Sri Lanka received US$6,865.4 million in workers’ remittances between January and September this year, US$1,053.7 million more than the US$5,811.7 million recorded in the same period of 2025, Hiru News reported on Tuesday, citing the Central Bank of Sri Lanka.
September alone brought US$734.4 million, up from US$695.7 million in September 2025.
A record year is close to assured
The cumulative total is already within US$1.21 billion of the record US$8.08 billion logged in all of 2025. At September’s run rate, the final three months would add about US$2.2 billion, putting 2026 near US$9.1 billion. Inflows would have to fall by roughly 45% for the rest of the year for the record to survive.
The growth rate has now eased for a fifth straight reporting period
The headline is a record. The trend underneath it is a steady deceleration, and extending the series this desk has tracked through the year makes that plain.
| Period | Growth on a year earlier |
|---|---|
| January–May | about 26% |
| January–June | 23.2% |
| January–July | 21.4% |
| January–August | 19.8% |
| January–September | 18.1% |
The monthly comparison is sharper still. Measured against the same month of 2025, January was up 31.1%, April 18.9%, June 9.3%, July 11.5% and August close to 10%. September’s US$734.4 million is a gain of 5.6% — the slowest year-on-year increase of 2026 by a clear margin, and roughly a sixth of January’s rate.
Month to month, September was also US$14.2 million below August’s US$748.6 million, and the third consecutive month below July’s US$777.6 million.
The figures reconcile exactly with the eight-month data
Both of the September monthly figures can be derived from the cumulative totals already on the record, and both check out to the decimal.
- 2026: nine months US$6,865.4mn less eight months US$6,131mn = US$734.4mn
- 2025: nine months US$5,811.7mn less eight months US$5,116mn = US$695.7mn
Each matches the month figure the Central Bank gives independently. That is a useful check: the nine-month release is consistent with the August release in both years, so the deceleration is a real movement in the data rather than an artefact of a revision.
How much of the easing is the base
Part of it is arithmetic. Inflows strengthened sharply through the second half of 2025, so each month of 2026 is measured against a progressively higher comparator — and September 2025 was itself a strong month at US$695.7 million. A smaller percentage gain on a larger base is not the same as a weakening inflow, and in absolute terms September 2026 still exceeded September 2025.
But the absolute margin is narrowing too. The year-on-year gap was US$38.7 million in September, against US$67.8 million in August and more than US$100 million in several earlier months. Both the rate and the absolute increment are compressing.
Analysts quoted earlier in the year linked softer months to rupee depreciation from April amid Middle East tensions, noting that expatriates 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 broader recovery in formal inflows to its move away from a parallel exchange-rate regime, which had pushed migrant workers toward informal networks during the 2022 crisis.
Remittances are one of Sri Lanka’s largest sources of foreign exchange and feed directly into reserves — which the President said on Monday have “not yet reached the level we expect”.
Not reported
The filing gives no breakdown by source country or by formal channel, no comparison with the Central Bank’s own full-year projection, and no comment from the Central Bank on the easing rate. It does not say whether September’s figure is provisional or subject to revision.
No reason is offered for the slowdown, and no departure or deployment data for migrant workers is set against it. No other verified Sri Lankan newsroom had filed on the nine-month release at the time of writing; searches returned the August data, which matches the figures used above.
