Does Turkish inflation cancel out the incentives?

This comes up early in most conversations, and a shrug will not do. Türkiye has had high inflation for several years. If the incentive programme pays you in lira, does the lira give back what the programme hands over?

For a company exporting software, the answer turns on a detail in the rules that is easy to miss and settles most of the worry.

Your claim is fixed to the day you spent the money

Article 119 of the implementing circular sets out how spending in foreign currency is converted. Costs invoiced in lira are paid in lira. Costs invoiced in foreign currency are converted using the Central Bank of Türkiye's indicative buying rates and cross rates on the date of the payment document.

The date of payment, not the date you file the claim or the date the money reaches you.

This is consequential, because most of what a studio or SaaS company claims is denominated in dollars to begin with: Meta and Google advertising, Apple and Google Play commissions, AWS and Google Cloud invoices, software licences. When you pay a $180,000 advertising bill in March, the lira value of your claim is set at March's rate, and it stops moving from that moment. Whatever the currency does between then and payment does not change the amount you are owed.

There is a refinement for the biggest category. Where social media and search engine advertising is paid in foreign currency more than three times in a month, the conversion uses the rate from the fifteenth of that month, which smooths out the effect of paying on many different days.

The only currency exposure left is the gap between the lira figure being fixed and the money arriving. Filing promptly inside the six-month window on each payment is what keeps that short, which is the same reason to file promptly for every other purpose.

The caps rise every January

The second worry is subtler. Even if each claim is fixed correctly, a cap of 50,000,000 TL is worth less each year unless somebody moves it.

Somebody does. Article 43 of the Decision and Article 117 of the circular require every cap in the Decision and the circular, along with the other lira amounts, to be raised at the start of each calendar year by up to the official revaluation rate determined under the Tax Procedure Law, with the updated figures published by the Ministry.

For 2026 that rate was 25.49%, announced in November 2025. So the caps you are working against this year are a quarter higher than last year's, without anyone having to amend the Decision.

Two limits apply to the mechanism. It runs on producer prices measured October to October, not consumer prices, and the President has authority to set a different figure. It tracks inflation closely without being formally pegged to it.

Where inflation actually reaches you

The income side of a software exporter is largely insulated. Your revenue comes from players and customers abroad, in dollars or euros, and Turkish companies hold foreign currency accounts as a matter of course. Türkiye's price level does not determine what a player in Ohio pays for coins.

The cost side splits in two. Cloud, advertising, store commissions and licences are foreign currency costs that behave the same wherever you are incorporated. Local salaries, rent and services are lira costs, and that is where domestic inflation lands.

That is the line to plan around, and it happens to be the one the programme helps with most directly. Salaries for staff hired for international promotion and marketing are reimbursed at 50%, capped at 90,000 TL of support per person per month for up to five people in Türkiye, and that cap rises each January along with everything else. Your most inflation-exposed cost line is therefore the one carrying a subsidy indexed against inflation.

What arrives, and in what form

The support itself is paid in lira, into the company's own account. Article 45 of the Decision also settles a question people often ask at this point: the amount is calculated including VAT, so the tax charged on a claimable invoice forms part of the figure the 50% is applied to rather than being stripped out first.

Once it arrives, it behaves like any other money in a Turkish company account. Exporters hold foreign currency accounts routinely, and the rules on bringing export income into Türkiye cover the flow in the other direction. Nothing obliges you to sit in lira with a reimbursement you plan to spend on next quarter's advertising.

It also helps to see what the annual uplift does over time. A per-product advertising cap of 15,000,000 TL in 2026 becomes about 18,800,000 TL in 2027 at a 25.49% uplift, and roughly 23,600,000 TL the year after if the rate held. Whether that keeps exact pace with the currency in any given year depends on the year. What it does mean is that the ceiling is designed to climb rather than sit still, which is the failure mode of most support schemes written in a local currency.

The direction of travel

Annual inflation was 31.75% in July 2026, the second consecutive monthly fall, down from 32.1% in June. The Central Bank of Türkiye's published forecast puts it at 24% by the end of 2026, 15% by the end of 2027 and 9% by the end of 2028.

Forecasts are forecasts. The reason they matter less here than you might expect is everything above: your revenue is in hard currency, your largest claimable costs are in hard currency and locked at the payment date, and the caps move up on a schedule regardless.

What this means in practice

A studio spending $2,000,000 a year on user acquisition, hosting and store fees claims against those payments at the rate on each payment date. At 50%, that is $1,000,000 of support, and at the 70% rate for target countries it is $1,400,000. Those dollar figures are not estimates that erode. They are fixed as each payment is made.

Underneath, the inflation question is really about which currency your business runs in. For a company selling software abroad from Türkiye, the answer is mostly dollars, and the programme is written to follow the currency you spent rather than the one it pays in.

Run your own spending through the calculator to see the figure for your case, and the 0% tax on export income covers the other half of the arithmetic.