Only 21.3% of Sri Lankan households had at least one desktop or laptop computer in 2025, the Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) has reported — and the figure has stayed inside a 19–21% band since 2023, Daily Mirror reported.
The finding comes from the DCS Computer Literacy Statistics 2025 Annual Bulletin, based on a nationally distributed sample of 25,000 households and people aged 5 to 69, reweighted using the 2024 Census of Population and Housing.
The gap is sectoral before it is national
Ownership splits sharply by where a household sits:
| Sector | Households with a computer |
|---|---|
| Urban | 37.8% |
| Rural | 18.6% |
| Estate | 5.2% |
Estate-sector ownership is less than one-seventh of the urban level.
By province, the Western Province leads at 34%, followed by Central (20.3%), Sabaragamuwa (19.4%), North Western (17.5%), Southern (17.4%), Uva (14.1%), North Central (12.9%) and Eastern (12.5%). The Northern Province is lowest at 10.1% — a 3.4-fold gap between the top and bottom provinces.
The number that explains the flat line
Against 21.3% computer ownership, the same bulletin puts digital literacy at 72% of people aged 5–69, while computer literacy is 39.2% — up 3.3 percentage points in a year. The DCS defines a computer-literate person as someone aged 5–69 able to use a computer unaided.
The bulletin’s own device data resolves the apparent contradiction: smartphones accounted for 80.6% of device usage recorded in the survey; desktops and laptops for 17.4%.
Read together, the three years of flat household ownership and the rising literacy rate point the same way. Sri Lankans are getting online in growing numbers without buying computers. Digital access has migrated to the phone.
Computer literacy itself follows the same sectoral pattern as ownership — 54% urban, 37.1% rural, 19.5% estate; 50.2% in the Western Province against 24.3% in North Central, the lowest.
Why the distinction matters
A phone is sufficient for messaging, payments and government portals. It is a poor substitute for the work that the country’s digital-economy programmes assume people can do — coding, spreadsheets, CAD, remote office work, and the online coursework increasingly set by schools and universities. An estate-sector household has a 5.2% chance of owning the device that work requires.
Not reported
The bulletin’s headline findings were carried by a single newsroom on Monday. Daily Mirror does not give a household internet-connection rate, a breakdown of ownership by income, or the share of students with home computer access. It does not say whether the DCS has published the full bulletin, or how Sri Lanka’s 21.3% compares with its South Asian neighbours.
