Routes to Turkish Citizenship by Investment

The Turkish citizenship by investment programme accepts five qualifying routes. Each one ends in the same place: a presidential decision granting citizenship to you, your spouse and your children under eighteen. The cost, the lock-in mechanics and the side effects are different.

This page is the routing hub. Pick the route that fits your situation, then follow the link for the page that gets into the operational detail.

At a glance

Route	Minimum	Lock-in	Friction above the investment	Who tends to use it
Real estate	$400,000	3 years (deed annotation)	$15,000 to $35,000	Roughly 95% of applicants
Bank deposit	$500,000	3 years (BDDK letter)	$11,000 to $18,000	Investors who want capital back at term, not a building
Investment funds	$500,000	3 years (MKK custody)	$14,000 to $25,000 (plus annual mgmt)	Investors who want managed exposure to Turkish real estate or VC
Government bonds	$500,000	3 years (custody)	$11,000 to $16,000	Rare in practice; lira-denominated yield
Job creation	50 Turkish employees	Ongoing	n/a	Investors building a Turkish operating company anyway

Friction estimates assume a family of four, mid-tier legal and advisory support. The cost calculator puts the numbers into your exact case.

How to choose

The route decision usually comes down to three questions, in this order.

Do you want a Turkish property at the end of this, yes or no? If yes, the real-estate route is yours and the conversation is about which property. If no, the only reason to take the real-estate route is the lower headline number, and the savings vanish once you account for transfer tax, property-management cost and exit risk three years out.

How patient is the capital? Bank deposit returns your money at the end of three years with interest, in the currency you deposited; the trade-off is that lira deposits pay much more than dollar deposits, and the lira side carries Turkish inflation and FX risk. Property and funds carry market risk but offer the chance of upside. Government bonds split the difference, with limited upside, in lira.

How much operational work do you want to do? Real estate involves due diligence on a specific seller and a specific building. Funds outsource that to a SPK-licensed manager and a custody chain. Deposits are the most administrative of all, in that all the work is on the bank side.

What every route shares

Regardless of which route you pick, the same checklist applies on the applicant side.

• A clean criminal record certificate, for the spouse as well as the main applicant, apostilled and sworn-translated. Spousal criminal record certificate is a 2025 addition many websites still miss.
• A Turkish tax number, obtainable on arrival or by power of attorney.
• A Turkish bank account, opened by you in person or by your lawyer under power of attorney.
• One short visit to Türkiye for biometric fingerprinting, also a 2025 change.
• Source-of-funds documentation, scrutinised more closely since the 2025 due-diligence pass.

The requirements page lays the full document checklist out; the process page puts the steps in order.

Where files actually fail

Across the application population we see, the failure modes are not evenly distributed by route.

For real estate, the failure mode is the appraisal coming in below $400,000, or the seller turning out to be ineligible (foreign-owned, or recently acquired the property from a foreign owner). Both are preventable by ordering the appraisal and running the title-chain check before paying.

For bank deposit, the failure mode is the source-of-funds packet not satisfying the receiving bank’s compliance team. The block is rarely at the citizenship office; it is at the deposit-acceptance stage. The fix is to build the SoF packet before transferring, and to negotiate the bank choice on the strength of that packet.

For funds, the failure mode is choosing a fund that is technically SPK-licensed but not on the BDDK / Treasury short list of acceptable funds for citizenship. The list is short and changes; the qualifying funds page is the current cut.

For bonds, the failure mode is rarely operational; the route is so uncommon that issues are usually applicant-specific.

After the qualifying investment

The downstream steps are identical across routes: conformity certificate from the relevant authority, residence permit (for the applicant and spouse, since 2025), citizenship file with the Provincial Directorate of Civil Registration, security check, biometric in person, presidential decision, ID card and passport issuance at a consulate or directly in Türkiye.

The process page tracks all of that. The costs page carries the full line-item version of the bill.

Next

• Start with the route most applicants choose: the real estate $400k route.
• Or compare it side-by-side with the bank deposit route and the investment funds route.
• For the legal framework that underlies all five, see the requirements page.
• For the all-in cost in your situation, run the calculator.