The World Bank has revised down its estimates of poverty in Sri Lanka during the economic crisis, in the October 2026 Sri Lanka Development Update.
Using annual household data from the Labour Force Survey, the Bank now puts the poverty rate at its US$4.20-a-day line at 20.7 percent in 2023, the crisis peak. The earlier method estimated 27.6 percent. The rate was 11.5 percent in 2019.
The Bank said poverty roughly doubled and about two million people were pushed into poverty between 2019 and 2023. “Poverty on the ground has not changed, it is now measured more accurately,” the report said.
The revised figures show poverty at 18.4 percent in 2024 and 16.9 percent in 2025, projected to fall to 15.8 percent in 2026 and 14 percent in 2028. Real labour incomes fell by more than 40 percent between 2019 and 2023 and have yet to fully recover, the Bank said.
Poverty outside the Western Province is two to three times higher than within it, according to the Bank. It said its figures are not official statistics, which come from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey of the Department of Census and Statistics.
New 2025 Labour Force Survey data are expected in November 2026.
