Will Türkiye's export incentive programme last?

If you are considering setting up a company in Türkiye partly because of what the incentive programme pays, you should want to know how durable it is. Support schemes come and go, and a rebate that disappears in two years is a poor reason to move a business.

The programme was in fact rewritten from top to bottom five weeks ago. That makes this a good moment to answer the question, because we now have evidence rather than reassurance: we can look at what happened to the companies who were already in it.

The record

State support for Turkish service exports is not a recent idea. Decision No. 10962, which took effect for activity from 1 January 2026, repealed five separate instruments when it arrived:

• The 2014 decision on state aid for technical consultancy services
• The 2020 decision on branding support for foreign-currency-earning service sectors
• Presidential Decision No. 5447 of April 2022, which created the IT programme and E-Turquality
• Two further 2022 decisions covering service exports generally and overseas logistics networks

Those were not cancelled and left unreplaced. They were folded into one framework with higher amounts, a wider scope and clearer rules. An IT company now deals with one rulebook, one set of application documents and one examining body instead of several overlapping decrees.

For the specifics of what moved, what changed between Decision 10962 and 5447 goes through it item by item. The relevant point here is the direction. Twelve years of policy, consolidated upward.

What happened to companies mid-claim

This is the real test of how a government treats people who relied on its programme, so it repays a close look.

Provisional Article 1 of the new Decision covers anything already under way when it landed. Support applications filed but not yet assessed, pre-approvals already granted, payments already made in whole or in part, and activities already begun are all handled under whichever set of rules is more favourable to the applicant, rather than defaulting to either the old rules or the new ones.

Provisional Article 2 handles the clocks. Where a support period had already started under the repealed decisions, the time used is deducted from the new limits and the original start date is kept for calculating the period. Nobody had their five years reset, and nobody had years quietly taken away.

Provisional Article 3 does the same for the Branding side. Companies already admitted to E-Turquality continue to be supported under the new E-TURQUALITY track with the same registered brand they applied with, and those still in their first five-year period pick up the new supports with time already used deducted.

The answer to "what if the rules change after we commit" is therefore not a prediction. It is a matter of record: when the rules changed, in-flight claims were protected and existing positions carried over.

Your own five-year windows

Entry is not an open-ended promise, and that works in your favour for planning. Each support item runs for up to five years per company. Advertising for your products, store commissions and salary support all carry that limit, set out in the Decision item by item.

That gives you a defined period to work with from the point you start claiming, rather than an entitlement that depends on the programme staying exactly as it is. A studio that starts claiming this year knows what it is working with through the end of the decade.

The caps go up on their own

Article 43 of the Decision and Article 117 of the circular do something most support schemes do not: they raise every cap at the start of each calendar year, by up to the official revaluation rate set under the Tax Procedure Law, with the updated figures published by the Ministry.

That rate was announced as 25.49% in November 2025, which is what lifted the 2026 amounts. A cap set in lira does not quietly erode between rewrites of the Decision, which is the mechanism that usually makes older support schemes worth less each year without anyone announcing a cut.

Why the policy sits where it does

Türkiye's exports set a record for a fifth consecutive year in 2025, reaching $273.4 billion. Services and software are the part of that mix the government has been most explicit about wanting to grow, which is why the IT sector got its own programme in 2022 and its own dedicated track when everything was consolidated in 2026.

The incentives also do not stand alone. Corporate tax on income earned from exporting software and services is a separate matter, in separate legislation, so a company here is resting on two independent supports rather than one.

Why a government pays for this

Durability is easier to judge once you can see what the state is buying, and the design of the programme makes that unusually clear.

Almost every item is conditioned on the activity pointing abroad. The Decision defines a service export as a service supplied by someone resident in Türkiye to a person or organisation resident abroad, and the support items follow from that definition: advertising for overseas markets, hosting that delivers your product to users abroad, commissions on overseas sales, salaries for staff working on international promotion. Spending aimed at the domestic market does not attract any of it.

The Ministry then goes further and raises the rate from 50% to 70% for activity aimed at a specific list of target countries, which is a fairly direct statement of where it wants export earnings to come from.

What Türkiye gets in return is foreign currency arriving in Turkish banks, skilled people employed here, and a software sector that grows without the state having to pick which companies deserve it. A studio spending $2 million a year acquiring players in the United States is bringing dollars into the country every month it operates. The reimbursement is a share of that spending, paid after the fact, against invoices, only once the money has moved.

This is a trade, not a handout, and trades that work tend to get renewed. It is also why the programme has survived a full rewrite by getting larger: the thing it is buying became more valuable, not less.

What nobody can promise you

The amounts and rates are set by Presidential Decision, and a Presidential Decision can be amended. No one can promise you the 2031 caps today.

What that argues for is a habit rather than hesitation. Each payment you make carries its own six-month filing window, so a company that claims quarterly converts spending into cash as it goes and never carries a large unclaimed balance into an uncertain future. Companies that lose money to rule changes are usually the ones that left a year of invoices in a drawer.

If you want to see what this year's caps are worth against your own spending, the calculator runs on the current figures and is updated whenever they are.