Sri Lankans leaving for foreign employment sent home a record US$8,076 million in 2025 — a 22.8% jump on the previous year — even though the number of people departing barely moved, according to Central Bank figures reported by Hiru News.
The headline percentage needs care
Hiru’s report leads on foreign employment departures falling to 7.2% of all departures from Sri Lanka in 2025, down from 8.1% in 2024 and a peak of 27.6% in 2022.
That share is mostly a denominator effect, not a collapse in migration. The absolute numbers moved very little:
| 2024 | 2025 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Departures for foreign jobs | 314,670 | 311,223 | −3,447 (−1.1%) |
| Daily average | 862 | 853 | −9 |
What changed underneath the ratio is the total volume of people leaving the country for any reason — tourism and general travel were still heavily suppressed in 2022, when migrant workers made up more than a quarter of all departures. As ordinary travel recovered, the migrant share fell even while migration itself held roughly steady. The 2024 figure remains the highest across eight years.
Who is leaving
The gender split moved in opposite directions. Male departures rose to 190,881 in 2025 from 186,658; female departures fell to 120,342 from 128,012. Both remain well above pre-pandemic levels — in 2019 Sri Lanka recorded 122,257 male and 80,830 female departures.
By skill category, skilled workers made up 76.2% of departures in 2025, slightly down from 77.7% in 2024 but far above the 66.1% recorded in 2022. Low-skilled workers accounted for 23.8%, up from 22.3% but still below the 33.9% share of 2022.
The money tells a different story
Remittances reached US$8,076 million in 2025, up from US$6,575 million in 2024 — an increase of roughly US$1.5 billion achieved with 3,447 fewer people departing. It is the highest annual total in eight years, exceeding the previous record of US$7,104 million set in 2020, and it completes a recovery from the crisis-year low of US$3,789 million in 2022 and US$5,970 million in 2023.
Because departures were essentially flat, the increase is not explained by more migrants. It points instead to higher remittance value per worker — consistent with the sustained shift toward skilled categories, which command higher wages — and to more of the flow being captured through formal banking channels rather than informal ones.
Where the current series stands
The 2026 figures have continued the trend: remittances reached US$6.13 billion in the first eight months of this year, after passing US$5 billion by July.
Sourcing note
These are annual figures for 2025, not a new data release. The same Central Bank totals — including the US$8,076 million record — were reported when the year closed, in EconomyNext’s account of December 2025 remittances. Hiru’s filing on 29 September 2026 restates the full-year series without citing a fresh publication, and does not identify which Central Bank document the figures are drawn from; readers should treat the data as a retrospective rather than as newly released.
The figures internally reconcile: the male and female departure counts sum exactly to the stated totals for both 2024 and 2025, and the stated 22.8% remittance growth matches the two dollar totals. Hiru describes 2022 as the year female departures “reached a high” of 124,006, but that is below the 128,012 it reports for 2024; we have set that characterisation aside and given the series instead. No second verified outlet carried this particular filing.
