Sri Lanka's Ministry of Labour has clarified that a widely circulated international comparison placing Sri Lanka 120th among 130 economies in terms of the national minimum wage was based on 2024 data and does not reflect subsequent increases in Sri Lanka's statutory minimum wage.
The Ministry also said the ranking was published by Visual Capitalist, rather than being a ranking prepared and published by the International Labour Organization.
According to the Ministry, the ILO confirmed that it was not involved in preparing or publishing the ranking itself.
However, the Ministry acknowledged that the comparison may have drawn on minimum-wage information from ILOSTAT, the ILO's publicly available statistical database.
The distinction is important.
The clarification does not mean that the underlying international labour dataset was fabricated.
Rather, the Ministry's position is that:
- the ranking used older 2024 data;
- it was produced by Visual Capitalist rather than the ILO; and
- it does not reflect subsequent Sri Lankan minimum-wage increases.
Sri Lanka has since increased the statutory national minimum wage.
Under amendments introduced in 2025, the national minimum monthly wage was raised to Rs.27,000 from April 1, 2025, and then to Rs.30,000 from January 1, 2026.
The national minimum daily wage increased to Rs.1,200 from January 1, 2026.
Therefore, a ranking based on 2024 wage levels should not automatically be treated as a current 2026 comparison of Sri Lanka's statutory minimum wage.
At the same time, the Ministry's clarification does not by itself establish what Sri Lanka's current position would be in a newly calculated international ranking using comparable 2026 data.
A current global ranking would require a fresh comparison using consistent and up-to-date wage, exchange-rate and purchasing-power data across all countries included.
The accurate framing is that the circulated ranking was based on 2024 data, was published by Visual Capitalist rather than the ILO, and does not incorporate Sri Lanka's later statutory wage increases.