The annual tax on a Turkish home is small by the standards of most of my clients' home countries, and that is exactly why it causes trouble. Nobody explains it at the land registry, the first bill arrives at a Turkish address the owner rarely visits, and the two obligations that actually carry penalties, a declaration to the municipality in the year of purchase and a separate declaration to the tax office for high-value homes, are not bills at all. Add the 2026 revaluation, which reset land values across the country under a statutory cap that even Turkish accountants read two ways, and a foreign owner has a reasonable claim to be confused. This page sets out the system from the Property Tax Law as it stands in September 2026: who pays, how much, on what value, by when, and what changed for 2026.
Sources, checked 9 September 2026. Property Tax Law No. 1319, Articles 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 18, 23, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 42, 44, 45, 46 and 47 and Provisional Article 23 as amended by Law 7566 of 4 December 2025; Property Tax Law General Communiqués No. 88 and No. 89 (Official Gazette 33124, fifth repeated issue, 31 December 2025); Law No. 7582, Article 20/D of the Income Tax Law.
Who pays, and whether nationality matters
Article 1 of Law 1319 taxes every building within Turkey's borders, and Article 3 names the taxpayer: the owner, or the usufructuary if there is one, or failing both the person who disposes of the building as an owner would. Co-owners by shares are liable in proportion to their shares; co-owners in undivided ownership, which is how inherited property is usually held, are jointly and severally liable for the whole. Nationality does not appear anywhere in the article. A foreign owner pays the same tax, at the same rates, on the same value and by the same dates as a Turkish owner, and the only nationality-linked exemption in the law is the one in Article 4(l) for buildings owned by foreign states and used as embassies and consulates, on condition of reciprocity.
The tax is a municipal tax. Article 37 applies the Tax Procedure Law and the Public Receivables Law to it but says that wherever the law speaks of the "tax office", it means the municipality. The municipality assesses, collects, penalises and enforces, and the mayor exercises the powers the general tax law gives to the head of the local finance office. This matters when something goes wrong: the letter you did not receive came from the district municipality, not from the national tax administration.
The rates: 0.1% to 0.6%, doubled in the big cities
Article 8 sets the building tax at one per thousand of the tax value for residences and two per thousand for other buildings, and Article 18 sets the land tax at one per thousand for agricultural land and three per thousand for building plots. Both articles double the rates inside the boundaries and adjacent areas of the thirty metropolitan municipalities, which include Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Antalya, Bursa, Muğla and Mersin. A flat in Bodrum, which lies within the Muğla metropolitan area, is therefore taxed at 0.2% of its tax value; a flat in a provincial town outside a metropolitan municipality at 0.1%. The President may halve the rates or triple them by decision.
| Property | Rate outside metropolitan municipalities | Rate inside metropolitan municipalities | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residence | 0.1% | 0.2% | Art. 8 |
| Other building (office, shop, warehouse) | 0.2% | 0.4% | Art. 8 |
| Building plot (arsa) | 0.3% | 0.6% | Art. 18 |
| Agricultural land (arazi) | 0.1% | 0.2% | Art. 18 |
Two adjustments sit inside Article 8. A newly built residence enjoys a temporary exemption under Article 5(a): one quarter of its tax value is exempt for five years from the budget year after construction ends, and a buyer who acquires the home during those years inherits the remaining period, provided the home is used as a residence. And the last paragraph of Article 8 says that the tax on a new building may not be less than the tax on its plot for four years after completion, which is why a small house on a valuable Bodrum plot pays land-plot tax in disguise for its first four years.
The zero rate that Turkish readers know about is in the second paragraph of Article 8, and foreign retirees should read it carefully before assuming it applies to them. The President may reduce the rate to zero on the single residence, of no more than 200 square metres gross, of a person who documents having no income at all, or whose income consists solely of a pension from a Turkish social security institution established by law, and of veterans, the disabled and the widows and orphans of martyrs. The wording excludes a person living on a foreign pension, because that pension is not paid by a Turkish statutory institution, and it excludes homes "used for rest at certain times", which is the statute's description of a holiday home. A retiree who moved to Turkey under the arrangements described on the retirement page pays the full rate on the home they live in.
The value the tax is charged on, and what 2026 did to it
The tax value is not the price you paid and not a market appraisal. Under Article 29 it is a statutory figure: for land, the minimum unit values per square metre fixed by assessment commissions every four years for each street and neighbourhood; for buildings, the square-metre construction cost tables published jointly by the Treasury and the Environment Ministry, applied to the building's class, age and area, plus the value of the land share. Between assessment years the value rises automatically. Until 2025 it rose by half the annual revaluation rate; Law 7566 of December 2025 deleted the word "half", so from 2027 tax values rise by the full revaluation rate each year.
2026 is the first year of a new four-year assessment period, and the 2025 assessments produced land unit values many times higher than the 2022 figures in the coastal and metropolitan districts where foreigners own. Parliament answered with the amended Provisional Article 23: the building and land tax values calculated for 2026 may not exceed the 2025 values "by more than twice", which the Ministry's Communiqué No. 89 reads, in its worked example, as a ceiling of three times the 2025 value: a plot valued at 900,000 lira in 2025 and assessed at 6,000,000 lira for 2026 is taxed on 2,700,000 lira. The same ceiling applies where the taxpayer changes during 2026, so a buyer in 2026 starts from the capped figure rather than the raw assessment. For 2027, 2028 and 2029 the capped 2026 values are the base, increased each year by the full revaluation rate. The cap also flows through to every other charge that uses the property tax value as its base, which includes the title deed fee at purchase.
The practical consequence for a foreign owner is that the 2026 bill is higher than the 2025 bill, in some districts substantially, but not as high as the assessment alone would have made it, and that the four years after 2026 will bring increases at the full inflation-linked rate rather than half of it. The comparison with the annual tax in Montenegro, which is charged on market value at rates set by each municipality, is drawn on the Montenegro property tax page, and the three-market table on the Montenegro, Dubai and Turkey comparison uses these Turkish figures.
The first deadline: the declaration in the year you buy
Here is the obligation the land registry does not mention. Under Article 33(6), a change of taxpayer is an event that alters the tax value, and Article 23 requires a property tax declaration to the municipality where the property lies, within the budget year in which the change occurred. If you buy in the last three months of the year, the declaration is due within three months of the purchase, which can run into the following year. Co-owners by shares declare separately; co-owners in undivided ownership may declare jointly or separately. Liability itself starts, under Article 9, from the budget year following the acquisition, so the seller owes the tax for the year of sale and the buyer owes it from 1 January of the next year.
If the declaration is not filed, Article 32 lets the municipality assess the tax itself on the value it computes, and the general tax law supplies the penalties for a late or missing declaration. In practice most municipalities now pull the transfer from the land registry's data and open the file on their own, and the declaration has become a formality; but it is still the law, and it is the reason the first bill sometimes carries a penalty the owner never understood. Since 2021, under the last paragraph of Article 30, the land registry itself checks the property tax value and any outstanding property tax debt through the municipality's system before it registers a transfer, so a seller's arrears surface at the deed and are settled there, except in inheritance, court-ordered and enforced transfers.
The declaration also matters for new construction. Under Article 23(a), a newly completed building, or a part of it that is put to use before completion, must be declared within the budget year in which construction ends or use begins, whatever the state of the occupancy certificate. The register status and the tax status of a new flat are separate questions, and the difference is explained on the title deed types page.
When and how the tax is paid
Article 11 has the municipality assess the tax annually in January and February on the value computed under Article 29, and the assessment is deemed notified. Article 30 splits payment into two equal instalments: the first in March, April or May, the second in November. There is no requirement to be in Turkey; the tax can be paid online through most municipalities' portals and through e-Devlet where the municipality is connected, by bank transfer to the municipality's account, or by a proxy holding a power of attorney. Unpaid instalments accrue default interest under the Public Receivables Law, and the municipality may enforce against the property. Article 30 also contains a relief foreign owners in Istanbul's older districts should know: where the disposal of a property is restricted by law or by public-order legislation, the tax is collected at one tenth for as long as the restriction lasts, and the deferred nine tenths become due only if the property is sold, expropriated or given away.
The land registry's check at transfer is the safety net for a buyer; it is not a safety net for an owner. An owner who does not pay accumulates interest quietly until the day they sell, and the arrears are then deducted at the deed from a price they had already spent in their head.
The second tax: the valuable housing tax
Since 2021 Turkey has charged a second, national tax on high-value homes, and it is the one foreign owners in Istanbul's Bosphorus districts and on the Bodrum peninsula most often learn about from a penalty notice. Under Article 42 of Law 1319, a residential property whose building tax value under Article 29 exceeds a threshold, set for 2026 by Communiqué No. 88 at 17,711,000 lira, is subject to the valuable housing tax. Article 44 taxes only the excess over the threshold, at three per thousand up to 26,567,000 lira, six per thousand from there to 35,425,000 lira, and ten per thousand above that, with the lower bands charged at fixed amounts once the value passes them. The base is the property tax value, not the price and not a market valuation, which is why a home bought for far more than the threshold may still sit below it, and why the 2026 revaluation pushed homes across the line that had been below it in 2025.
The taxpayer is the same as for the building tax: the owner, the usufructuary, or the person disposing as owner, with shares taxed proportionately and undivided co-owners jointly liable. Article 46(b) exempts a person's only residential property in Turkey, and, for a person who owns several, the lowest-valued one among those above the threshold. The exemption is per person and asks whether you own one residence in Turkey, not whether you own others abroad; a foreign owner whose only Turkish property is a single villa above the threshold owes nothing, and a foreign owner with two Istanbul flats above the threshold pays on the more valuable one.
The procedure is what catches people. Under Article 47 the tax is not assessed by the municipality; it is declared by the taxpayer to the tax office of the place where the property lies, by 20 February of the year after the year in which the value first exceeded the threshold, and every February thereafter, and it is paid in two instalments by the end of February and the end of August. Liability starts, under Article 45, from the year after the value crosses the threshold. The exemption for a single home is claimed, not automatic. A foreign owner who does not know the threshold moved, or does not know the tax exists, files nothing, and meets the tax office when the assessment and penalty arrive together.
What this tax is not
The property tax is not income tax, and it is not affected by the twenty-year foreign-income exemption in Article 20/D of the Income Tax Law, described on the Law 7582 page; that exemption concerns income obtained outside Turkey, and a Turkish municipal tax on a Turkish building is neither. Rent from the property is taxed separately as income, on the rules set out on the rental income taxation page, and a home let for tourism under the permit regime carries the tourism share described on the short-term rental page in addition to, not instead of, the property tax. The environmental cleaning tax under the Municipal Revenues Law is a separate small municipal charge billed with the water account. The gain on a sale is a separate question again, governed by the Income Tax Law's five-year rule, and is not covered here.
The owner's calendar, on one page
| Event | What is due | To whom | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Purchase | Property tax declaration | District municipality | Within the budget year of purchase; within 3 months if bought in October to December | Art. 23, 33(6) |
| Each year | Building or land tax, first instalment | Municipality | March to May | Art. 30 |
| Each year | Second instalment | Municipality | November | Art. 30 |
| Value first exceeds 17,711,000 lira (2026) | Valuable housing tax return | Tax office of the property's district | By 20 February of the following year, then every February | Art. 42, 47 |
| Each year while above the threshold | Valuable housing tax | Tax office | End of February and end of August | Art. 47 |
| Construction completed or part put to use | Property tax declaration | Municipality | Within that budget year | Art. 23(a) |
| Sale | Arrears settled through the land registry's check | Municipality, via the registry | At the deed | Art. 30 |
Whose side we are on, and how we are paid
Nobody who sells you a Turkish home is paid to explain the tax on it. The agent's commission is settled at the deed, the developer's price does not change with the municipality's assessment, and the accountant who could tell you about the February return is usually engaged after the penalty. That is not misconduct. It is a description of why the two declarations in this page are the ones foreign owners miss.
We take no commission from sellers, developers or agents, in any form, on any file. The fee you pay us is our only income from your matter, and it does not rise if you buy. Because our position does not move with the sale, telling you that the flat you like sits in a metropolitan district at double the rate, or that its 2026 value has crossed the valuable housing threshold, costs us nothing to say.
One boundary, stated plainly. We are lawyers, not licensed investment advisers and not accountants. We do not prepare your annual returns, and we do not tell you whether the tax makes the purchase worthwhile. What we protect is the legal position: the declarations, the deadlines, the exemptions you are entitled to claim and the arrears you are not liable for.
Before your first November
Send us the title record and the district. We will tell you the rate that applies, whether the 2026 value has crossed the valuable housing threshold, whether the single-home exemption is available to you, which declaration is due and when, and we will set up the power of attorney that lets the two instalments be paid without you being in Turkey. If you have already received a penalty notice from a municipality or a tax office, send that; the objection periods are short. Our Turkish property work is described on the Turkey real estate page.
What this page does not settle
The title deed fee at purchase, the environmental cleaning tax and the taxation of rental income and of capital gains are separate subjects. The zero rate for pensioners depends on a Presidential decision and on documentation rules set by the Ministry, and is described here only as far as the statute goes. Municipal payment channels differ from one municipality to another.
