The 0% corporate tax on IT exports, explained plainly

Türkiye has taxed exported services favourably for years, but the discount was always partial and the percentage kept moving. As of 2026 it is no longer partial.

Presidential Decision No. 11257, published on 30 April 2026 and applying to tax periods beginning 1 January 2026, raised the corporate tax deduction on qualifying service export income to 100%. For a software company, a game studio or an IT services business selling abroad, the corporate tax on that revenue comes to zero.

What changed, and what did not

The mechanism explains most of the confusion we hear about this.

Türkiye has not created a tax-free company. It has raised a deduction that applies to one part of your income, namely what you earn from exporting services. That part comes out of the taxable total in full, so no corporate tax is charged on it. The rest of the company is taxed as normal.

This has a practical consequence for your bookkeeping. Your accounts have to separate export income from everything else. A studio with $2M of overseas store revenue and $200,000 of Turkish consulting work does not pay 0% on $2.2M. It pays 0% on the $2M and the standard rate on the $200,000. If the two are muddled in the books, a clean deduction turns into an argument with an auditor.

The four conditions

1. A Türkiye-registered entity. The deduction belongs to a company registered in Türkiye. A foreign-owned Turkish subsidiary qualifies on the same terms as a domestically owned one.
2. Invoices issued to the foreign customer. The invoice goes from your Turkish entity to the customer abroad. Invoicing a Turkish intermediary that then bills abroad is a different transaction and will not qualify.
3. The service is used abroad. The benefit has to be realised outside Türkiye: a game played by users abroad, software licensed to a foreign company, a development service consumed by a foreign client.
4. The revenue is brought into Türkiye by the tax return deadline. This is the condition most often missed, because it is the only one that depends on timing rather than structure. Export earnings sitting in a foreign account past the corporate tax return deadline put the deduction on that income at risk.

The first three conditions are settled when you set the company up and sign your contracts. The fourth has to be managed every year.

VAT on exported services

Separately from corporate tax, exported services are VAT-exempt. You do not charge Turkish VAT to a foreign customer.

The VAT you pay on your own costs is not lost either. Under Decision 10962, the amount you get back is worked out on the full invoice, VAT included, so the VAT on a claimable expense comes back at the same 50 to 70% as the expense.

How it stacks with reimbursements

These are two separate systems, run by different parts of government, and a company can use both at once:

Most jurisdictions that court software companies reward you for being profitable. The Turkish pairing also rewards you for spending on growth, which is the position most studios are in before profitability arrives.

Worked example

A studio invoices $2,000,000 of game revenue to overseas stores and spends $800,000 on user acquisition targeting players in the United States and Japan, both on the Ministry's target-country list.

Corporate tax on the $2M comes to nil, provided the four conditions are met and the revenue is repatriated on time.

The $800,000 of UA is claimed under Article 17 at the 70% target-country rate, which is around $560,000 back in cash, subject to the item's annual and per-product caps. Whether the full amount lands depends on how the spend is split across titles, since the per-product cap usually binds first. The calculator will show you where your own numbers hit that ceiling.

The tax side asks nothing of you beyond clean structure and timely repatriation. The reimbursement side asks for evidence and a filing rhythm. Both are useful, and they do not interfere with each other.

What to do about it

If you already have a Turkish entity, three questions are worth checking: whether your income split is clean in the books, whether your invoicing really does run from the entity to the foreign customer, and whether repatriation is on the finance calendar ahead of the return deadline.

If you do not have an entity yet, this is the half of the picture that makes the reimbursements worth building around.

None of this is tax advice for your specific situation. The interaction with your home country's rules on controlled foreign companies is a real question and deserves its own conversation. The Turkish side is the straightforward half.