What a salary actually buys in Istanbul

Most of what gets written about moving a company to Türkiye is about tax and incentives. The question founders actually ask over a drink is different: what is it like to live there, and what does a salary get you?

Here are the numbers, taken from one source across three cities so the comparison is like for like. Figures are Wise's 2026 cost of living data, in pounds because that is how the source publishes them.

Istanbul against Berlin and London

Add rent in the centre to the everyday costs and a single person is looking at roughly £1,361 a month in Istanbul, £2,047 in Berlin and £3,346 in London. Istanbul comes out at about two thirds of Berlin and about 41% of London.

The utilities line is the one people read twice. Heating, water and electricity for a decently sized flat run at about a fifth of the Berlin figure. Energy is priced very differently here, and for anyone who has spent recent winters in Northern Europe it is a noticeable change in monthly outgoings.

Transport is the other large gap. A monthly travel pass covering metro, tram, bus and the ferries costs about a quarter of the London equivalent, in a city with a metro network that has expanded enormously over the past decade.

One caveat, and then I will leave it alone: lira prices move faster than European ones, so the absolute figures date quickly. The ratios are the durable part, and they have been wide for years.

What this means for what you pay a team

For a founder the interesting version of this question is not personal spending. It is what it costs to employ good people.

Market data puts an average Istanbul software engineer at a small fraction of typical Berlin or London total compensation, and even at the top of the local band, where you have to pay to compete with remote offers from foreign companies, the gap stays large. That gap is not a quality gap. Türkiye produces a great deal of engineering talent, the games industry here has been through the full cycle from garage studio to billion dollar exit, and the people who built those companies are still in the market.

The part that changes the arithmetic further is where you put them. Inside a teknopark, salaries of R&D, design and support staff are exempt from income tax through the end of 2028, up to a ceiling of 40 times the gross minimum wage, which at the 2026 rate is well above any engineering salary you are likely to pay. The Treasury also covers half the employer's social security contribution for those staff. Turkish payroll carries a meaningful gap between what the employee receives and what the employer pays, as it does everywhere in Europe, and those two measures close a large part of it.

For the commercial side of the team, the export programme handles it directly: half the gross salary of up to five business development, sales and marketing hires comes back in cash, capped at 90,000 TL of support per person per month, for five years.

The two lines that actually matter

Strip a software company down and two costs dominate: the people who build the product, and the money spent getting users.

Both are subsidised here, by different mechanisms. Engineering payroll is cheaper to begin with and partly exempt from tax inside a teknopark. User acquisition comes back at 50%, and at 70% when it is aimed at one of the Ministry's target countries, which is a list that includes the markets most studios already spend in.

That combination is unusual. Plenty of countries offer a low tax rate on profit, which helps once you are profitable. Fewer of them reduce the cost of the two things you spend money on while you are still growing.

Why the people are here

A cost comparison only means something if you can hire, and this is the part that separates Istanbul from cheaper cities elsewhere.

Türkiye has been through a full industry cycle. Peak sold to Zynga for $1.8 billion, Dream Games reached a $5 billion valuation, and Zynga bought three Istanbul studios in the space of a few years. Every one of those outcomes put money and experience back into a small local market, and the people involved did not leave. They started new studios, joined others, and became the senior layer that a new company hires from.

That counts for more than a salary index. In a city with no industry history you pay less and train everyone yourself. In Istanbul you can hire a producer who has shipped a game to the top of the US grossing charts, a user acquisition manager who has run seven-figure monthly budgets, and an engineer who has kept live-ops running for millions of daily players. Those people exist here in numbers that a market this size would not normally support, because the exits happened here.

The universities feed the same pool, with the major teknoparks attached to them, and there is a steady flow of engineers who would otherwise be taking remote contracts for foreign companies. You are competing with those remote offers rather than with local salaries alone, which should inform where you set your bands.

Living here, briefly

The parts of Istanbul life that people mention after a year are rarely the ones in a spreadsheet.

Food is the obvious one, and it lives up to the cliché, at prices that make eating out an ordinary weekday decision rather than an event. The city is enormous and layered, with a serious cultural calendar and a coastline that gets used. Domestic flights are cheap and put a lot of the country inside a couple of hours.

The adjustments are real too. Learning some Turkish is close to essential for daily life outside the tech bubble, and it is a hard language for English speakers. The bureaucracy takes patience, and getting a residence permit, a tax number, a bank account and a phone line set up is a process rather than an afternoon. That last part is a large share of what a service like ours removes from a founder's calendar.

Where to start

If you are pricing a move, the sequence that works is to establish what the export programme pays against your real spending first, because that number is usually larger than people expect and it changes what the rest of the budget looks like.

The calculator does that part, and teknoparks and where the industry sits covers the office and payroll side of the same decision.