Turkish Citizenship by Bank Deposit: The $500,000 Route

If the real estate route is the popular one, this is the quiet one. Picked by people who do not want to own a flat in a country they may rarely visit, who do not want to deal with tenants or developers, and who can live with their capital sitting in a Turkish bank for three years.

It is the simplest path in the program on the paperwork side. There is no appraisal to argue about, no seller history to check, no district restrictions, no resale problem in year three. You wire the money, you sign the deposit instructions, the banking regulator confirms it, and the citizenship file moves.

The trade you accept for that simplicity is currency risk, and most of what is written online about this route understates it.

How it works

You open an account at a bank licensed in Turkey and bring in at least $500,000 (or the equivalent in another convertible currency). The bank sells the foreign currency to the Central Bank of Türkiye, receives the Turkish lira equivalent, and places that lira amount into a 3-year fixed-term deposit in your name. The deposit is blocked: it cannot be withdrawn, transferred, pledged or used as collateral until the lock expires.

The bank then notifies the BDDK, Turkey’s banking regulator. The BDDK issues the conformity certificate confirming that your deposit qualifies under Article 20/2-ç of the Regulation on Implementation of Turkish Citizenship Law. That certificate goes into the same citizenship pipeline as every other route: residence permit, application, biometrics, presidential decision.

Non-resident account opening is the only mildly annoying part. Banks’ compliance teams have tightened since 2025. Expect to document the source of the funds properly: a sale contract, a dividend statement, a business account history. An unexplained transfer chain costs weeks.

The currency rule everyone gets wrong

Look at any ten English-language guides on this route and most will tell you the deposit can be kept in USD, EUR or TRY. That stopped being true on 6 January 2022, when the BDDK aligned the rule with the Law on the Protection of the Value of Turkish Currency. The current process is:

1. You bring in $500,000 (or the equivalent foreign currency).
2. Your Turkish bank sells the FX to the Central Bank on the spot rate of that day.
3. The TRY proceeds go into a fixed 3-year deposit account in your name.
4. The deposit is blocked for the full 36 months.

There is no USD or EUR variant. The deposit is in lira, and it has to be. The frequent claim that “the USD equivalent is locked at account opening and stays the same for three years” describes the reporting rule (the BDDK files note the dollar value at deposit date) and not what your account actually holds.

This matters because, between 2022 and the end of 2025, the lira lost roughly half its value against the dollar. An applicant who deposited $500,000-equivalent at the start of 2022 would, at the end of 2024, have held a TRY balance whose dollar value was closer to $250,000, even with interest. The interest on TRY deposits has been very high (40 to 50 percent has been normal), but it has not made up the depreciation in dollar terms across the full window.

What used to protect you, and why it is gone

Through 2022, 2023 and most of 2024 there were two state-subsidised products that effectively hedged this risk for non-residents using the deposit route:

• KKM (Kur Korumalı Mevduat), the wider exchange-rate-protected TRY deposit, where the Treasury topped up the lira return to cover any USD depreciation over the term.
• YUVAM (Yurt Dışında Yaşayanlar Mevduat), the non-resident-only variant, designed specifically for inbound foreign currency.

Both were closed in 2025: YUVAM to new accounts in March, KKM to new and renewing accounts on 23 August. Existing accounts mature at their original terms but no new applicants can use them. An applicant starting a $500,000 deposit in 2026 holds bare TRY for three years, with no subsidised hedge.

If you do not have a directional view on Turkish monetary policy and the lira, this is the price of the route. Run the dollar-bar math before signing anything: interest accrued in lira, converted back to dollars at the maturity-date rate, against the dollar amount you started with. The gap is the real cost of citizenship on this path, and in recent windows it has been larger than the cost of the real estate route’s all-in friction.

Deposit versus real estate, in one minute

Take the deposit route if you value paperwork simplicity, will not use Turkish property, and you can absorb a real possibility of dollar-bar capital loss over three years. Take the real estate route if you want the lower $400,000 ticket, an asset that holds value in its own market, the option to earn rental income during the holding period, and ownership of the exit risk. The timeline difference is small. Both routes land in the same 6 to 12 month range overall.

The deposit route does produce one clean thing: no income story in Turkey. No rental, no operating account, nothing to declare. Details on the tax page.

Paperwork itself is the same as every route. Passports, criminal records for you and your spouse since the 2025 compliance pass, apostilles, all listed on the requirements page. Or skip straight to a free eligibility check.