Istanbul or Ankara: where to base the company

Almost every foreign company that sets up in Türkiye sets up in Istanbul, usually without considering anything else. That is often the right answer, though it is better arrived at deliberately than by default.

Ankara is the country's second option and a different proposition entirely: cheaper, quieter, more technical, closer to government, and holding the oldest technology park in the country. For some kinds of company it is the better base. For most of the ones we work with it is not, and the reason is narrower than people expect.

One thing to clear away first. The incentives are national. Decision No. 10962 sets the same rates and caps whatever city you register in, and the technology development zone regime works the same in any approved zone. Nothing in the money argument favours either city.

What things cost

Taken from the same source across both cities so the comparison holds:

Add central rent to everyday costs and a single person is looking at roughly £1,361 a month in Istanbul against £1,061 in Ankara, so Ankara runs at about 78% of Istanbul.

Two lines stand out. Rent is where most of the gap lives, at around 70% of the Istanbul figure. And transport is not close: a monthly pass covering the whole system costs about a sixth of the Istanbul equivalent, which reflects a smaller city with a shorter network rather than a subsidy.

Utilities are the one line where Ankara is slightly more expensive, which surprises people until they spend a winter there. Ankara sits on a plateau at altitude and gets properly cold. Istanbul does not.

What Ankara has

The oldest and largest technopark. METU's Teknokent was the country's first and remains among the largest, with a heavy concentration of defence and deep tech. Bilkent CYBERPARK sits alongside it with a few hundred R&D companies, several research centres and thousands of staff on a large site. Hacettepe has its own zone.

The defence and aerospace cluster. The major national contractors are headquartered in and around Ankara, and the supply chain around them is dense. If your product touches defence, aviation, space, secure communications or industrial systems, the customers and the partners are there rather than in Istanbul.

The universities. METU, Bilkent and Hacettepe produce a steady flow of strong engineers, and the technoparks are attached to them. For deep technical hiring at graduate level, the pipeline is excellent.

Proximity to government. Ministries, regulators and agencies are all in Ankara. For a business whose growth depends on public sector procurement or regulatory engagement, being in the same city is worth something real.

A quieter life. Ankara is a fraction of Istanbul's size, moves faster on the roads, and has none of the sprawl. People who move from Istanbul to Ankara talk about getting time back.

What Istanbul has

The games industry. This is not a close call. The studios, the exits and the people who built them are in Istanbul. A studio hiring a producer who has shipped a top-grossing title, or a user acquisition manager who has run seven-figure monthly budgets, will find a deep pool in Istanbul and a thin one in Ankara.

The investors. The venture funds, the angels and the international investors who visit are all in Istanbul. Fundraising from Ankara is possible and people do it, but every meeting is a flight or a drive.

The flights. Two large international airports with direct connections to most of Europe, the Gulf and much of Asia. Ankara's airport is domestic-heavy with limited international routes, so almost any international trip routes through Istanbul anyway.

The depth of the market. Suppliers, agencies, lawyers, accountants, recruiters, production companies. Everything a growing company needs to buy is available in more variety and at more price points.

Where people already want to live. For a foreign hire or a returning Turkish professional, Istanbul is an easier sell. That counts when you are competing for senior people who have options.

What it does to salaries

The cost gap tempts founders into assuming they can pay Ankara people less. That works at the junior end and stops working quickly above it.

Graduate and early-career salaries do track the local market, so a team built from METU and Bilkent graduates does cost less to run than the Istanbul equivalent. That is a real saving and it compounds as the team grows.

Senior people are a different market. An experienced engineer in Ankara has the same remote offers from foreign companies as one in Istanbul, priced against those companies rather than against Ankara rent. So the saving thins out exactly where payroll concentrates, and a company that budgets for a uniform discount ends up unable to close its most important hires.

The sensible version is to treat Ankara as cheaper for scale and comparable for seniority, then check whether the roles you need sit on the cheap side of that line. For a company hiring twenty engineers it often does. For one hiring five senior specialists it usually does not.

How to decide

The cost difference is real and it is not the deciding factor. Roughly a fifth off living costs is meaningful for an individual and marginal for a company, because the cost that dominates a software business is salaries, and senior salaries track the market for the person rather than the rent in the city.

What decides it is where the people you need actually are.

For a games studio, a consumer app or a company raising venture capital, Istanbul is the answer and the cost premium is the price of access. Going to Ankara to save on rent and then failing to hire a senior live-ops lead is a bad trade by an order of magnitude.

For a deep tech, defence, aerospace or industrial software company, Ankara has a serious case. The customers, the cluster and the graduate pipeline are there, and the cost saving comes on top rather than instead.

For everyone else, including most B2B SaaS, Istanbul is the default because the ecosystem around it is deeper, and Ankara is a reasonable choice if the founders would rather live there. Neither is a mistake.

Whichever you pick, the export programme pays the same. The calculator gives you that number, and what a salary buys in Istanbul covers the personal side in more detail.