Starting a company in Türkiye as a foreigner, start to finish

The question we get asked before any other is whether a foreigner can actually do this, or whether there is a catch involving a local partner, a residence requirement or a minimum investment. There is not. A foreign founder can own a Turkish company outright and never set foot in the country.

What follows is the sequence, in the order that works, with the parts that go wrong marked.

What you are allowed to do

Foreign shareholders can hold 100% of a Turkish limited company. No Turkish partner is required, no Turkish director is required, and there is no minimum local shareholding. This is the single most common misconception, and it usually comes from someone confusing Türkiye with a Gulf jurisdiction where local sponsorship rules once applied.

You also do not need to live here. Owning shares carries no residence requirement. A work permit only enters the picture if you personally intend to work in Türkiye, which most founders do not.

What the company does need is activity on the ground. People doing actual work here, with an office arrangement and payroll. That is not a formality: it is the difference between a company that can claim under the export incentive and one that cannot. We wrote about whether a Turkish company needs real people separately, because it is the question that decides whether any of this works.

The order that works

1. Tax numbers for the shareholders. Every shareholder, individual or corporate, needs a Turkish tax number before the company can be registered. It is quick, and it is the step people skip and then wait on.

2. The company itself. Articles of association, notarised signatures, registration with the trade registry, and the company exists. A limited company is right for almost every software business; the joint stock form matters mainly if you expect outside investment or a sale, which we covered in limited or joint stock.

3. The bank account. Almost always the slowest step, and the one that cannot be rushed by paying more. Banks run their own compliance on foreign shareholders, and the timeline depends on the bank and on how clean the ownership chain looks. Start it the day the company is registered.

4. The operational accounts. Advertising, cloud, app stores, payment processors. All of them go in the company's name, billed to the company, paid from the company's account or card.

Doing steps three and four out of order is the expensive mistake, and it is the most common one we see.

Why the order matters more than it looks

Here is what happens when a founder gets impatient. The company registration is under way, the launch is close, so they open the Meta and AWS accounts on a personal card and plan to "transfer them later".

That spend is gone. Not the money, the claim. Under the export incentive, the claim belongs to the company that was invoiced and that paid. An invoice in a founder's name with a payment from a personal card is not claimable by the company, however clear the business purpose is. On a studio spending $50,000 a month on user acquisition, waiting three weeks for the company before starting to spend is worth more than anything else in the setup.

The same applies to the six month filing window. Every payment has its own window from the payment date, so the day the company starts paying is the day the clock starts. We covered the six month window on its own.

What it costs

Formation costs are modest: notary, registry, translations and the accountant who files everything. The running costs are the ones to plan for, since a Turkish company needs monthly accounting, quarterly and annual filings, and payroll administration once there are employees. We set out the numbers in what it costs to set up and run a Turkish company.

Set that against what comes back. A company spending on advertising, app store commissions and hosting recovers half of it, and up to seventy percent when the customers are in a target country.

What you can skip

Three things people spend time on that they do not need at the start.

A physical office before you have staff. You need a registered address and a working arrangement, but the full office comes when the team does.

Residence permits for founders who are not moving. Shareholding does not require them.

Teknopark membership on day one. Teknopark status is valuable, and it suits a company with development staff on the ground rather than one that has just registered. It can be added later without redoing anything.

What to get right instead

The accounting relationship. Turkish filings are monthly and unforgiving of gaps, and the export incentive claims sit on top of that record. Weak bookkeeping shows up later as a claim that cannot be evidenced.

The billing details on every account. Company name, company address, company tax number, on every invoice from every vendor. Fixing this retroactively across a dozen vendors is a week of somebody's life.

The payment trail. Company account or company card, every time. No personal cards, no reimbursements, no group entity paying on behalf.

What this is worth once it is running

The setup is a few weeks of administration. What it unlocks is a permanent change to the cost of growth: half of what you spend reaching customers abroad comes back in cash, and income from those customers is not taxed under the export regime.

Put your own numbers in and see what the arithmetic looks like for your spending.

How long it actually takes

Two to four weeks from starting to being able to invoice, assuming the shareholder documents are in order and the bank does not ask for something unusual. Longer if the ownership chain runs through several jurisdictions, because the bank will follow it.

Nobody has to fly here for any of it. Powers of attorney cover the notarised steps, and we have set up companies for founders who have still never visited.