Turkey's Airbnb Law 7464: The Permit, the Building Vote, the Fines, and the Tax Fight Over Your Rental Income

Almost every foreign buyer I act for in Bodrum, Kalkan, Alanya or Istanbul asks the same question somewhere between the deposit and the deed: "Can I put it on Airbnb when I am not there?" Until the end of 2023 the answer was a shrug and a tax return. Since 1 January 2024 the answer has three parts, and each of them can cost you the plan. Letting a home for up to a hundred days at a time now requires a permit from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism before the first booking; the permit requires the unanimous written consent of every owner in your building; and the tax office spent 2025 treating the permit itself as proof that you run a hotel, a position the Council of State has stayed but not yet finally decided. This page covers the law and its regulation as they read today, and then the tax dispute, because the buyers who get hurt learn about the second half after obeying the first.

Sources, checked 9 September 2026. Law No. 7464 on the Letting of Residences for Tourism Purposes, Articles 1 to 6, 27 and 33 and Provisional Article 1; Regulation on the Letting of Residences for Tourism Purposes (Official Gazette 32413, 28 December 2023), Articles 5 to 12 and Provisional Article 1; Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098, Article 339; Law No. 7183, Article 6; Expenditure Taxes Law No. 6802, Article 34, and Presidential Decision 11263 (Official Gazette 33240, 1 May 2026); Revenue Administration general letter No. 7877 of 24 January 2025 and the Council of State decisions of 27 October 2025 (3rd Chamber, E. 2025/2792), April 2026 (3rd and 7th Chambers jointly) and 29 June 2026 (Tax Litigation Chambers Council, objection No. 2026/1), as reported by counsel and the tax press; Revenue Administration rental income guide for the 2026 filing season.

What the law calls a tourism let, and the hundred-day line

Article 2 of Law 7464 defines a tourism let as the letting of a residence to users "for any purpose" for a period of up to one hundred days. The purpose is irrelevant: a hundred-day let to a remote worker who never sees a beach is a tourism let. Article 1(3) puts single lets of more than one hundred days outside the law altogether. That is the whole test. There is no "fewer than thirty nights" threshold as in some European cities, no distinction between a spare room and a whole flat except the one I come to below, and no exemption for owners who let only a few weeks a year.

The obvious dodge, a string of 101-day contracts, was closed in the same article that sets the fines. Article 4(1)(g) imposes a fine of one million lira on a lessor who signs contracts of more than a hundred days each and still lets the same home more than four times within a year of the first contract. Four lets of 101 days a year is lawful without a permit; the fifth is not.

Two other provisions shape what you are actually selling. Article 3(9) of the law says the contract between the permit holder and the user ends when its stated term ends. Article 339 of the Code of Obligations, which is older, says the tenancy-protection rules for residential leases do not apply to premises that are by their nature intended for temporary use and are let for six months or less. Read together, a permitted tourism let does not create the tenant that foreign landlords fear, the one described on the eviction page. The price of that comfort is everything that follows.

The permit comes before the first booking, not after

Article 3(1) is blunt: the permit must be obtained before the tourism letting contract is made. A listing that goes live while the application is pending is an unpermitted let, and the fine in Article 4(1)(a) attaches per home from the first booking.

The application belongs to the lessor, which Article 2(d) defines as the owner or the holder of a registered usufruct or building right. Under Article 5 of the regulation, every application goes through e-Devlet; a paper application is returned unread. A foreign individual files a copy of the passport together with either a foreign identity number or a Turkish tax number, plus a signature declaration if the passport carries no signature. A company files its tax number, trade registry or MERSİS number and the identity of its signatory. If you do not hold e-Devlet credentials yourself, the regulation allows the application to be made by a proxy under a notarised power of attorney, and that is how most of my non-resident clients file.

The title layer matters more than owners expect. The application needs the current land registry record showing the unit is registered as a residence with a condominium or construction servitude in place. Where the building never completed that step, the regulation accepts a building registration certificate issued for a residence instead, which is the amnesty document discussed on the land page. If the flat is co-owned, the consenting co-owners must represent a majority of both shares and heads; if it is held in undivided co-ownership, as inherited property usually is, every co-owner must consent in writing.

Article 6 of the regulation gives the provincial directorate thirty days to decide. A permit is followed by an inspection within another thirty days; if the home fails the minimum standards, the holder is fined under Article 4(2)(ğ) of the law and given fifteen days, and a second failure cancels the permit. The directorate then sends a copy of every permit to the Ministry, the municipality, the local police and the tax office of the district. Keep that last recipient in mind. The wave of tax assessments in 2025 did not come from platform data; it came from the tax office receiving the permit.

Two smaller rules catch foreign owners who read the headline and not the text. You cannot obtain a permit to let out rooms of the home you live in, and a permitted home cannot be let room by room to different guests under separate contracts. Law 7464 is a whole-unit regime.

The building vote and the twenty-five per cent cap

This is the provision that decides most files before any form is filled. Article 3(3) of the law requires, with the application, a decision taken unanimously by all unit owners of the building in which the flat sits, approving tourism letting in that unit. The regulation asks for the notarised copy of that decision and confines the vote to the owners of the residential units. In a complex of several buildings only your own building votes, and a copy of the permit goes to the site management afterwards.

Unanimous means unanimous. One neighbour who does not answer the letter, or who bought precisely because the management plan promised a quiet building, ends the plan. When a client tells me the agent said "everyone in the building does it", I ask for the notarised decision. If it exists, the seller's permit may be transferable to the buyer, which I come to below. If it does not exist, the purchase should be conditioned on obtaining it, or the buyer should price the flat as a long-let asset and not as a holiday let.

Article 3(4) adds a cap. In a building with more than three units, permits may be issued to the same lessor for at most twenty-five per cent of the units. Where the same lessor seeks permits for more than five units in one building, the application must also include a workplace opening and operating licence from the municipality and, if the building sits in a multi-building complex, a unanimous decision of the owners of the whole complex, not just the building. An investor who buys a floor of a new block to run as serviced flats has, at that point, opened a business in the municipality's eyes, and is treated accordingly.

Two categories escape both the vote and the cap. Article 5(4) of the regulation exempts detached houses, which is why the villa market around Kalkan and Fethiye absorbed the law more easily than the apartment market in Istanbul. Article 3(10) of the law exempts what it calls high-quality residences: multi-unit buildings whose registered management plan already permits short-term letting and which physically provide reception, security and daily cleaning together with services such as laundry, catering, a gym or a pool. Those buildings can be let through a housing operator company holding the permit in its own name, and a marketing company can hold a separate permit alongside it. If you are being sold a "residence" on the strength of that exemption, ask to see the annotated management plan and the Planned Areas Zoning Regulation location document the regulation requires for it. Some branded towers qualify; many buildings called "residence" on the brochure do not.

Who may run it: you, or a licensed agency

Article 3(5) places the obligation to hold the permit on the lessor. If anyone other than the lessor carries on the tourism letting, the law allows it only through travel agencies holding an A-group licence under Law 1618. In practice this leaves a non-resident owner with two lawful structures. Either the permit is in your name and a local manager acts as your agent under a power of attorney, handling keys, cleaning and check-in while the contracts and the income remain yours; or an A-group agency takes the home and lets it in its own operation. The informal third structure, in which a "property management company" without an agency licence lets your flat on its own account, is what Article 4(1)(d) fines at one hundred thousand lira per contract.

Article 3(7) closes the two doors that platforms had left open. A guest may not re-let the home to third parties, and a person who rents a home as their residence may not let it for tourism on their own account. Both carry a fine of one hundred thousand lira per contract under Article 4(1)(c) and (ç). The single exception is a corporate guest that houses its own staff in the home it has rented. If your long-term tenant is running your flat on Airbnb, the tenant is the person fined, but you are the person whose neighbours vote next time.

Identity reporting is the obligation most owners abroad forget. Article 3(8) applies the Identity Notification Law No. 1774 to every permitted home and names the permit holder as the responsible person. In practice that means each guest's identity is reported to the police through the notification system, in the same way a hotel reports its guests, and your manager must be set up to do it from day one. The regulation adds data-protection compliance and a written or online notice of the building's rules to every guest.

What the platforms are required to do

Article 4(1)(e) of the law treats Airbnb, Booking and their local competitors as intermediary service providers under the E-Commerce Law No. 6563. A platform that does not remove a listing for an unpermitted home within twenty-four hours of a Ministry warning is fined one hundred thousand lira per home, and the Ministry may order the content removed or access blocked through the Access Providers Union. Article 14(2) of the regulation lets the Ministry send those warnings through the platforms' own online systems. The practical result is what you see on the sites today: a Turkish listing carries a permit number field, the regulation requires a legible copy of the permit and a prescribed set of facts about the home in every advertisement, and a listing without the permit is a listing the Ministry can take down without asking you.

The fines, and why the statutory figures understate them

The amounts in Article 4 were written in 2024 lira. Article 17(7) of the Misdemeanours Law No. 5326 increases every fixed administrative fine each January by the revaluation rate published under the Tax Procedure Law, so the figure actually applied in 2026 is well above the figure printed in the statute. Treat the table below as the floor, not the bill.

Article 4(3) splits enforcement. Fines on unpermitted letting are imposed by the governor or district governor of the place where the home is; fines on platforms and on permit holders are imposed by the Ministry. Article 5 lists the cancellation grounds, which include a report from any public authority that the home is being used contrary to public order or public morals, and Article 5(2) preserves the rights of guests already in the home until their contracts end.

Selling the home, inheriting it, and what happens to the permit

The permit is personal to the lessor, but the law provides a transfer route rather than a dead end. When ownership changes other than by inheritance, Article 4(2)(b) requires the change to be notified within thirty days of the registration of the transfer, and Article 5(1)(c) then gives the new lessor a thirty-day period to apply for the transfer of the permit; if no application is made, or the transfer is approved but the obligations are not taken up, the permit is cancelled. If you are buying a flat marketed as a working holiday let, the notification and the transfer application are your deadlines, counted from the day the deed is registered in your name, and the seller's permit file, including the notarised building decision, is a document you should hold before you sign.

On death, Article 3(6) gives the heirs three months from the date of death to apply; if they do not, the permit lapses. A permit held by a company lapses when the company ceases to exist. In each case the guests already in the home keep their rights to the end of their contracts. Foreign families who hold a Turkish flat in a single name and let it should add the three-month clock to the list of things the executor needs to know.

Inspections continue after the permit. Article 12 of the regulation requires an inspection at least every two years, and a home that has stopped meeting the standards on which the permit was issued goes back through the fine, the fifteen days and the cancellation.

The tax fight over your rental income

Here is where the two halves of this page meet, and where the advice foreign owners received in 2024 turned out to be incomplete. Some of the tax position is settled and some of it is in front of the Council of State. I separate them.

What is not in dispute. Rent from a Turkish home is Turkish-source income, taxable in Turkey whether you are resident here or not, and it is outside the twenty-year foreign-income exemption described on the Law 7582 page, which expressly leaves Turkish rent on the return. The Revenue Administration's rental income guide for the 2026 filing season states that payments for weekly, daily and similar short-term lets are within the rule requiring rent to pass through a bank or PTT account; cash from a guest is a documentation failure before it is anything else. And Article 6 of Law 7183, as amended by Article 27 of Law 7464, imposes the tourism share at one half of one per cent of net sales and rental income on places holding a tourism letting permit. It is declared to the tax office and paid monthly, it is deductible from the income it is charged on, and Article 4(2)(c) of Law 7464 fines a permit holder who cannot produce the payment document.

What is in dispute. On 24 January 2025 the Revenue Administration sent its provincial offices general letter No. 7877, which treated the act of obtaining the permit as evidence of a commercial organisation and of continuity. The consequence it drew was that a permit holder is a commercial taxpayer from the date of the permit: business income rather than rental income, bookkeeping and invoices, provisional tax, VAT at the general rate of twenty per cent, and accommodation tax. On the VAT rate, a Muğla ruling of 16 September 2024 had already held that a permitted home is not an accommodation facility under the tourism facilities regulation and therefore does not enjoy the reduced hotel rate. Tax offices opened files retrospectively to the permit date, in many cases to January 2024, with penalties.

The Council of State stayed the letter. The 3rd Chamber suspended its execution on 27 October 2025 in case E. 2025/2792; the 3rd and 7th Chambers, sitting jointly at the request of the Tax Litigation Chambers Council, confirmed the suspension in April 2026; and on 29 June 2026 the Tax Litigation Chambers Council rejected the Ministry's objection in its objection decision No. 2026/1. The reasoning, as reported from the decisions, is consistent across the three: letting a property daily, weekly or monthly in order to earn more does not change the character of the income, which remains income from immovable property; commercial income requires an organisation of the kind a hotel, apart-hotel or pension has, with ancillary services such as breakfast, meals, daily cleaning or ironing; and a home let without such an organisation is not an accommodation facility and is not subject to accommodation tax. The merits of the case remain to be decided, and a stay is not an annulment. But the letter cannot be applied while the stay stands, and the reasoning has now been adopted by the Tax Litigation Chambers Council, the body that will hear any appeal on the merits.

What this means for the way you run the flat. The line the court drew is factual, and it is drawn by what you do, not by the permit you hold.

• A home let whole, through a platform or an agent, cleaned between guests and otherwise left to the guest, falls on the rental-income side: an annual return, expenses deducted either at the lump-sum rate or as actually incurred, no VAT registration and no accommodation tax, on the reasoning the Council of State has applied so far.
• A home, or a set of homes, run with staff, daily cleaning, meals or a reception function falls on the commercial side: books, invoices, VAT at twenty per cent rather than the reduced hotel rate, provisional tax, and accommodation tax, which Article 34 of the Expenditure Taxes Law sets at two per cent and which Presidential Decision 11263 reduces to one per cent from 1 May 2026 to the end of 2026.
• An owner who received a retrospective assessment on the strength of letter 7877 has grounds to contest it, but the time to challenge a tax assessment in the tax court is thirty days from notification, and a stay in someone else's case does not stop your clock.

I do not tell clients which side of the line to stand on for tax reasons; I tell them that the side is chosen by the operating model, and that the model should be chosen deliberately, in writing, before the first guest. Cleaning between stays is not a hotel. A cleaner who comes every morning, a breakfast basket and an airport transfer arranged by your manager may be, and the tax office will read the listing before it reads your accounts.

Where the permit meets your residence permit

One more collision, because it catches retirees in particular. The short-term residence permit granted to foreign property owners presupposes that the home is a residence you actually use and do not let; the position is set out on the residence-through-property page. A home holding a tourism letting permit is, by definition, let. If you want both a residence permit based on property and an income from tourism letting, the honest structures are two homes, or a residence permit on a different ground. The retiree who plans to live in Turkey for seven months and let the flat for five should read the retirement page before choosing which ground to apply under.

And before any of this, the two questions every foreign buyer must clear first still apply: whether you can hold title at all, covered on the nationality and zones page, and whether the building's title, management plan and condominium status are what the brochure says, which is the work described on the due diligence page. Owners comparing Turkey with the Adriatic will find the Montenegrin regime, which is a registration and categorisation rather than a building vote, set out on the Montenegro short-term rental page.

Whose side we are on, and how we are paid

The people who tell a foreign buyer that a flat "does very well on Airbnb" are paid when the flat sells. The agent's commission does not depend on the neighbours voting yes, the developer's brochure does not mention Article 3(3), and the management company that promises to "handle the licence" is often the unlicensed intermediary in Article 4(1)(d). None of that is dishonest in itself; it simply means nobody in the room is paid to tell you the vote will fail.

We take no commission from sellers, developers, agents, platforms or management companies, 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 or if you list. Because our position does not move with the sale, telling you that the building will not vote, that the cap is already used up by another owner, or that the operating model you have in mind is a hotel in the tax office's eyes, costs us nothing to say.

One boundary, stated plainly. We are lawyers, not licensed investment advisers and not tax return preparers. We do not tell you whether the flat will earn more as a holiday let than as a long let, and we do not file your returns. What we protect is the legal position: the vote, the permit, the contracts, the transfer deadlines, and the record that shows which side of the court's line you stand on.

Before you list

Send us the title record and the address. We will read the management plan, count the units against the twenty-five per cent cap, tell you whether a unanimous decision is realistic in that building, draft the decision and the powers of attorney, and set up the identity-reporting and tourism-share obligations with your manager before the first booking. If you already hold a permit and received a retrospective assessment in 2025, send that too; the deadlines are counted in days. Our Turkish property work is described on the Turkey real estate page.

What this page does not settle

The merits decision of the Council of State on letter 7877 is pending, and a legislative response is possible; the tax section describes the position as it stands on the date above. The high-quality residence exemption depends on the management plan and the physical services of the particular building, and the workplace licence required above five units is governed by municipal legislation that varies with the municipality. Neither is covered here beyond what the law itself says.