How we compare savings rates

The rate you actually get is banded

Most Sri Lankan savings accounts pay a different rate depending on how much you keep in them. A small balance might earn a headline "up to X%" that only the top tier actually gets, while the first few rupees earn far less. Showing a single number would be misleading, so we publish the Annual Effective Rate (AER) for each of four balance bands and let you sort the table by the band that matches your balance.

The four bands

Each band is anchored to a representative balance we use to resolve which tier applies when a bank's breakpoints don't line up exactly with ours:

We track LKR standard savings today. Foreign-currency and children's / senior / promotional accounts are a separate surface, they're different products, not different bands.

Worked example: a tiered rate sheet

Say a bank publishes: "3.00% p.a. on balances up to Rs 100,000; 4.25% p.a. on the portion above."We don't average those, we record the rate that applies ateach band's representative balance:

So two banks that both advertise "up to 4.25%" can look identical on a poster but rank very differently once you compare the band your money actually sits in.

How we read the rates

Fixed-deposit rates come in clean per-tenor tables, so we parse them positionally. Savings rates are the opposite: they hide in paragraphs, footnotes, and asterisks ("*bonus interest applies when…"). Positional parsing can't survive that, so savings is the one rate board where we use a read each bank's rate page with an LLM weekly. For every band we store the verbatim quotewe pulled the number from, plus which named product delivers it, so any rate can be checked against the bank's own words, and a mis-extraction is visible rather than silent.

What the table shows

AER

The effective annual rate for that band. Savings interest is typically calculated on the daily balance and credited monthly; AER is the number you compare across banks.

Balance band columns

One column per band. Sort by the band closest to your balance to rank banks for your money. The leader for a Rs 50,000 balance is often not the leader for Rs 50M.

Freshness

Every bank row carries a last observedtimestamp. Savings rates move less often than FDs; anything more than 7 days old is tagged amber, more than 14 days red. Tap a bank for its full band structure, the product the rate sits on, and a link to the bank's own page.

Things we deliberately don't do

• No paid placement. The same method reads every bank; no bank pays for ordering.
• No tax adjustment. WHT and the deposit-insurance levy apply uniformly across banks. We quote the gross AER the bank publishes; your net is the same gap whichever bank you choose.
• No projection.AER assumes the rate holds, but savings rates change. The chart shows where a bank's rate has moved, not where it will.
• No blended "up to" number. We never collapse a tiered sheet into one headline; every band is shown separately so the comparison is honest.