Do you have to live in Türkiye to own a company there?

Behind most questions about setting up in Türkiye sits a personal one that founders ask last: does this mean I have to move?

For the incentives, no. Nothing in Decision No. 10962 or its implementing circular asks where the shareholders live. Article 3 defines a beneficiary as a company resident in Türkiye and established under the Turkish Commercial Code, and Article 4 defines the export as a service supplied from Türkiye to a customer abroad. Both sentences describe the company. Neither describes you.

That said, three separate things get tangled together in this question, and they have different answers.

What the company needs

A Turkish company has to be able to function without you being in the room. In practice that means two things.

Someone with signature authority has to be able to act for it: sign contracts, deal with the bank, authorise filings. That person can be you, a co-founder or an appointed manager. A joint stock company can appoint directors who own no shares at all, which gives you more room to arrange this than a limited company, where at least one shareholder has to serve as manager.

The company also has to run its money through its own account. Article 119 of the circular requires payments to move through banking channels from the company itself, and rules out payments made on a shareholder's personal card or from a personal account. So the operating reality of the company has to be here even when the owners are not.

None of this requires anyone to relocate. It requires the company to be a working business rather than a name on a certificate, which is a lower bar than founders expect and is covered in more detail in what the rules ask of the company itself.

What you need if you want to work here

Owning shares does not give you the right to work in Türkiye. These are separate permissions, and conflating them is the most common mistake in this area.

If you are going to be in Türkiye managing the company day to day, you need a work permit. The application is made by the company, and the company has to satisfy a financial test. The current thresholds ask for one of the following:

• Paid-in capital of 500,000 TL
• Annual gross sales of 8,000,000 TL
• Annual exports of $150,000

For a software company selling abroad, the third one is usually already true, which is a considerably easier path than the first two. The export incentive programme and the work permit rules are looking at the same activity from different directions.

There is also an employment ratio: five Turkish employees for each foreign employee, with a grace period of roughly six months on a first permit before the ratio has to be met. For a studio that intends to build a team here anyway, this sets the hiring order rather than blocking anything. For a founder who wants to be the only person in the company, it is the constraint that bites.

Thresholds in this area move, so treat the figures above as the current position rather than a permanent one, and check them when you apply.

What it means for your own tax

The third strand is personal, and it is decided by days rather than by paperwork.

Foreigners who spend more than six months of a calendar year in Türkiye are generally treated as tax resident here, which brings worldwide personal income into the Turkish net. Below that line you are a non-resident and Türkiye taxes only Turkish-source income.

Whether that is good or bad depends entirely on where you are coming from, and it interacts with your home country's rules rather than replacing them. Will my home country tax me anyway covers that side, including what controlled foreign company rules actually target. The point to carry from here is that the six-month line is a decision you make, not something that happens to you, and founders who split their time deliberately keep count.

Three shapes that work

Most companies we see settle into one of three arrangements.

Owners abroad, operation here. The founders stay where they are. The Turkish company has a managing director, a small commercial team and the engineering it needs, and the founders visit. This works well for the incentives, needs no work permits for the owners, and puts the weight on hiring someone locally you trust.

One founder relocates. A single founder takes the work permit, runs the entity, and becomes the person who signs. This is the most common arrangement for a studio that is serious about Türkiye, because it solves the trust question and strengthens the position with everyone's tax authority at once.

Everyone moves. Less common, and usually a decision about life rather than tax. The cost side of it is easier than most people assume, since living costs in Istanbul run well below Berlin or London.

The part people underestimate

Whichever shape you choose, someone has to care about the filing calendar every month.

Each payment the company makes starts its own six-month window to claim against it. Advertising invoices, cloud bills and store commissions arrive monthly, so a company claiming properly is doing something every quarter rather than once a year. That work does not need a founder, but it does need somebody whose job it is, and it is the thing that quietly decides how much of the programme you actually collect.

Companies that run this from abroad with nobody assigned to it tend to discover a year later that two quarters of invoices have aged out. Companies with a local person on it, or with the work handed to someone whose job it is, collect the lot. The difference between those two outcomes is usually larger than any of the structural questions on this page.

Weigh that when you decide how present you need to be. The answer is rarely about your own presence. It is about whether anybody is watching the calendar.

What actually decides it

The incentives do not push you toward any of the three. A company claiming 50% on advertising and hosting, or 70% in the Ministry's target countries, claims the same amounts whether the founders live in Istanbul or Stockholm.

What tips the decision is usually the other question: how comfortable your home tax authority is with a company you own abroad. A business with staff, a director and decisions being made in Türkiye is in a stronger position than one run entirely by email, and the more of the company that lives here, the less there is to argue about.

Usefully, the programme pays for exactly that. Salary support covers half the gross pay of up to five commercial hires, and the engineering side is subsidised separately through the teknopark regime. Building the thing that makes your structure solid is the thing Türkiye is funding.

If you want the numbers before the life decisions, the calculator gives you the company side in a couple of minutes, and the personal questions are much easier to answer once you know what is at stake.