Sri Lanka Legal interest rate (Civil Procedure Code s. 192)
Sri Lanka Legal interest rate (Civil Procedure Code s. 192) is 12 percent, in force since 11 Dec 1980. Last checked against the official source on 10 Aug 2026.
Sri Lanka's legal rate of interest: 12% per annum under section 192 of the Civil Procedure Code, applied where the parties agreed no rate, running on the principal adjudged from the date of the action through to payment.
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| Current value | 12 percent |
|---|---|
| In force from | 1980-12-11 |
| Official source | Civil Procedure Code (Cap. 101) s. 192(1) as substituted by the Civil Procedure Code (Amendment) Act, No. 53 of 1980: where the action is for a sum of money due to the plaintiff the court may in the decree order interest 'according to the rate agreed on between the parties by the instrument sued on, or in the absence of any such agreement at the rate of twelve per centum per annum to be paid on the principal sum adjudged from the date of the action to the date of the decree ... with further interest at such rate on the aggregate sum so adjudged, from the date of the decree to the date of payment' |
| Last verified | 2026-08-10 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
12% per annum, the figure substituted into section 192 by Act No. 53 of 1980 with effect from 11 December 1980 and unchanged since. It is Sri Lanka's legal rate of interest and applies to civil and commercial money claims alike — there is no separate commercial regime and no reference-rate link, so the figure does not move with Central Bank policy rates. WHEN IT RUNS IS THE CRITICAL SCOPE POINT: section 192 fixes interest from the DATE OF THE ACTION to the date of the decree, and then on the aggregate decreed sum from the decree to payment. It is not a late-payment rate that starts at the invoice due date. Interest for the period BEFORE suit is a separate question governed by the contract or the substantive law, and section 192 preserves it — the 12% is ordered 'in addition to any interest adjudged on such principal sum for any period prior to the institution of the action'. A rate agreed in the instrument sued on displaces the 12% entirely, in both directions. FURTHER POINTS: the award is expressed as a power ('the court may'), so it is not automatic and a plaintiff should plead it. The same 12% appears as a ceiling, not a fixed figure, for interest on money decreed in lieu of mesne profits or rent, where the court may order interest 'at such rate not exceeding twelve per centum' as it thinks fit. Lending institutions recovering under the Debt Recovery (Special Provisions) Act No. 2 of 1990 or the Recovery of Loans by Banks (Special Provisions) Act No. 4 of 1990 proceed on their contractual rates through a separate accelerated procedure, not on this rate. Retrieval note: lawnet.gov.lk serves a TLS certificate for an unrelated host that automated fetchers reject, and the srilankalaw.lk and Supreme Court copies are image-only PDFs with no text layer.
Get it programmatically
curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/lk/statutory-interest
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/lk/statutory-interest/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://asiaref.dev/provenance/lk/statutory-interestOther Sri Lanka series: Overnight Policy Rate (OPR) · VAT standard rate · VAT registration threshold · National minimum wage · Public holidays · CCPI inflation (year-on-year) · Corporate income tax standard rate · Withholding tax rates · Personal income tax bands · Statutory social-insurance contributions
The same figure elsewhere: Taiwan · Thailand · Türkiye · United Arab Emirates · Uzbekistan · all 28