About This Guide

This site is a plain-language guide to Sri Lanka's Aswesuma welfare benefit programme and the work of the Welfare Benefits Board (WBB). It exists for one reason: official announcements about benefit lists, payment tiers and appeal dates are often written in formal language, buried in PDFs, or shared as photos of notices on social media. Families who need the information most can struggle to find a clear answer. We collect the key facts — who qualifies, how much each tier pays, when lists come out, how to check a name with an NIC number, and how to appeal — and set them out in simple English with the dates and amounts up front.

The Welfare Benefits Board itself is a government body set up under the Welfare Benefits Act No. 24 of 2002. It runs Aswesuma, the benefit programme launched in 2023 that replaced the old Samurdhi payments for new beneficiaries. Households are scored with a Proxy Means Test prepared with the Department of Census and Statistics, then placed into tiers. As of the October 2026 update, the extremely poor tier pays Rs 17,500 a month and the poor tier pays Rs 10,000 a month, with extra monthly supplements for members over 70 and certified disabled members.

What you will find here: a guide to the current beneficiary list and how to search it, a walkthrough of the appeals and objections process, a breakdown of payment amounts and dates, and news summaries when the board publishes updates. Every figure we publish is taken from board announcements, official notices or reputable Sri Lankan news reporting of those announcements, and we date our pages so you can see how fresh the information is.

One thing this site is not: it is not the Welfare Benefits Board, and it is not a government website. We cannot check your personal status, change your score, accept your appeal or speed up your payment. Only the board and its offices can do that. For anything personal, use the official website, www.wbb.gov.lk, the e-services portal, your Divisional Secretariat office, or the WBB helpline on 1924. Our disclaimer explains the relationship in full.

If you spot an error on one of our pages — a wrong date, an old amount, a broken link — please tell us through the discussion on this site. Benefit rules change, lists get updated, and a correction from a reader helps the next family that lands here.