn from a portal’s inventory, and it deserves to be quoted as exactly that. An asking price is a request. A sale price is an outcome. Everything that happens between the two is the negotiation, and none of it is visible in the average.
Listing counts have the same character. ikman carried 13,626 or more houses for sale in Colombo, and LankaPropertyWeb more than 3,600 properties, when those counts were observed. Those are counts of adverts on a platform at a moment in time. They describe how much stock is visible there, not how many properties exist, how many are selling, or at what.
None of this makes portal data useless. It makes it a different instrument with a different bias, and one that should be labelled when it is quoted. LankaPropertyWeb has been running since 2007, so the archive behind it is long, but a long run of asking-price data is still asking-price data.
What to use where there is no index
Six of the seven districts A1 covers have no published series behind them. That sounds like a gap. In practice it changes very little, because an index was never what priced a specific property.
Three kinds of evidence do the work, and they are available everywhere.
The first is completed comparable sales: what genuinely similar property nearby actually transacted at, and when. Similar means the same kind of street, the same rough extent, the same condition, not merely the same district.
The second is competing supply: what a buyer looking at your property today can look at instead, and at what price. That set is usually small, local, and knowable.
The third is time. How long comparable stock has been on the market before selling, and how long it stayed unsold when it did not, tells you more about the current level of demand than a percentage from a national headline ever will.
The one question to ask
When somebody quotes you a Sri Lankan property price, ask three things: which district, which property type, and as at when. A number that survives all three is useful. A number that cannot answer them is a headline, and a headline is not a price.
The same discipline applies in reverse. If a figure on this site or anywhere else is not carrying its period and its coverage, treat it as decoration.
Nothing here is legal or tax advice, and A1 does not give it. Anything turning on title, extent, duty or tax belongs with a notary or an attorney before it turns into a number in a contract.
The next step
If your property is in Gampaha, Kandy, Kurunegala, Galle, Matara or Nuwara Eliya, no index is going to price it for you, and nobody honest will claim otherwise. What can be assembled is local evidence, comparable sales, competing stock, and the time those took, and that is what A1 puts in front of an owner as a market appraisal, for a sale or a letting, on either side of the transaction. You can see the districts we work in on the areas pages.
A market appraisal is not a chartered valuation. The two are produced by different people, for different purposes, and where the second is what you actually need we will name a valuer rather than approximate one.