After KKM ended: what the $500K deposit route really looks like in 2026

The Central Bank closed Kur Korumalı Mevduat (KKM) to new and renewing accounts on 23 August 2025. YUVAM, the non-resident variant most often paired with the $500,000 citizenship-by-deposit route, stopped accepting new accounts in March 2025. Both retirements were signposted well in advance as part of the post-2024 normalisation pass, but the consequence for citizenship applicants planning a 2026 file has not been widely discussed.

The deposit route is still open. The mechanics that sat behind it for three years are not.

What KKM and YUVAM actually did

Both schemes neutralised the foreign exchange risk that has been baked into the deposit route since the rule was tightened on 6 January 2022. Under that rule, the foreign currency a citizenship applicant wires into Turkey is sold to the Central Bank on the spot rate of the day; the resulting Turkish lira balance is placed in a 3-year fixed deposit, blocked from withdrawal, transfer, pledge or collateral for the full lock.

In nominal lira, the depositor was always made whole, with interest. In dollars, the picture depended entirely on how the lira behaved over those three years. Through 2022, 2023 and most of 2024 the lira’s slide was rapid enough that a bare TRY deposit gave back significantly less than the $500,000 the file started with.

KKM and YUVAM closed that gap. The Treasury topped up the lira yield by whatever the FX depreciation took out of it, so the depositor’s effective dollar return tracked the originating currency rather than the lira. For citizenship applicants this turned the route into something close to a 3-year hard-currency park.

The retirements end that.

The bare-TRY math, in plain numbers

A 2026 applicant brings in $500,000. Suppose the spot rate at deposit date is 33 TRY to the dollar; the account opens with 16,500,000 TRY. At a nominal 42 percent annual interest, compounded over 36 months, the balance at maturity is in the neighbourhood of 47 million TRY.

What that converts back into in dollars is the whole question. If the lira holds at 33, the dollar return is over $1.4 million; this would not happen and no responsible planner should price it. If the lira reaches 70 over the period (a depreciation in the range of recent three-year averages), the dollar return is around $670,000. If the lira reaches 100, it is around $470,000: the principal is dented in dollar terms even after the high coupon.

Nobody can tell you which of those three the next 36 months will produce. The point is that the range now sits on the depositor, not the Treasury.

What this changes for the file

Nothing on the citizenship side. The BDDK conformity letter still issues against the lira deposit. The 3-year lock still produces the qualifying-investment evidence for the application. The presidential decree is on the same timeline.

What changes is the calculus on whether to pick this route at all.

For applicants who would have leaned on YUVAM to keep their dollars effectively safe, the deposit route is no longer the conservative pick it looked like in 2023 and 2024. The real estate route now compares more favourably than it did: the $400,000 ticket is lower, the asset sits in a market with its own price dynamics rather than tracking the lira directly, and the exit risk is at least observable rather than fully macro-driven.

For applicants who specifically want lira exposure, who hold a view that current TRY rates over-compensate for the realistic depreciation path, the deposit route remains the cleanest instrument for taking that bet.

For everyone in between, the answer is to run the math at the depreciation you expect and compare with the real estate route. The two paths cost roughly the same in friction terms; the difference is which risk you choose to carry.

See also

• The bank-deposit route page, now updated with the post-KKM mechanics.
• The YUVAM wind-down post for the earlier half of the story.
• The real estate route guide for the comparison most 2026 applicants are now running.
• The 2026 programme guide for the route-by-route summary.