Kuwait has overtaken every other foreign labour market to become Sri Lanka’s single largest source of worker remittances, Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE) Chairman Kosala Wickramasinghe said on Friday, with Sri Lankans employed there remitting approximately US$893 million during 2025 alone.

Speaking on the Ada Derana “Big Focus” programme, Wickramasinghe said nearly 300,000 Sri Lankans leave the country each year in search of foreign employment, and close to 80,000 — about 30 percent — head to Kuwait. That concentration has translated directly into remittance dominance, edging Kuwait ahead of every other Gulf labour market on the SLBFE’s 2025 inflow tally.

Qatar ranked second among contributing countries, followed by the United Arab Emirates, the chairman said. Saudi Arabia and the United States remained among the major sources, while Italy, the United Kingdom, the Maldives, Australia and Israel were named as the next tier of significant contributors. The SLBFE chairman said foreign remittances continue to play a vital role in the Sri Lankan economy, serving as one of the country’s key sources of foreign exchange earnings.

The Kuwait ranking offers a country-level breakdown that the Central Bank of Sri Lanka’s monthly headline data does not surface. CBSL’s most recent figures show worker remittances reached US$847 million in May 2026, taking the five-month total to US$3.91 billion — a run-rate roughly 26 percent ahead of the same period a year earlier and the strongest external inflow at a time when Ceylon Petroleum Corporation’s monthly fuel bill jumped to US$886 million in April.

Migrant labour policy has been an active accountability beat through May and June. Earlier this month, Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the UN Office at Geneva, Himalee Subhashini Arunatilaka, chaired the UN Committee on Migrant Workers as its inaugural chair returns for a fourth term, while Labour and Foreign Employment Minister Manusha Nanayakkara has pushed banks to capture more of the Gulf inflows that currently leak into the undiyal informal channel.

Sources: Kuwait accounts for largest share of Sri Lankan worker remittances: SLBFE — Ada Derana, June 19; Kuwait tops remittance contributions from Sri Lankan workers abroad — Newswire, June 19.