Housing condition and materials
Housing materials, permanent and improvised units, and one-room homes.
- Records
- 372
- Vintage
- Census 2024, final report; table years vary
- Last checked
- 16 October 2026
- Published by
- GovernmentDepartment of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka
What this dataset contains
The census classifies occupied housing as permanent, semi-permanent, improvised or not classified using wall, roof and floor materials. Counts and shares cover every district and the report’s sector groups. National tables also describe wall, roof and floor materials and construction periods. A separate sector table records one-room and multi-room housing.
How it is used here
Compare semi-permanent housing shares by district, examine roofing materials, or compare one-room housing across sectors. Construction-period counts describe the surviving census housing stock in each period, rather than annual construction output.
What it cannot tell you
Material-based condition does not certify structural safety, building-code compliance or maintenance quality. Room counts are not bedroom counts or an overcrowding measure. Construction-period totals exclude container boxes and other units, giving 6,029,330 units rather than the 6,030,541 in the condition and room tables. Construction periods have unequal lengths and cannot be compared as annual building rates. The condition table combines urban and estate-urban; the room table separates them. Wall, roof and floor distributions are separate, overlapping views of the same units. Counts, shares and overlapping totals must not be added together; printed percentages, including 0.0, retain rounding.