The Election Commission has published the number of MPs each electoral district would return at a parliamentary election held under the 2026 electoral register, allocating 196 seats across the island’s 22 districts.
The Commission issued an official media release on the allocation on Tuesday, Hiru News reported. The calculation rests on the electoral register certified on 19 October 2026, and is made under sub-article 8 of Article 98 of the Constitution.
The district figures
Seat counts follow each district’s population and its number of registered voters. Colombo and Gampaha are the largest, with 19 seats each. The figures released for other districts include Kurunegala 15, Kandy 12, Kalutara 11, Ratnapura 11 and Galle 9. Trincomalee is the smallest, at four seats.
The 196 seats are the district-elected component of the 225-member Parliament; the remaining 29 are national list seats, which are not allocated by district and do not form part of this calculation.
Which districts moved
Tuesday’s release gives the new totals but not what they replace. The before-and-after comes from the certification stage reported last week: Colombo and Gampaha each rose from 18 seats to 19, while Jaffna fell from seven to six and Badulla from nine to eight, The Island reported on Sunday.
Those four changes cancel out — two seats added, two removed — which is what keeps the district total fixed at 196 while representation stays tied to population ratios, as the law requires. LankaNewz reported the certification of the register and the seat reallocation on 30 October.
The two voter totals do not match
The filings give two different figures for the size of the register, and neither account reconciles them.
Hiru News puts the total number of registered voters under the 2026 register at 17,534,397. The Island, and the Election Commission’s certification reported last week, put the number of people qualified to vote at 17,641,006 — a net increase of 90,835 on the 2025 list. The gap is 106,609.
The two may be measuring different things: a register total against a count of those qualified to vote can legitimately differ. But no filing says so, and LankaNewz has not established which figure the seat calculation was performed on. The district allocations above are reported as the Commission released them.
What is not stated
The release reported here does not give the full 22-district table — seven districts and Trincomalee are named, leaving 14 unlisted. It does not say when the Extraordinary Gazette formally publishing the allocations will be issued, give the registered-voter count for each district, or indicate when the revised allocations would first apply. No parliamentary election has been announced.
On sourcing
The district allocation is carried here on Hiru News, the only verified newsroom to file on Tuesday’s release at the time of writing. Ada Derana also reported it, but the site has returned a CloudFront 403 to this desk for some fifty days and could not be fetched or dated, so it is not cited. The before-and-after figures are separately sourced to The Island.
Update — the Gazette is identified, and two districts change hands
The Daily Mirror filed on Tuesday afternoon with the detail this article recorded as missing.
The Extraordinary Gazette formally publishing the allocations is No. 2511/02, issued on 19 October 2026, the Daily Mirror reported. That answers the question left open above — the Gazette was not forthcoming, it had already been issued a fortnight before the Commission’s announcement was reported.
The allocation is made under Article 98(8) of the Constitution, and is based on the Main Electoral Register for 2026 together with the 2026 (1) Supplementary Electoral Register.
The two movements reported
- Colombo rises from 18 seats to 19.
- Badulla falls from nine seats to eight.
Those are the only two changes the Daily Mirror names, and it does not say whether they are the only two in the revision. The pairing is consistent with a fixed national total of 196 being redistributed rather than expanded: a district gaining a seat implies another losing one.
The Daily Mirror filing adds a third verified newsroom to this story.