GetMyPostalCode

Find Your Postal Code in Sri Lanka

A Sri Lankan postal code is five digits, and a great many of them begin with zeros — which is the single thing most likely to break yours. Press the button and your position becomes the postal code covering that spot, with the town so you can check it looks right.

Your location is only used to find your postal code.

Postal Code

00100

Sri Lanka

Example

The Postal Code Format

Format

Five digits, written without a space (00100)

Example

00100

A Sri Lankan postal code is five digits with no space and no letters. Colombo 01, the Fort area, is 00100.

Those leading zeros are not padding and not optional. A very large share of Sri Lankan codes begin with one or two of them, and the capital begins with two. Stored as a number anywhere along the chain — a spreadsheet cell, a numeric database column, a JSON field a parser helpfully converts — 00100 becomes 100, which is not a Sri Lankan postal code at all.

This is the most consequential fact about the format and it is worth putting before anything structural. A postal code is a string of characters that happen to be digits. Nothing is ever added to one or sorted numerically for a good reason, so there is no benefit to storing it as a number and one very common failure if you do.

What Each Part of a Postal Code Means

Read left to right, each part of a Sri Lanka postal code narrows the destination down.

Breakdown of each part of a Sri Lanka postal code
PartIdentifiesWhat it means
Digits 1-2RegionPlace the code in a broad part of the country. Colombo city and its immediate surroundings sit in the 001 to 015 range, which is why the capital carries leading zeros.
Digits 3-5Delivery areaNarrow to the particular town, suburb or delivery area served by one post office.
Colombo zonesA numbered sequenceThe Colombo city zones, numbered 01 to 15 in everyday speech, map onto codes running from 00100 for Colombo 01 up to 01500 for Colombo 15.
Outer suburbsThe 10 and 11 rangesSuburbs beyond the Colombo city zones generally carry codes beginning 10 or 11, which is why those ranges cover so much of the built-up area around the capital.

How postal codes work in Sri Lanka

The Sri Lankan system is a conventional one: a regional layer at the front and a delivery layer at the end, narrowing from a part of the country down to the post office that hands an item over. What makes it worth explaining is less the hierarchy than the way it interacts with how Sri Lankans actually name places.

Colombo is the clearest case. The city is spoken about in numbered zones — Colombo 01, Colombo 07, Colombo 15 — and those numbers are part of everyday language in a way postal divisions usually are not. The postal codes map onto them directly, running from 00100 for Colombo 01 through to 01500 for Colombo 15, which means that for the capital the code and the colloquial name carry the same information.

That tidiness does not extend beyond the city. The suburbs around Colombo generally fall into codes beginning 10 or 11, and the rest of the country is allocated without a pattern a reader can reconstruct. Outside the capital the code has to be looked up.

As everywhere, what the code really identifies is a delivery operation rather than a patch of ground. The post office serves an area, so the code behaves like a region most of the time, but its boundary is wherever that office stops delivering. A single code can cover a dense few streets in Colombo and a considerable stretch of countryside elsewhere, and both are correct.

Sri Lanka Post publishes a lookup rather than a specification of what each digit position means, so confident digit-by-digit explanations found elsewhere should be treated with the same caution you would apply to any unsourced claim.

The leading zero problem, in detail

It is worth spelling out exactly how a leading zero gets lost, because the failure is always silent and almost always happens somewhere other than where it is noticed.

A spreadsheet is the usual culprit. Paste 00100 into a cell formatted as a number and it displays as 100 immediately. Export that sheet to CSV and the zeros are gone from the file, not just from the display. Anything downstream now has a value that matches nothing.

The same thing happens in code. A JSON field typed as a number, a database column declared as an integer, or a parser that converts numeric-looking strings will all do it, and none of them will raise an error. The address looks fine to whoever typed it and is broken by the time it reaches a carrier.

The fix is the same at every layer: store postal codes as text, declare the column as text, and quote the field in any export. If you have inherited data where the zeros are already gone, you cannot reliably restore them — a three-digit value could have lost one zero or two — so the records have to be re-collected rather than repaired.

Colombo zones and postal codes

If you have lived in or visited Colombo you will have heard addresses given as Colombo 03 or Colombo 07 rather than by suburb name. Those numbers are the city zones, and they line up with the postal codes neatly enough to be useful.

Colombo 01 is 00100, Colombo 02 is 00200, and so on through to Colombo 15 at 01500. If somebody tells you an address is in Colombo 05, you can derive the postal code without looking it up, which is a convenience almost no other country offers.

Two cautions. The convenience stops at the city limits: the suburbs beyond use the 10 and 11 ranges and do not follow the pattern. And the zone number is not a substitute for the rest of the address — the code narrows delivery to the right office, and the street and house number do the rest.

Where a lookup and Sri Lanka Post can disagree

This tool answers which postal code covers the point your device reported. Sri Lanka Post answers which office delivers to a given address. Those usually produce the same code.

The ordinary cause of a mismatch is accuracy. A device fix degrades indoors, among tall buildings and when it is working from mobile signals rather than a clear satellite view. Near the edge of a delivery area that is enough to return the neighbouring code.

The other cause is data coverage. Postal codes appear less consistently in the open data behind reverse geocoding for Sri Lanka than for countries with open government address files, so a lookup may return a town without a code, or nothing at all. For filling in a form or checking a code looks plausible it is fast and usually right. For anything consequential, confirm it with Sri Lanka Post.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I find a postal code from an address here?

No. This site works only from your current position: your device reports where it is, and that point becomes the postal code covering it. There is no address database behind it. To search from an address, use the Sri Lanka Post postal code lookup.

Why does my postal code start with zeros?

Because a large share of Sri Lankan codes legitimately do, including the whole of Colombo city. 00100 is a real code and 100 is not. If yours is showing short, it has been stored as a number somewhere and the zeros have been dropped.

How do Colombo zone numbers relate to postal codes?

Directly. Colombo 01 is 00100, Colombo 02 is 00200, and so on up to Colombo 15 at 01500. The pattern applies to the city zones only — suburbs beyond them generally use codes beginning 10 or 11.

Can I recover a postal code that lost its zeros?

Not reliably. A three-digit value could have lost one leading zero or two, and there is no way to tell which from the value alone. Affected records have to be re-collected rather than repaired.

A form wants five digits. Will my code fit?

Yes, if the zeros survive. The risk is a form that treats the field as a number and strips them, which passes validation and produces an address that cannot be delivered against.

Why did the lookup return nothing for my location?

Postal code coverage in the open data behind reverse geocoding is less complete for Sri Lanka than for countries with open government address files. Where there is no code in the data for that point, none can be returned.

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