Sri Lanka's Investor Visa gives a five-year residence visa for USD 100,000 and a ten-year visa for USD 200,000. Those thresholds, and a fee of USD 200 per applicant per year, come from Extraordinary Gazette No. 2360/24 of 27 November 2023. Almost everything else that governs an application is somewhere else.
That split is the thing worth knowing before any money moves, and it is not how the scheme is usually described.
What the regulations actually say
The instrument is not a new code. Gazette No. 2360/24 amends the Immigrants and Emigrants Regulations 1956, and the amendments were made by the Minister of Public Security under section 52 read with section 23 of the Immigrants and Emigrants Act (Chapter 351, better known as Act No. 20 of 1948), and approved by Parliament.
What the gazette does is narrow. It creates the residence-visa subclass, prescribes the application form, fixes the fee at USD 200 for the investor, the spouse and each dependent child for each period of twelve months or part of one, and requires a letter from a commercial bank evidencing a minimum investment of USD 100,000 for five years or USD 200,000 for ten.
It does not name a bank account. It does not list what may be invested in. It says nothing about sectors, nothing about review cycles, and nothing about reporting. Those all come from the Department of Immigration and Emigration's published Investor Visa guideline, which is an administrative document rather than a statutory one, and from foreign exchange regulations made under a different Act.
The practical consequence is that a reader who asks for the rule in writing, citing the gazette, will find that the gazette answers roughly one question in five. Knowing which source each requirement comes from is the difference between an argument you can make and one you cannot.
The two tiers
| Investment | Visa | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| USD 100,000 | Five-year residence visa | USD 200 per applicant, per twelve months |
| USD 200,000 | Ten-year residence visa | USD 200 per applicant, per twelve months |
The visa extends to the investor, a spouse and dependent children, and the fee applies to each of them.
The ten-year tier is not endorsed for ten years at the outset. Under the Department's guideline the endorsement is granted for five years, and the Department then issues a letter extending it for a further five. That is an administrative act on a subsisting investment rather than a scheduled second term, and two biennial reviews will have fallen due before it arrives.
Two accounts, in a fixed order
This is where applications go wrong, and it is worth setting out exactly as the guideline does.
- Open both accounts first: an Inward Investment Account and a Visa Programme Foreign Currency Account, with a licensed commercial bank in Sri Lanka.
- Remit the funds to the credit of the Inward Investment Account. The money may come from an account held outside Sri Lanka or from an account with the offshore banking business of a licensed commercial bank here. An existing balance in an Inward Investment Account may be used.
- Make the investment through the Visa Programme Foreign Currency Account. It is a balance in that account which the bank's confirmation letter must certify.
So the Inward Investment Account is not an alternative or an afterthought. It is the account the money arrives in, and the Visa Programme account is the one the investment is made through. Remitting straight into the Visa Programme account, or opening only one of the two, produces a problem that is tedious and slow to unwind.
Commentary occasionally refers to a rupee-denominated Visa Programme account. The Department's published guideline names only the two accounts above, so a rupee remittance should be confirmed with the bank and with the Department before it is made rather than after.
What counts as the investment
The guideline, not the gazette, sets out what may be invested in:
- At least ten per cent of the voting share capital of a company incorporated under the Companies Act, No. 7 of 2007. The test is voting share capital, so non-voting shares do not count toward it.
- A place of business in Sri Lanka operated by an overseas company registered under the Companies Act.
- Debt securities issued by the Government, the Central Bank or another establishment under the Government, with a maturity of at least five years, in rupees or a designated foreign currency.
- Term deposits with a licensed commercial bank, in rupees or a designated foreign currency.
- Immovable property, expressly subject to the other written laws of Sri Lanka. Foreign acquisition of land is separately restricted, principally by the Land (Restrictions on Alienation) Act, No. 38 of 2014, and the visa guideline does not relax those restrictions. Anyone contemplating this limb should establish what may actually be held, and on what tenure, before treating the amount as the only question.
Sector limits, which come from somewhere else entirely
The limits on what a foreign investor may put money into are not part of the visa rules. The guideline sources them to Regulation No. 02 of 2021 issued under the Foreign Exchange Act, No. 12 of 2017, and they are structured in tiers.
They also differ according to which route is taken, and that difference is the trap.
| Investment in voting shares | Place of business or branch | |
|---|---|---|
| Closed outright | Pawn broking; coastal fishing; retail trade where the foreign capital contributed is under USD 5 million | A longer list, including money lending, pawn broking, sub-USD 5 million retail trade, coastal fishing, mechanised gem mining, lotteries, freight forwarding and shipping agency |
| Limited to 40 per cent foreign ownership | Ten categories, including quota-restricted exports; the growing and primary processing of tea, rubber, coconut, cocoa, rice, sugar and spices; mining and primary processing of non-renewable resources; timber using local timber; deep sea fishing; mass communication; education; freight forwarding; travel agencies; shipping agencies | Not the applicable structure — several of the activities merely capped on the share route are prohibited on this one, including the farming and processing of tea, rubber, coconut and rice |
| Permitted only with approval | A further tier requiring approval of the relevant legal or administrative authority: air transportation; coastal shipping; arms and military hardware; poisons, narcotics, alcohol and toxic materials; currency and security document printing; large-scale mechanised gem mining; lotteries | As above |
Two points follow.
An investor who reads that tea and rubber are capped at forty per cent, and structures a branch operation accordingly, may have bought a prohibited business rather than a restricted one. The route determines the treatment.
And the approving body is not always the Board of Investment. The Board approves departures from the forty per cent limitations; the third tier is approved by whichever legal or administrative authority is relevant to that activity. Going to the wrong authority costs time that the two-year review cycle does not forgive.
The conditions that run with the visa
This is a supervised status, not a purchase, and the obligations are continuing:
- The investment project is reviewed every two years by the Department's Investigation Division.
- Material changes must be reported within two months. That covers changes to personal particulars as well as to the investment.
- Two months' written notice is required to terminate the investment project.
- Fourteen working days' notice is required before leaving Sri Lanka permanently.
- The holder must comply with immigration, tax and other legal obligations, and refrain from political or disruptive activity.
One further condition matters more than its position in the guideline suggests. Transferring funds out of Sri Lanka must comply with directions issued under the Foreign Exchange Act, No. 12 of 2017. The visa says nothing about repatriation, and an investor who has satisfied himself about how the money goes in has not thereby answered how it comes out.
The Golden Paradise question
A search for a Sri Lankan golden visa will return the Golden Paradise Residence Visa, introduced in 2022. Its published terms differ: a single threshold of USD 200,000 for ten years, and a Golden Paradise Foreign Currency Account rather than the two accounts described above. The fee is the same USD 200 a year.
Whether it remains open to a new applicant is genuinely unclear, and it should not be stated either way.
Against it: the 2023 regulations restate the residence-visa subclasses and Golden Paradise is not among them, although they expressly preserve two other schemes for extension only, which shows the draftsman knew how to wind a scheme down. Sri Lankan missions abroad have quietly removed their Golden Paradise pages. And the Investor Visa is demonstrably operating, the first having been issued on 1 October 2025.
For it: no instrument revoking Golden Paradise has been traced. The Department still publishes a brochure for it on its main site, its eServices portal is in substance a Golden Paradise landing page, and the scheme mailbox is still published. Golden Paradise was never a gazetted subclass in the first place, being an administrative category of residence visa, so its absence from the 2023 regulations proves less than it appears to.
The Department is the only body that can answer this, and the question should be put to it in writing before anything is remitted. The reason to be careful is concrete rather than procedural: the two schemes call for different bank accounts, and an investor who opens the wrong one has not made a qualifying investment.
The digital nomad visa, which is not this
The same gazette creates a Digital Nomad Visa, defined there as for persons who use digital technologies to earn a living and conduct their lives in a nomadic manner. It is regularly confused with the investor route and leads to nothing similar.
| Feature | Position |
|---|---|
| Duration | Up to twelve months, renewable annually |
| Income | USD 2,000 a month. The gazette requires proof of monthly income; the Department's guideline requires monthly remittance into Sri Lanka, which is the stricter test |
| Dependants | Beyond two, a further USD 500 a month for each additional dependant |
| Fee | USD 500 a year for the main applicant, the spouse and each dependent child |
| Also required | A recommendation from the Ministry of Digital Economy |
| On extension | Proof of tax registration with the Inland Revenue Department |
| Local employment | Prohibited. All income must be earned from foreign sources |
| Changes | Employment, income or dependants must be notified within thirty days |
The two requirements most often missed are the Ministry of Digital Economy recommendation, without which the application does not proceed, and the tax registration needed at extension, which a holder who has treated the visa as simply renewable will not have.
The questions to settle before money moves
Five, in the order they arise:
- Which scheme is the application under, and is that confirmed in writing by the Department? The two published schemes call for different accounts.
- Have both the Inward Investment Account and the Visa Programme Foreign Currency Account been opened, and is it understood which one receives the remittance?
- Is the sector permitted on the route being used, and is the route in shares or in a branch? The answer differs between them.
- If the investment is in immovable property, what may a foreign national actually hold under the Land (Restrictions on Alienation) Act, and on what tenure?
- How does the money come out, and what directions under the Foreign Exchange Act govern that?
The thresholds are the easiest part of this to satisfy and the least likely to cause difficulty. The difficulty is that the rules governing an investor visa are spread across a gazette, an administrative guideline and a foreign exchange regulation, and only the first of those is law.
