Türkiye's IT and gaming export incentives: the complete guide

Most countries that support software companies support the building of the product. They fund research, they credit development costs, they run grant competitions for prototypes. Türkiye supports the selling side instead. The money you spend finding customers abroad: advertising, app store commissions, hosting, trade fairs, certification, localisation, and the salaries of the people doing that work.

This guide covers what the programme pays, who can use it, what a claim requires and where it runs out. We file these claims for game studios and software companies every month, so most of what follows is operational rather than theoretical.

What the programme pays for

Türkiye runs a service export incentive programme under Presidential Decision No. 10962. There are two separate things in it for a software or game company.

It reimburses 50% of eligible spending aimed at customers outside Türkiye, rising to 70% when the activity targets a country on the Ministry of Trade's list. And separately, income earned from customers abroad is not subject to corporate tax under the IT export regime, which is a different mechanism with different conditions.

The reimbursement is cash. The Ministry pays it into the company's bank account in Turkish lira, against invoices the company has already settled. That is the practical difference from a British tax credit or a German research allowance: those reduce a tax bill, so they do very little for a company with no taxable profit. This pays whether you are profitable or not.

Who can use it

Any company established in Türkiye that sells software, games or IT services to customers abroad. There is no minimum revenue threshold on the standard programme and no company age requirement.

Ownership does not matter. A company owned entirely by foreign shareholders claims on exactly the same terms as a Turkish-owned one. The programme exists to increase Türkiye's service exports, so the nationality of the shareholders is not a condition anywhere in it. Foreign founders ask us this more often than any other eligibility question.

You do not have to relocate. The founders can stay wherever they are. What the company does need is real activity in Türkiye, meaning people doing the work here. For most studios we set up, that is a small local team handling the operations being claimed for, while the leadership stays put.

What comes back

The programme has sixteen support items in the standard track. Three of them account for most of what a software or game company claims:

• Advertising and user acquisition. The largest line for almost every mobile studio, and the one the 70% rate applies to when the audience is in a target country.
• App store and platform commissions. Apple's and Google's cut, which for a company selling through the stores is usually the second largest cost in the accounts after marketing.
• Hosting and servers. Cloud infrastructure for delivering the product to users abroad.

Beyond those sit trade fair participation, certification and accreditation, market research, software licence costs, trademark and patent registration, overseas office rent, and salary support for newly hired sales and marketing staff.

Each item has its own annual cap, and the caps are revalued upward every calendar year by Türkiye's statutory revaluation rate. We do not print them in articles, because they change every January and an article does not. They are in the calculator and the guides, which both read the same source file.

The two programmes, and which one you are in

There are two tracks.

The standard programme is open to any eligible company with no revenue threshold. Most companies start here.

The branding programme, which includes the E-TURQUALITY track, is for companies already exporting at scale. Entry depends on foreign revenue over a qualifying period. Moving up lifts most of the per-item caps and replaces them with a single much larger programme ceiling, which matters once your spending has outgrown the item caps rather than before.

The track is not something you pick. It follows from your foreign revenue, and the sensible path is to start on the standard programme and move up when the numbers support the application. We wrote about what the branding programme pays separately.

The target country list, and the twenty points it adds

The difference between 50% and 70% is the single largest lever in the programme, and it turns on where your customers are.

The Ministry publishes a list of target countries. When an activity is aimed at one of them, eligible items are supported at up to 70% instead of 50%. The list includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, which between them cover where most studios spend their user acquisition budget anyway.

Two conditions are easy to miss. For an activity covering several countries, all of them have to be on the list, so a campaign spanning target and non-target markets does not qualify at the higher rate. And the higher rate has to be evidenced: campaign reporting showing where the audience was, not an assertion in the filing. We covered how the 70% rate works in detail.

What a claim has to show

Claims fail on paperwork far more often than on eligibility.

Four things have to line up on every claim:

• The invoice is addressed to the Turkish company, not to a parent company or a founder.
• The payment comes from the Turkish company's own bank account or company card.
• There is a contract, order confirmation or platform agreement behind the spend.
• There is evidence the activity is aimed at foreign markets, which for advertising means campaign data and for hosting means showing the product serves users abroad.

Every one of the claims we have seen fail, failed on one of those four. The most common by far is a personal card: a founder opens the ad account or the cloud account before the company exists, pays with their own card, and never moves the billing across. The spend happened, the business purpose is obvious, and it is not claimable, because the claim belongs to the company that was invoiced and that paid.

The six month window

Every payment has its own six month filing window, counted from the payment date rather than the invoice date.

This is the deadline companies lose money to, and they usually lose it without noticing. A studio that decides to "get the paperwork in order first" and files everything in one batch six months later discovers that the earliest payments in the batch have already expired. Multiple payments for the same activity are filed together, each within its own window, so a batch is only as good as its oldest invoice.

Once it is a habit it is not difficult. The first year is where it costs people, while the company is new and nobody has established the rhythm yet. We wrote about the six month window on its own.

Which cap you hit first

Each item carries an annual cap, and there is also a programme ceiling. New claimants tend to worry about the ceiling, but in practice the item caps are reached long before it.

The two largest caps apply per product, for up to ten products a year. A studio running all of its user acquisition behind a single title hits that cap and stops. The same company spending the same total across four titles claims considerably more, because each title carries its own cap.

This is written into the Decision, and it changes what a portfolio company should be doing with its media buying. It is the main reason we model a spending pattern for clients instead of quoting a percentage.

How it fits with Türkiye's other programmes

The export incentive is one of several Turkish programmes. It sits alongside the tax reliefs below, because reimbursing an invoice and reducing a tax base are separate operations. The tax reliefs themselves are mostly exclusive of one another, which [the stacking article](/blog/can-you-stack- the-incentives/) works through.

• Teknopark status exempts profits from software developed inside a technology development zone from corporate tax, and exempts developer salaries from income tax until the end of 2028.
• R&D centre status deducts qualifying research spend twice over, in exchange for employing at least fifteen full-time research staff.
• TÜBİTAK 1501 and 1507 fund defined research projects at 75%.

Most companies we work with end up using more than one. One caution to plan for: teknopark and R&D centre benefits above a threshold trigger a 3% venture capital obligation, and the export incentive does not, because a cash reimbursement is neither a deduction nor an exemption.

What it does not cover

Three honest limits.

It reaches spending aimed at customers abroad. Domestic Turkish marketing is a different question with different treatment. If your product also has a Turkish-language version, support on some items is calculated on half the payment.

It is a reimbursement, so the company funds the spending first and is repaid afterwards. It improves your economics; it does not solve a cash flow gap this month.

And it depends on approval. Support is subject to eligibility and to review by the examining body, and a claim with weak evidence can come back for completion. Reviewers give three months to fix gaps, extendable by three more. A query delays the payment without ending the claim.

What this comes to on a typical budget

A studio spending $500,000 a year on user acquisition, $200,000 on app store commissions and $80,000 on hosting, selling to players in target countries, is looking at roughly half a million dollars a year coming back, before any item cap is reached.

That figure is not a promise, and it moves with your spending mix and with the caps, so put your own numbers in instead. This is the same calculation our full calculator runs, reading the current rates and caps from the same file.

Where to start

If you already have a Turkish company, the first useful thing is an audit of the last six months of spending, because some of it is probably still inside the filing window and some of it is probably already gone.

If you do not, the sequence is a company, a bank account, the accounts and contracts moved onto it, and then claims from the first eligible payment. It takes weeks rather than months, and the company can be owned entirely from abroad.

Either way, do the arithmetic before the decision. It takes about twenty seconds.