What it costs to set up and run a Turkish company

Everything else on this site is about what the Turkish state pays you. This post is about what you pay, because nobody should be reading about 70% reimbursements without knowing what the entity underneath them costs to run.

Figures below are market ranges as of 2026 and move with the lira. They exclude our own fees, which we quote separately.

Setting it up

The usual structure for an IT company is a limited şirket, the Turkish equivalent of a limited company.

Share capital: 50,000 TL. This is the one number people misread. It is not a fee. The capital is subscribed to the company and stays in the business as working capital, so it comes back to you as the thing that pays your first invoices. A quarter is payable before registration and the balance within two years.

Fees to register: roughly 26,000 to 40,000 TL. That covers the trade registry filing, Chamber of Commerce registration, publication in the Trade Registry Gazette, the Competition Authority contribution (0.04% of capital), and your accountant's incorporation work.

Notary and sworn translation: budget more if you are foreign. Passports, powers of attorney and any corporate shareholder documents need sworn translation and notarisation. This is the line that separates a foreign founder's setup cost from a local one, and it scales with how many shareholders and documents are involved. Published guides put the notary and legal element around 10,000 to 12,500 TL before translation.

Different providers quote quite different totals for the same work, and you will see figures from around $1,000 to $8,000 depending on who is counting what. Ask specifically what is and is not included.

Time: weeks, not months. The registration itself is fast. The bank account is usually the slowest step.

What it costs to run

Bookkeeping: roughly 5,000 to 15,000 TL a month. The range depends on transaction volume and how many people you employ. A small studio with a handful of staff and a few hundred transactions a month sits nearer the bottom.

Payroll filings. Monthly, and mandatory from your first employee. Usually bundled into the bookkeeping fee.

Annual tax compliance. The corporate return and year-end work, typically several hundred to a couple of thousand dollars depending on size.

Record keeping. Free in cash terms, not free in attention. You keep invoice and payment originals for ten years, and every payment you intend to claim needs its invoice, contract and payment record stored together.

So a small company running properly costs somewhere in the region of 60,000 to 180,000 TL a year in accountancy, plus the one-off setup.

Put that next to what comes back

Take the mobile studio from our worked example: $1.2M of user acquisition, $180,000 of hosting, two marketing hires. Across four titles that comes to roughly $1.3M of support in a year, and even with everything behind a single game it is around $524,000.

Annual running costs on the entity, at the top of the range, are a few thousand dollars.

For any company with real growth spending these are small numbers against what the entity collects in a year, so the fees are rarely what the decision turns on.

Where the real cost sits The money is the easy part. What you are committing to is that the

monthly work gets done.

A Turkish entity that files late, pays suppliers from the wrong card, or keeps its records in three different inboxes will still cost you the same accountancy fees and will collect far less, because claims fail on evidence and deadlines rather than on eligibility. Every failure mode in the rejections post is a process failure, not a legal one.

That is what you are taking on. The invoices above are the small part. The real commitment is a monthly routine that has to be run by somebody who cares whether it is right, in a language and a system most founders do not read, and it has to happen in the months when nothing is being claimed as well as the months when something is.

If you want the number for your own spending before you think about any of this, the calculator takes a minute.