Filing your Sri Lankan tax return online: the whole process, screen by screen

E-filing is mandatory and the portal is open. What to gather first, every step in order, and the points where people get stuck.

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The Salli team

Jun 2026 · 10 min read

A papercraft laptop with a folded paper form sliding into the screen

The portal for YA 2025/26 opened on 7 July 2026 and closes on 30 November 2026. Paper returns are gone: e-filing is mandatory under section 113(1B) of the Inland Revenue Act No. 24 of 2017, so the IRD's e-Services portal (built on RAMIS) is the only route there is.

The process is not hard, but it is unforgiving about preparation — most people who get stuck do so because they opened the portal before gathering a document they cannot proceed without. Here is the whole thing in order, including the points where that happens.

If you want the dates and the cost of missing them first, see the YA 2025/26 deadline guide.

Before you start: what to have ready

Filing goes faster, and with fewer errors, if you gather everything first rather than hunting for documents mid-form.

Your Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN)
Your IRD e-Services username and password (register at eservices.ird.gov.lk if you haven't already)
APIT/PAYE certificates from every employer during the year
Withholding tax (AIT) certificates for interest, dividends, or rent received
Records of foreign-currency income and any tax already paid overseas
Proof of qualifying payments (donations, solar installation costs, and similar reliefs)
Business income and expense records, if you're self-employed or freelancing

Source: TaxWise.lk, "How to File Your Income Tax Return in Sri Lanka: 2025/2026 Step-by-Step Guide".

Step 1: Register for a TIN, if you don't have one

If this is your first time filing, you'll need a Taxpayer Identification Number before you can do anything else. Registration is available online or at a regional IRD office. If you already have a TIN from a previous year, skip ahead.

Step 2: Activate your e-Services account

Sign in at the IRD e-Services portal using your TIN and password. If you've never logged in before, you'll need to complete an initial account activation step tied to your TIN.

Step 3: Open the Return of Income (IIT) for the correct year

Once logged in, navigate to the return-filing section and select the Individual Income Tax return for the relevant Year of Assessment (for example, YA 2025/2026 for income earned between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026). The portal also supports a simplified filing option for eligible individual taxpayers with straightforward income sources.

Source: IRD Opens Online Tax Return Filing for 2025/2026 Assessment Year (Lanka News Web).

Step 4: Enter your income, by source

Work through each income schedule in turn:

Employment income: enter figures from your APIT/PAYE certificates.
Investment income: interest, dividends, and any AIT already withheld.
Rental income, if applicable.
Foreign-currency income, including any tax already paid overseas that may qualify for a credit.
Business or self-employment income, with allowable expenses.

Step 5: Claim your reliefs and credits

This is where most of the return's real value sits. Declare your personal relief (LKR 1,800,000 for YA 2025/26), any qualifying payment reliefs, and every credit you're entitled to: APIT already withheld, AIT already withheld, and any foreign tax credit. Missing a credit here is the single most common way people overpay: the withholding already happened, but it only counts if you actually declare it on the return.

Step 6: Review before you submit

Before submitting, re-check every schedule against your source documents. Once a return is submitted electronically, correcting it means filing an amendment, not simply re-editing the same form, so it's worth the extra ten minutes here.

Step 7: Submit and pay any balance

Submit electronically through the portal. If the return shows a balance still owing after your credits, you can typically pay through the portal itself or through an approved bank channel.

Mistakes that slow this down every year

A few patterns show up repeatedly and are worth checking for specifically:

Forgetting a mid-year employer. If you changed jobs during the year, you need APIT certificates from both employers, not just the most recent one.
Not declaring foreign income correctly. Income paid in foreign currency has its own treatment and concession, so folding it into ordinary employment income understates or overstates what you actually owe.
Missing AIT credits on interest income. Banks withhold AIT automatically; if you don't declare it on the return, you don't get the credit for tax that's already been paid.
Waiting until the last week of November. The IRD has explicitly flagged that portal traffic and technical issues spike right before the 30 November 2026 deadline for YA 2025/26, so filing even a week early avoids that entirely.

Why this is easier with a live ledger

Every one of those mistakes comes from the same root cause: reconstructing a year of financial activity from memory and scattered documents in the days before a deadline. If your transactions were already recorded as they happened, with the right account, the right credit, and the right currency treatment, filling in the return schedules becomes a matter of reading numbers off a report rather than reconstructing a year from scratch. That's the specific gap Salli's ledger and tax engine are built to close: the numbers are already there, correctly categorised, months before the return is due.

Before you open the portal

Everything above is mechanical once you know your numbers. Knowing them is the hard part, and the portal will not work them out for you.

Salli computes your YA 2025/26 position from your own ledger — relief, bands, APIT and AIT credits, and the foreign-income route if it applies — and shows the working line by line, so what you type into RAMIS is a figure you can defend rather than one you hope is right.

Sources

This is a general walkthrough based on publicly available IRD guidance, not a substitute for the IRD's own instructions or advice from a licensed tax practitioner. Portal steps can change between years, so always follow the current on-screen guidance when you file.

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Written by The Salli team

We build the honest ledger and deterministic tax engine behind Salli. This article is general guidance, not personalised tax advice.