A status register, not a prospectus. It tells you which government-university business, commerce, accounting, finance, HR and management degrees you can apply to today, which have already closed, and which cannot be confirmed at all. Unverified facts are labelled as unverified rather than filled in.
Research cutoff 14 September 2026 · every deadline checked against that dateSixteen in-scope programmes across nine state institutions. On 14 September 2026, exactly one of them was accepting applications, and it is a polymer-technology degree with an industrial-management component rather than a business degree. The honest summary is that the Sri Lankan external-degree calendar concentrates its calls between March and August, and mid-September falls in the gap.
The strongest immediate option is therefore not a programme but a plan: the Rajarata BBA closed on 31 August 2026, two weeks before this cutoff, which makes it the most likely next call. The University of Sri Jayewardenepura opened its 2026/2027 external intake in early May and the Open University opened on 1 July, so a March-to-July watch window covers most of what matters.
If you want an English-medium honours degree with a published fee and a functional specialism, the Open University's Bachelor of Management Studies is the best-documented programme in this dataset by a wide margin — a four-year honours qualification at roughly Rs. 250,000 with Accounting and Finance, Marketing and HRM specialisations. If you need HR and industrial relations specifically and you are over 22 and employed, the Colombo IHRA Bachelor of Labour Management is the only dedicated route, though its current intake status could not be confirmed.
Institutions were checked in priority order: official university programme pages first, then official admission notices and application portals, then the University Grants Commission. Where a university's own site could not confirm something, that gap is recorded as a gap rather than filled from a course-directory site.
Every intake status was set by checking the university's own portal on 14 September 2026 and comparing each published closing date against that date. A programme whose most recent intake has closed is labelled closed and kept separate from anything joinable, with its last confirmed intake shown so you can judge the annual rhythm yourself.
Category relevance scores come from published curriculum descriptions and entry routes where those exist, and are marked provisional where they do not. Every programme's detail view explains why it scored the way it did. Salary bands are the weakest part of this dataset and are labelled accordingly throughout — no government wage series was consulted, and the self-reported aggregators that dominate search results publish figures that contradict themselves.
Published so you can see the shape of the gaps rather than mistake silence for completeness.
Grouped by what they support. Inline references appear inside each programme's detail view as well, so no claim depends on this list alone.