Turkey’s Law 7582: The Definitive Guide to the 20-Year Foreign-Income Tax Exemption

Last reviewed: 7 July 2026. This is analysis of a new statute, not tax or legal advice — see the disclaimer. The implementing communiqué is still pending; this page tracks it and gets updated as the rules land.

On 4 June 2026, Türkiye published Law No. 7582 in the Official Gazette (No. 33270) and quietly created one of the most aggressive personal tax regimes on offer anywhere: twenty years of zero Turkish income tax on foreign-source income for qualifying new residents. Not a lump-sum deal you negotiate, not a capped holiday — a statutory exemption, retroactive to 1 January 2026.

I’ll be straight about my vantage point: I haven’t moved to Turkey. I’m writing this from Barcelona, where I live on Spain’s digital nomad visa and pay Spanish standard progressive rates — because Spain’s celebrated impatriate regime turns out to be closed to people with my structure (more on that in a moment, it’s a story with a moral). Turkey’s Law 7582 is one of the options on my own spreadsheet for what comes next. So what follows isn’t first-hand Turkey experience; it’s the close reading of the statute I did for my own money — gazette text and Turkish primary sources, translated and annotated, with the open questions flagged as open instead of hand-waved.

The regime in one box

• What: 20-year exemption from Turkish income tax on income and earnings derived outside Turkey (new GVK mükerrer madde 20/D).
• Who: anyone who becomes a Turkish tax resident after three full calendar years with no Turkish domicile and no disqualifying Turkish tax liability.
• When: in force 4 June 2026; applies retroactively to income from 1 January 2026 for people resident from that date.
• The catch nobody leads with: foreign tax paid on the exempt income is not creditable in Turkey, Turkish-source income stays fully taxable — and if you’re a US citizen, the IRS doesn’t care what Ankara exempts.
• Companion perk: inheritance transfers during the exemption window taxed at a flat 1% instead of the progressive scale that tops out at 10%.
• Status: the Ministry of Treasury and Finance implementing communiqué (uygulama tebliği) is still pending as of 7 July 2026.

What Law 7582 actually is

Law No. 7582 is an omnibus amendment law — “on the Amendment of Certain Laws” — and the piece that matters here is the article it inserts into the Income Tax Law (Law No. 193): mükerrer madde 20/D, the “exemption for income and earnings derived from abroad.” It sits inside a broader 2026 package aimed at pulling in foreign capital and coaxing back the Turkish diaspora, alongside a companion amendment to the Inheritance and Transfer Tax Law (No. 7338) that we’ll get to near the end.

The design is unusual by international standards. Most “new resident” regimes cap the benefit (Italy’s flat tax is a fixed annual payment), time-limit it tightly (Spain gives six years), or restrict it to specific income types (Portugal’s old NHR). Türkiye went with twenty years, all foreign-source income categories, no annual charge. The nearest structural cousin is the classic UK non-dom remittance basis — except 20/D doesn’t even tax remittances: exempt income can be brought into Turkey without losing the exemption, on the statute’s face. One practical note before we go further: there is no official English text. The Gazette publishes in Turkish only, and Türkiye doesn’t issue authoritative translations of its tax laws — every English version you will find anywhere, including ours, is unofficial, and where it matters the Turkish text controls. We translated and annotated the operative text ourselves — the annotated translation is linked at the end of this guide.

Who qualifies: the two-limb test, precisely

Strip away the law-firm summaries and the statute asks exactly two things:

1. You become a Turkish tax resident (full taxpayer — tam mükellef); and
2. In the three full calendar years immediately before the year your residency begins, you had neither a Turkish domicile nor a disqualifying Turkish tax liability.

The phrase doing the heavy lifting is “disqualifying.” Here’s the distinction most English coverage fumbles: prior limited tax liability does not disqualify you. If you spent the last decade declaring rental income from an Antalya flat, dividends from Turkish shares, or capital gains on Turkish assets as a non-resident, the statute expressly protects you — those are limited-liability items. What kills eligibility is having been a full taxpayer, or having had a commercial or professional tax liability, or an active economic establishment in Turkey, in any of the three lookback years. One disqualifying year in the window is fatal; there’s no partial credit.

Three groups fall out of this test naturally: foreign nationals with no Turkish tax history at all (the easy case); Turkish citizens returning after three-plus years abroad — an enormous and underserved cohort this law was plainly written for; and internationally mobile people who own Turkish investments but never lived there, whom the limited-liability carve-out keeps eligible.

The trigger: how Turkish tax residency actually starts

Since the whole regime keys off the year you become resident, the residency rules are load-bearing. Under Articles 3–5 of the Income Tax Law, you become a Turkish tax resident by either route:

• Domicile — you settle in Turkey in the Civil Code sense: your home and life move there. This can make you resident from arrival.
• Presence — you stay in Turkey continuously for more than six months within one calendar year. Temporary absences don’t break the continuity count.

The calendar-year framing creates a genuine planning variable: when in the year you land matters. Arrive in early spring and the six-month test can complete inside that same year, making it residency year one. Arrive in September without establishing domicile, and the six-month clock can’t finish before 31 December — your residency year is the next calendar year, which shifts the three-year lookback window with it, and leaves your arrival months in a limbo we’ll quantify in the examples below.

Map your own years

Rather than making you diagram this on paper, we built the calculator. Give it your history and arrival date; it returns your first residency year, the three lookback years with pass/fail, and your twenty-year window. (Also available as a standalone page.)

Five people, five calendars

The straightforward mover. An American remote worker who has never touched the Turkish tax system arrives in Istanbul in March 2027 and stays. The six-month test completes in 2027, so 2027 is residency year one. Lookback: 2024, 2025, 2026 — all clean. Exemption window: 2027 through 2046.

The returning citizen. A Turkish national who moved to Germany in 2021 and gave up Turkish residency comes home in February 2026. Lookback: 2023–2025, all clean. She’s resident in 2026 — and because the law applies to persons resident from 1 January 2026, her foreign income from January 2026 onward is covered, even though the law wasn’t gazetted until June. Window: 2026–2045.

The landlord who never lived there. A Dutch investor has owned and rented out an Antalya apartment since 2019, declaring the rent each year as a non-resident. That’s limited liability — expressly protected. He moves to Turkey in 2027: eligible, same as the straightforward mover. (His Turkish rental income stays taxable in Turkey as it always was; the exemption covers his foreign income.)

The boomerang. Someone who was a Turkish tax resident through 2024 wants back in. The lookback needs three clean full calendar years: 2025, 2026, 2027. The earliest residency year that qualifies is 2028 — and if any of those years accidentally re-triggers residency (a long stay, a domicile), the clock restarts.

The September arrival. Lands 15 September 2026, rents an apartment, doesn’t move his family or establish domicile. Only 108 days remain in 2026 — the six-month test can’t complete, so residency year one is 2027 (lookback 2024–2026). Two consequences: his window runs 2027–2046, and his September–December 2026 income sits outside the exemption entirely. Had he instead settled on arrival — home, family, the Civil Code works — 2026 could be residency year one with the retroactive January coverage. Same person, same money, materially different outcome. This is why the arrival-date question in the mapper isn’t decoration.

Two more, from the corridors this site watches

The Ukrainian who fled to Antalya in 2024. There is no refugee or humanitarian carve-out anywhere in Law 7582 — someone who became a Turkish tax resident in 2024 simply isn’t a “new” resident now, and on the plain calendar she’d wait out three clean years before qualifying. But there’s a thread worth pulling before conceding that. Article 5 of the Income Tax Law says a foreigner is not treated as settled — even past the six-month mark — when the stay is for a temporary purpose or results from circumstances beyond the person’s control; the statute’s examples are detention and illness, but the list is expressly illustrative. Someone who fled a war intending to return home has at least a colorable argument that 2024–2025 never made her a tax resident at all — in which case her lookback may still be clean and her twenty-year window could open now. To be clear about the weight of that: it’s an argument, untested against a month-old law, and much weaker if she filed Turkish returns as a full taxpayer in those years. It belongs in front of Turkish counsel, ideally as a ruling request — but it’s the difference between “locked out until 2029” and “eligible today,” so it’s worth the fee to ask.

The Russian who opened a Turkish bank account but never moved. Hundreds of thousands of Russians opened Turkish accounts in 2022–2023 to keep personal money moving when home-country rails were cut. For 20/D purposes that history is close to harmless: a bank account creates neither domicile nor presence, and even the deposit interest it earned — Turkish-source, taxed by withholding as a non-resident — is exactly the limited-liability category the statute expressly protects in the lookback. If Istanbul later becomes the actual move, the banking years don’t taint the twenty-year window at all. What would: any calendar year in which the visits crossed the continuous six-month line, or a stay that started to look like settling — an apartment, a family, a life. The account was never the problem; the couch you slept on might be.

What’s exempt — and what never was going to be

Exempt (foreign-source)	Not exempt
Foreign salary and self-employment income	Any Turkish-source income (Turkish salary, business profits, rents)
Foreign business profits	Income tied to work physically performed in Turkey — the contested category, see below
Foreign dividends and interest	Non-income taxes: VAT, property tax, motor vehicle tax, stamp duties
Rent from property abroad	Social security contributions, where applicable
Capital gains on foreign assets
Foreign pensions

The contested category deserves a hard look, because it’s the entire question for remote workers: if you sit in Istanbul doing work for foreign clients, is that income “derived outside Turkey”? The statute doesn’t say, and the communiqué is expected to. I’d urge real caution against assuming the friendly answer, and here’s my reason: Spain runs exactly this source rule against me today. My clients are American, my contracts are American, my bank is American — and Spain sources my consulting income to Spain anyway, because services income is sourced where the work is physically performed, under both Spanish domestic law and the standard treaty framework. That is the majority international position. If Turkey’s communiqué adopts it, the digital-nomad reading of 20/D (“move to Istanbul, keep invoicing, pay nothing”) dies on contact. If it doesn’t, this regime is even bigger than it looks. Until the communiqué lands, treat remote-work income as an open risk, not a settled win.

The no-credit trap: exempt is not the same as optimal

Buried in the statute is the clause that should reorganize your planning: taxes paid abroad on exempt income cannot be credited against Turkish tax — and related expenses can’t be deducted either. Obvious once said: there’s no Turkish tax on that income to credit against. But it inverts the usual cross-border logic. In a credit system, source-country withholding is annoying but recoverable; under 20/D it is a final, sunk cost.

Illustration: a portfolio throwing off dividends with, say, 15% withholding at source. Under a credit regime, that 15% offsets home-country tax. Under 20/D, Turkey charges nothing and credits nothing — the 15% is simply gone. Your effective global rate on that income is the source withholding. So the planning work migrates upstream: minimizing withholding at source — treaty rates, where the assets sit, and which entity holds them — becomes the whole game. For high earners this single clause decides whether 7582 beats a lump-sum regime elsewhere; run your actual portfolio through it before falling in love with “0%.”

If you’re a US citizen: Ankara can’t fire the IRS

Every “0% tax in Turkey!” post you’ll see this year omits the audience for whom it’s least true. The United States taxes citizens on worldwide income wherever they live, and the US–Turkey treaty’s saving clause preserves exactly that. Law 7582 zeroes the Turkish layer. Your 1040 continues. FBAR continues. Form 8938 continues — I file this stack every year from Spain and it follows you to Istanbul unchanged.

Now the mechanics that actually bite. The foreign tax credit — the workhorse that keeps most US expats from double taxation — needs foreign tax paid to work. Under 20/D you pay Turkey nothing on foreign-source income, so there’s nothing to credit: you pay full US rates on it. The exemption is worth strictly less to Americans than to everyone else. The foreign earned income exclusion still shelters earned income up to its cap (roughly $130k) if you meet the residence tests; everything above, and all passive income, is taxed by the US as if Turkey didn’t exist.

And one more line the marketing posts skip entirely: the US has no totalization agreement with Türkiye (unlike Spain, unlike most of Western Europe — the current list is on ssa.gov). Self-employed Americans in Turkey keep paying US self-employment tax — 15.3% up to the wage base — with no certificate-of-coverage escape, on top of whatever Turkish social security applies to their situation. For a self-employed American, the honest comparison isn’t “0% vs. my current rate”; it’s “US federal + SE tax + source withholding, minus nothing.” Sometimes that still wins. Run it.

The view from Spain

Part of why 7582 is getting attention in my corner of Barcelona: the European alternatives keep narrowing. Spain’s impatriate regime — the “Beckham law” everyone moves here for — is six years, not twenty, and if you own the foreign company you work for, there’s a decent chance it’s not available to you at all: a controlling owner generally can’t have the employment relationship the regime requires, a wall several thousand consultants and founders discover only after they’ve already become Spanish tax residents. (I’m one of them; that story, with the paperwork, is its own article.) Meanwhile the first Beckham cohorts of the 2020–21 wave are aging out of their six-year windows and shopping for what’s next. Against that backdrop, a twenty-year statutory exemption two borders away is going to pull people — and the year you leave Spain and the year you land in Turkey interact through both countries’ residency tests and the Spain–Türkiye treaty tiebreaker, which rewards doing the calendar math before you book movers, not after.

The 1% inheritance companion

Law 7582 also amended Article 16 of the Inheritance and Transfer Tax Law: for people benefiting from the 20/D exemption, inheritance transfers during the exemption window are taxed at a flat 1%, versus the standard progressive scale, which climbs by tranche from 1% to 10% on the largest estates. The benefit is parasitic on 20/D — lose the income exemption and the 1% goes with it. For families relocating with real estates and portfolios in tow, twenty years of 1% inheritance treatment may quietly matter as much as the income exemption; it’s a genuine estate-planning window, and one worth professional design rather than improvisation.

Getting it wrong is expensive

The statute’s enforcement clause has real teeth: if it’s later established that you claimed the exemption without meeting the conditions, the unassessed taxes are treated as lost to tax evasion — back assessment, the penalty regime, and interest, potentially across many years of a long window. The three-year lookback is a factual claim about your past that you may someday need to prove. Until the communiqué defines the evidentiary standard, the rational posture is over-documentation: exit stamps and travel records, foreign tax returns for the lookback years, foreign leases and utility bills, and employer letters — the boring paper trail that turns “I wasn’t resident” from an assertion into a file.

What the communiqué still has to answer

Status as of 7 July 2026 — pending. The open items we’re watching: the documentary standard for proving the three-year lookback; the mechanics of claiming and maintaining the exemption (declaration? application? automatic?); the source characterization of remote work physically performed in Turkey — the big one; and any interaction with residence-permit categories. When the tebliğ publishes, this guide will be updated to match it; the newsletter is the fastest way to hear that it happened.

If you’re seriously considering it

1. Run the mapper above and pin down your residency year and lookback window before anything else.
2. Audit your lookback years for accidental Turkish exposure — long stays, a forgotten registration, anything that could read as domicile or full liability.
3. Price the no-credit clause against your real portfolio’s source withholding, and — if American — add the US layer honestly.
4. Time the landing. Early-year arrival or genuine domicile-on-arrival versus a late-year arrival changes your window by a year and your first-year coverage by up to twelve months.
5. Assemble the non-residency file for the lookback years now, while the documents are easy to get.
6. Wait for the communiqué before executing if your income is remote work performed in Turkey — that question is genuinely unresolved.
7. Get Turkish counsel for the execution. Analysis like this maps the terrain; the filing is a professional’s job. (When we’ve vetted firms we trust for this, we’ll say so — and disclose the relationship.)

FAQ

I’ve been in Turkey since January 2026 — did I miss it?

No. The law applies to persons deemed resident from 1 January 2026 onward. If you became resident this year and your 2023–2025 lookback is clean, you’re covered from 1 January 2026 — no new action required by the statute’s text, though watch the communiqué for claim mechanics.

Does buying property in Turkey qualify me?

Buying property can support a residence permit, and citizenship-by-investment is a separate program entirely. Law 7582 cares about tax residency and your three-year lookback — ownership alone neither qualifies nor disqualifies you.

I’m a Turkish citizen abroad. Am I eligible when I return?

Citizenship is irrelevant to the test. If you’ve had no Turkish domicile and no disqualifying liability for the three full calendar years before your return year, you qualify like anyone else — returning citizens are arguably the law’s primary audience.

What about crypto gains?

Unresolved in an interesting way: the exemption turns on where income is derived, and sourcing rules for crypto disposals are exactly the kind of thing the communiqué may or may not settle. Gains realized on foreign platforms have a reasonable foreign-source argument; treat it as unconfirmed for now.

Dividends I pay myself from my own foreign company?

On the statute’s face, foreign dividends are exempt. Whether Turkey looks through owner-operator arrangements — especially where the underlying work happens in Turkey — is precisely the substance question other jurisdictions have been tightening. Flagged for the communiqué; don’t build a structure on the optimistic answer yet.

If I leave Turkey and come back later, do I get a second window?

The statute frames the exemption around becoming resident after the clean lookback; whether a person who used part of a window, left for three-plus years, and returned can re-qualify isn’t addressed in the text we have. Genuinely open — awaiting guidance.

Do digital nomads without a residence permit qualify?

Tax residency and immigration status are separate systems. The tax test is domicile or six-plus months’ presence — a permit isn’t part of it. But six-plus months of presence without a matching immigration basis is its own problem, and the communiqué may yet tie the exemption’s mechanics to permit categories. Watch this space.

When exactly do my 20 years start?

With your first residency year — which, per the mapper above, is a function of your arrival date and whether you establish domicile or ride the six-month presence test.

Sources

• Law No. 7582, Official Gazette No. 33270 (4 June 2026) — primary text; our annotated translation of GVK mükerrer madde 20/D [link on publication]
• Istanbul Lawyer Firm — GVK Mükerrer 20/D guide
• IMI Daily — gazetting report
• Karen Audit — Law 7582 exemption note
• STEP — industry summary
• SSA — US totalization agreements list · IRS — totalization agreements

This guide is analysis and documented research, not tax, legal, or investment advice — full disclaimer. Some pages on this site contain partner links, disclosed per our affiliate disclosure; this one currently has none.