Where to live in Sri Lanka
We track 4 cities in Sri Lanka: Colombo, Jaffna, Kandy and Negombo. Average temperatures run from 24°C to 28°C. We estimate a couple needs €1,844 to €1,982 a month to live centrally. Sri Lanka sits in our low to medium tax tier. For foreigners, long-term residency is possible, with conditions.
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- Tax tier
- Low to medium
- Moderate personal income tax
- Languages
- Sinhala, Tamil
- Limited English
- Safety
- 58/100
- country-level
- Healthcare
- 58/100
- country-level
- Internet
- ~40 Mbps
- median fixed broadband
The 4 cities we track
Source: City size from GeoNames, temperature from the Open-Meteo archive (2019 to 2023 averages), rainfall from TerraClimate (1991 to 2020 normals), coast distance from Natural Earth. Cost is our model estimate for a couple living centrally.
Taxes
Sri Lanka sits in our low to medium tax tier: moderate personal income tax. The tier applies to every city here, and couples who cap tax below it will not see these cities in their results.
Source: OurNextCity tax tiers, assigned by hand from each country's top marginal personal income tax rate and overall tax reputation, with no fixed rate cut-offs. Coarse by design; not tax advice.
Residency and visas
Possible, with conditions. Sri Lanka offers renewable long-term residence through a retirement visa for over-55s (fixed deposit plus monthly pension income), a professional/independent-means stream and an investor visa, with capital thresholds that are modest by global standards.
The cheapest self-funded routes we track for Sri Lanka:
- Income: about $1,500 a month (My Dream Home retirement visa (age 55+): USD 1,500/mo remittance from pension plus a USD 15,000 fixed deposit; cheaper monthly figure than the RGS professional stream's USD 2,000/mo; as of June 2026)
- Investment: about $100k (Individual Investor Visa Category, USD 100,000 deposit in a VPFCA for a 5-year visa (vs USD 200,000 for 10 years); first issued 1 Oct 2025; as of June 2026)
For short visits, 2 of 198 passports can enter visa-free, 191 can get an e-visa or visa on arrival and 5 need a visa in advance.
Source: OurNextCity residency dataset, hand-reviewed approximations researched against published immigration rules, figures as of June 2026. Not legal advice: check the official source before you apply. Short-stay entry from the passport-index dataset (ilyankou, MIT).