Remittances sent home by Sri Lankan migrant workers rose 19.8 percent to US$6.131 billion in the first eight months of 2026, against US$5.116 billion in the same period last year, NewsFirst reported, citing a Central Bank of Sri Lanka report.
That is a little over US$1 billion more than a year earlier, and it keeps remittances on course to beat the record US$8.08 billion logged in 2025.
August alone brought in US$748.6 million, an increase of US$67.8 million on the US$680.8 million received in August 2025 — a gain of almost 10 percent.
The headline is strong; the trend line is softening
The eight-month total is the best on record, but the rate of increase has fallen in every reporting period this year. Measured against the same stretch of 2025, cumulative growth has run:
| Period | Growth on a year earlier |
|---|---|
| January–May | about 26% |
| January–June | 23.2% |
| January–July | 21.4% |
| January–August | 19.8% |
The monthly comparisons tell the same story more sharply. January inflows were up 31.1 percent on the year and April up 18.9 percent; by contrast June was up 9.3 percent, July 11.5 percent and August close to 10 percent. The annual gain has roughly halved since the start of the year.
Month to month, August was also the second consecutive reading below July’s total: inflows slipped about US$29 million from the US$777.6 million received in July, which had itself rebounded from a seven-month low of US$697.3 million in June.
Some of the easing is arithmetic rather than weakness — 2025 inflows strengthened sharply through the second half, so this year is being measured against a progressively higher base. Analysts quoted earlier in the year also linked softer months to rupee depreciation from April amid Middle East tensions, noting that expatriates tend to shift to informal channels such as Hawala and Undiyal when the exchange rate looks uncertain. The Middle East is the largest overseas job market for Sri Lankans.
The Central Bank has credited the wider recovery in formal inflows to its move away from a parallel exchange-rate regime, which had pushed many migrant workers toward informal money-transfer networks during the 2022 crisis, alongside rising outward migration of skilled workers. Remittances are one of the country’s largest sources of foreign exchange and feed directly into reserves.
Update (September 14): the Daily FT files, and the reserves question is answered
The Daily FT carried the release on Monday morning, describing August as the seventh consecutive month of exceptionally strong inflows and the January–August period as the strongest on record.
It puts the month-on-month fall at 3.7% against July’s record US$777.6 million — the same US$29 million decline noted above, expressed as a percentage — and attributes it to seasonal variation in transfer patterns.
The paper also sets the run in longer context. Remittances collapsed 31% to a twelve-year low of US$3.78 billion in 2022, then recovered 57% to US$5.96 billion in 2023, rose 10.1% to US$6.57 billion in 2024, and reached US$8.07 billion in 2025 — about 12% above the previous all-time high of US$7.24 billion set in 2016. Between 2014 and 2018 inflows averaged roughly US$7 billion a year, or about US$600 million a month. It notes that overseas departures eased slightly in 2025 while inflows still rose, which points to higher average transfers per worker rather than more workers.
The question below about what the inflows imply for reserves now has an answer: official reserve assets reached a five-month high of US$6.9 billion in August, with the Central Bank buying a record US$579 million from the domestic market in the same month.
Neither outlet addresses the easing growth rate directly. The Daily FT reports the cumulative increase as “a robust 20%,” rounding the 19.8% figure up rather than treating the four-period decline as the story.
Not reported
Neither report breaks the August figure down by source country or by worker category, or gives a rupee-denominated total. Neither carries a Central Bank comment on the easing growth rate, or a full-year projection.
Ada Derana also carried the eight-month total, but its site returned a CloudFront error throughout this report and could not be used as a source. Hiru News had not filed on the figures at the time of writing.
