On 4 June 2026 Turkey did something it had never done before. Law No. 7582 inserted a new repeated Article 20/D into the Income Tax Law, and from that day a person who becomes tax-resident in Turkey with a clean three-year record pays no Turkish income tax on income earned outside Turkey for twenty years. The implementing communiqué followed on 4 July. Between those two dates, the relocation industry had already started selling it.
I have read both texts in Turkish rather than the summaries, because the summaries are where the errors are. This page sets out what the article grants, the three conditions it attaches, the deadline that quietly kills the benefit for late applicants, and the list of income that stays fully taxable no matter what your certificate says. Where the text is silent, I say so instead of guessing.
Sources, checked 9 September 2026. Law No. 7582 (Official Gazette 33270, 4 June 2026), Articles 2, 4 and 14; Income Tax Law No. 193, repeated Article 20/D and Articles 3, 4, 5, 7 and 123, consolidated text on mevzuat.gov.tr; Income Tax General Communiqué Series No. 333 (Official Gazette 33300, 4 July 2026), Articles 3 to 6 and its thirteen worked examples; Inheritance and Gift Tax Law No. 7338, Article 16 as amended by Law 7582; Presidential Decision 9286 (Official Gazette 32760, 22 December 2024) on the dividend withholding rate.
The rule in one paragraph
Repeated Article 20/D reads, in substance: natural persons who are treated as settled in Turkey, provided that in the last three calendar years before becoming settled they had neither a domicile nor a tax liability in Turkey, are exempt from income tax on the income and earnings they obtain outside Turkey for twenty years.
Four further sentences do the real work. Exempt income is not declared, and it is left out of any return you file for other income. Costs relating to exempt income cannot be deducted against taxable income. Foreign tax paid on exempt income cannot be credited against Turkish tax, which is a departure from the ordinary credit in Article 123. And if the conditions are later found not to have been met, the tax that was never assessed is treated as lost tax, with the penalty that phrase carries.
Law 7582 Article 14(a) fixes the temporal scope: the article applies to persons who become settled in Turkey from 1 January 2026 onwards. Someone who was already resident in 2025 is outside it, however long they have lived abroad before that.
Who counts as "settled in Turkey"
The exemption borrows its central term from Article 4 of the Income Tax Law, and that article is older than most of the people reading this page. A person is settled in Turkey if either of two things is true.
The first is domicile in Turkey. Article 4 points to the Civil Code, and Article 19 of the Civil Code defines domicile as the place where a person lives with the intention of staying permanently. You have only one domicile at a time. In practice the tax office reads this off your registered address, which is why the moment you register an address in the population system matters more than the moment you land.
The second is presence: staying in Turkey continuously for more than six months within one calendar year. Temporary departures do not interrupt the count. A person who spends seven months in Bodrum in one calendar year is settled for that year whether or not they ever registered an address.
Article 5 then removes a group of people who would otherwise be caught. Foreigners who come to Turkey for a defined and temporary job or assignment, as business people, scientists, experts, officials or journalists, and those who come for study, medical treatment, rest or travel, are not treated as settled even if they stay more than six months. So are people held in Turkey by detention, illness or similar causes outside their control. The relevance for a relocating investor is the reverse of what you might expect: a person who arranges their life to look like a long holiday may find they were never settled at all, and therefore never inside the exemption. The regime rewards people who move, not people who hover.
None of this is the same thing as an immigration permit. A residence permit under the Foreigners and International Protection Law is a right to be in the country; being settled under Article 4 is a tax status. They usually arrive together, but the exemption is tested against the second, not the first. I wrote about the same distinction on the Montenegrin side in residency and tax residence are different things, and the logic transfers.
The three-year look-back
The condition that disqualifies most of the people who ask me about this is the look-back. In the three calendar years before the year you become settled, you must have had neither a domicile in Turkey nor a Turkish tax liability. Both, cumulatively, for all three years. The communiqué's examples show how literally the tax office will read this.
| Situation before moving (from the communiqué's examples) | Result |
|---|---|
| No Turkish address and no Turkish tax file in 2023, 2024 and 2025; settled in July 2026 (Example 1) | Certificate issued |
| Domiciled in Turkey in 2022, left in November 2024, returned in 2027 (Example 4) | Refused: resident in 2024, inside the window |
| Earned a salary from one Turkish employer in 2026, taxed at source; settled in 2028 (Example 6) | Refused: a withheld salary is still a tax liability |
| Registered for trading income in Turkey from 2026; settled in 2028 (Example 7) | Refused |
| Declared rent from an Istanbul flat since May 2026; settled in 2028 (Example 5) | Certificate issued |
The last row is the exception written into the second paragraph of Article 20/D. A prior Turkish tax file that exists only because of rental income, investment income or capital gains does not disqualify you. Owning and letting a flat in Turkey before you move is compatible with the exemption. Having been on a Turkish payroll, even for one month, is not. For anyone who has ever held a Turkish work permit, taught a semester at a Turkish university or invoiced from a Turkish tax number, the exemption is closed until three clean calendar years have passed.
Note also what the window measures. It is three calendar years before the year of settlement, not thirty-six months before the date. A person settled on 2 March 2028 is tested on 2025, 2026 and 2027 in full.
The certificate and its deadline
The exemption is not self-executing. Communiqué Article 3(4) requires you to apply to your tax office for an Exemption Certificate for Income and Earnings Obtained Abroad, the form in Annex 1 of the communiqué. The tax office checks the three-year record and your settled status, and issues the certificate if both hold.
The deadline is the part nobody mentions. You must apply by the end of the calendar year in which you became settled. If you became settled in the last two months of the year, you have until the end of February of the following year. Example 2 of the communiqué is blunt about the consequence: a person settled on 2 March 2028 who applies on 1 May 2030 receives no certificate. Not a reduced benefit, not a penalty for lateness. No certificate.
I would treat the application as part of the move itself, filed in the same weeks as the address registration and the residence permit, because the year in which you become settled is often decided by facts you did not plan, such as the six-month count in Article 4. Communiqué Article 3(2) adds that you must be settled at the date of application, so the sequence is: become settled, then apply, both inside the same calendar year.
What is exempt and what stays taxable
The article exempts income obtained outside Turkey. It does not exempt income obtained in Turkey by a person who holds the certificate, and Communiqué Article 3(7) says so in terms. The line between the two is drawn by the source rules in Article 7 of the Income Tax Law and by the communiqué's own examples.
| Income | Position under Article 20/D |
|---|---|
| Dividends from a company resident abroad (Example 11: a Spanish company) | Exempt; not declared |
| Rent from property abroad (Example 8; Example 11: Monaco) | Exempt; not declared |
| Interest, fund distributions and gains on assets held abroad | Exempt, on the wording of paragraph 1 |
| Pension paid by a foreign social security institution | Already exempt under Article 23(13) regardless of Article 20/D |
| Rent from a flat in Turkey (Example 9) | Taxable, filed on the annual return |
| Dividends from a Turkish company (Example 11) | Taxable; 15% withholding under Presidential Decision 9286 |
| Fees for work performed in Turkey for foreign clients (Example 10: an engineer advising foreign investors from Turkey) | Taxable: the service was performed in Turkey |
| Gains on Turkish real estate or Turkish securities | Taxable under the ordinary rules |
Example 10 deserves a second reading by anyone who intends to keep working after the move. The engineer's clients were abroad and paid from abroad, and the income was still Turkish-source because the work was done in Turkey. Article 7(3) applies the same test to salaries: a wage is Turkish-source if the service is performed in Turkey. A remote employee of a foreign company who sits in Istanbul is performing the service in Istanbul. The communiqué did not address salaries directly, and I am not going to tell you the tax office will read it any other way; the remote worker's full position, including the older exemption that does apply to some of them, is in the digital nomad and remote salary page. The exemption was written for people whose foreign income arises without them, from capital, businesses run by others, and pensions. It was not written as a tax holiday for remote work, and the source rules were not changed to make it one.
Three mechanical rules sit underneath the table. Expenses relating to exempt income are not deductible. Foreign tax paid on exempt income is not creditable, which is unremarkable since there is no Turkish tax to credit it against. And exempt income is left out of your return entirely, even if you file one for Turkish rent or Turkish dividends; Example 11 walks through exactly that mixed case.
Twenty years from when, and what happens if you leave
The article says the exemption runs for twenty years. Neither the law nor the communiqué adds a day-count mechanism, a break rule for absences, or a rule for someone who leaves Turkey and later returns. The practical anchor is the certificate, which is tied to the year you became settled.
On leaving, the communiqué's Article 6 restates the general rule of Article 3: a person who stops being resident in Turkey is not taxed in Turkey on foreign income at all, exemption or no exemption. Example 13 makes the point with a resident of the United Arab Emirates who transfers money into a Turkish bank account and receives French rent into it. None of it is Turkish-taxable, because the person is not settled in Turkey. The exemption, in other words, only ever mattered while you were resident, and it stops mattering the day you are not.
The harsher scenario is Communiqué Article 5 and Example 12: a person who obtains the certificate and is later found to have been running an undeclared trade in Turkey in the look-back years. The tax office establishes a retrospective liability for those years, cancels the certificate from the date it was granted, and assesses the tax on all the foreign income that went undeclared, with a loss-of-tax penalty and late-payment interest. The exemption does not protect income that was never eligible; it postpones the day the eligibility is examined.
The inheritance rider: a 1% rate
Law 7582 did not stop at income tax. Article 2 inserted a new paragraph into Article 16 of the Inheritance and Gift Tax Law: for persons benefiting from the Article 20/D exemption, inheritance transfers that occur within the exemption period are taxed at 1%.
The ordinary inheritance scale for 2026 runs from 1% on the first 3,000,000 TL of a share to 10% above 55,000,000 TL, with the brackets indexed each year. A flat 1% therefore matters most for large estates. Two boundaries are visible in the text. The paragraph covers transfers by inheritance only; gifts remain on the separate scale of 10% to 30%, halved between parents, spouses and children. And the paragraph attaches to transfers from persons who benefit from the exemption, which on its face describes the estate of a certificate holder who dies within the twenty years. The Ministry has not published guidance on the edges of that wording, and I would not build an estate plan on any reading of it that the text does not plainly carry. What the estate of a foreign owner goes through in Turkey is set out separately in Turkish inheritance law for foreign property owners.
What the exemption does not do
It does not bind any other country. If your home state taxes non-residents on dividends or rent at source, it will go on doing so, and the rate it applies is set by its own law and by its treaty with Turkey, not by Article 20/D. Turkey remains your treaty residence state and will issue a certificate of residence; whether a particular treaty partner grants treaty rates to income that Turkey exempts is a question I answer treaty by treaty and not in general.
It does not touch social security. Contributions, coverage and the portability of a pension are governed by the social security agreements and by the Social Insurance Law, and none of that changed in June.
It does not extend to companies. Communiqué Article 3(10) limits the benefit to natural persons. A foreign company you own is a separate question with its own risk: if its management is effectively carried out from Turkey, the Corporate Tax Law can treat the company itself as Turkish-resident under its business-centre test, and no personal exemption reaches that result. The company owner's position is dealt with in moving to Turkey with a foreign company; the short version is that holding shares from Turkey is one thing and running the company from Turkey is another.
It does not replace the immigration decision. Whether you enter on a short-term residence permit, on the property-based route, or through the citizenship-by-investment programme, the exemption is indifferent. It asks only whether you are settled under Article 4 and clean under the three-year rule.
Where this sits next to the regimes you have been comparing
Turkey has entered a field that Portugal, Greece and Italy have occupied for a decade, and readers who arrived here from our Portugal pages, including what the end of NHR did to the D7 route, will want the structural comparison. I will publish that comparison separately from the official texts of each regime. Three features of the Turkish version stand out on their own.
First, it is a full exemption on foreign income rather than a flat charge. Second, its duration, twenty years, is longer than any of its European counterparts. Third, it is gated by a certificate with a same-year deadline and a three-year look-back that counts one Turkish payslip as a disqualification. The first two are why people will move. The third is why some of them will not qualify, and why the application belongs at the front of the relocation file rather than at the back.
Whose side we are on, and how we are paid
Almost everyone who will explain this regime to you is paid by the move happening. The relocation agent's fee depends on you relocating. The developer's sales team is the developer's. The bank that opens your account earns on the deposits that follow. That is not improper, but it decides what each of them can afford to tell you.
We take no commission from developers, agents, banks or relocation firms, 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 move. That is the whole difference: because our position does not change when your decision changes, telling you that the three-year rule closes the door on you costs us nothing to say.
In the file, that means we reconstruct your last three calendar years from your own records rather than from your recollection, we tell you in writing whether you are inside or outside the condition before you register an address, and where the answer turns on a date, we tell you which date and why.
One boundary, stated plainly. We are lawyers, not licensed investment advisers and not your home-country tax agents. We do not give personal investment advice on financial instruments, and we do not advise on the tax law of the country you are leaving. What we protect is your Turkish legal and tax position: the residence facts, the certificate, the filing consequences and the deadlines that decide all three.
Before you register an address
Send us the facts of your last three calendar years before you do anything that fixes your residence: any Turkish address you have held, any Turkish tax number, any Turkish salary, any Turkish company in which you were a director. We will tell you whether Article 20/D is open to you, in writing, and what the calendar looks like if it is. Our Turkish tax work is described on the international tax page, and the wider relocation practice on the wealth management page. If you already own a home here, the Turkey real estate page explains what we check before a foreign owner changes status.
What this page does not settle
It does not settle how the tax office will treat a salary paid by a foreign employer for work done from Turkey; the communiqué's Example 10 points one way and I have said which. It does not settle the exact day on which the twenty years begin or end, because neither text says. It does not settle whether a given treaty partner will grant treaty rates to income Turkey has chosen not to tax. And it does not tell you whether moving is a good idea, which is not a legal question.
