The costs of claiming that nobody quotes you

A studio spending $200,000 a year on user acquisition reads that half of it comes back and puts $100,000 in the model. The gross figure is right. The number that reaches the bottom line is smaller, and the gap is made of things nobody mentions when the programme is being explained.

None of this changes whether claiming is worth doing. It changes what you should expect to keep.

The support is income

Start with the largest item, because it is the one most often missed.

Cash support of this kind is not a tax-free windfall. In Turkish accounting practice a subsidy connected to the trading activity is recorded as income, and taxable supports are recognised in the period in which the right to them accrues.

The clearest published example is the Global Supply Chain support, another cash payment made to exporters from the same fund, where the rule is explicit: the support paid to the company is included in corporate income, declared and taxed. General business supports follow that pattern.

Research and design support under Law 5746 works differently. That is held in a special fund account and kept outside the tax base, which is why founders who have read about R&D grants sometimes arrive expecting the same treatment here.

Whether your own tax position absorbs the charge depends on the rest of your return. A company already deducting its export earnings under Article 10/1-(ğ) may find the position more favourable than a company that is not, because the deduction reaches earnings from services provided abroad and grant income is a separate item. That is a question for your accountant with your actual figures in front of them. What matters for planning is that the headline percentage is a gross number.

Certification is not optional

The application is not a form you fill in and send.

The summary that goes with a claim is signed and stamped by a yeminli mali müşavir, a sworn financial advisor. That is a distinct professional qualification from the accountant who keeps your books, and companies usually end up paying both: one to maintain the records through the year, another to certify what is being presented to the Ministry.

Professional fees have a published floor. The minimum fee tariff for accountants and sworn financial advisors is set annually and published in the Official Gazette, most recently on 17 December 2025 for the 2026 year. The tariff is a minimum, and what a firm charges above it tracks the size of the file and the state it arrives in.

That last point is where companies control the cost. A year of invoices already matched to payments, already in the company name, already filed by month, is a short engagement. A year that has to be reconstructed from a founder's inbox is a long one, and the difference shows up on the invoice.

Documents, notarisation, translation

Supporting documents carry their own small costs, and they accumulate.

Certain documents have to be notarised where the person or body concerned is not part of your company. Documents in foreign languages generally need translation, though there is a useful concession: a detailed summary table prepared by the company and certified by a sworn financial advisor can be submitted in place of translations in some cases. Check that before you send a stack of invoices to a translator.

Registration on the Support Management System, the Ministry's DYS portal, is its own piece of setup. Your MERSIS record needs to be current before you begin, including tax number, address, shareholding structure and the list of representatives, and getting that wrong is a delay rather than a cost.

It repeats

Every payment has its own six-month filing window, which we have written about in the six-month filing window. One consequence is that the costs above are not a one-off setup charge.

A company claiming steadily files repeatedly through the year. The certification work, the document assembly and the professional time attach to each filing. In a model, these belong on a recurring line next to the reimbursement they support, not as a one-time entry in month one.

What this does to the arithmetic

Take the studio at the top. It spends $200,000 on user acquisition, recovers 50%, and books $100,000 of support.

That $100,000 goes into income. Professional fees and document costs come off. What lands is smaller than the headline, and how much smaller depends on the size of the claim, the tidiness of the year and your tax position.

The proportion also improves as claims get larger. Certification of a $400,000 claim does not cost twice what certification of a $200,000 claim costs, so the running cost falls as a share of the money recovered. Small first claims carry the worst ratio, which is worth expecting rather than being disappointed by.

The calculator gives you the gross reimbursement, which is the right place to start. Treat the figure it produces as the top of the funnel, and hold something back for the items above before you decide what the programme is worth to you.

If you want to know where the recoverable money actually is before spending anything on a claim, how much Türkiye actually pays back works through three studios with different cost bases.