Rayiç Bedel: The Official Value Behind Your Turkish Property Tax
Every Turkish property carries two numbers. One is what somebody will pay for it. The other is what the state says it is worth — and that second number sets your annual tax, the floor under your title deed fee, and more besides. For 2026 it moved sharply.
The number that is not the price
Foreign buyers in Turkey meet rayiç bedel at an awkward moment — usually when a lawyer explains that the figure they want to write on the title deed is not actually available to them, or when the first annual tax demand arrives and bears no obvious relationship to what they paid. Understanding it early removes a whole category of confusion.
Rayiç bedel is an administratively determined value. It is not an appraisal of your specific home, it is not a negotiated figure, and nobody inspects your kitchen to arrive at it. For land and for plots, it begins as something narrower and stranger: an asgari ölçüde arsa metrekare birim değeri — a minimum square-metre unit value, assigned not to your property but to the street your property is on.
Those unit values are set by valuation committees known as takdir komisyonları, constituted under Article 72 of Tax Procedure Law No. 213. For plots, the committees work neighbourhood by neighbourhood and then street by street, or by distinct value zones where a single street does not describe the market well. In touristic areas, the streets and zones that differ in value are identified by the provincial governor’s office at the level of specific sheets, blocks or parcels. For agricultural land, the committees work per province or district according to the land’s classification — dry, bottomland or irrigated.
Multiply the unit value for your street by your plot’s surface area and you have the tax value of the land. If there is a building on it, you add the building: its external floor area multiplied by a published construction cost per square metre, adjusted by factors such as construction class, lift and heating allowances, and a depreciation deduction for age. The sum is your vergi değeri — the tax value, the base your annual property tax is actually charged on under Law No. 1319.
The practical point: the two numbers can diverge enormously, and in Turkey they usually have. A street’s unit value may sit far below what property on it changes hands for. That gap is not a loophole and it is not an error — it is simply what happens when an administered value is reset every four years while a market moves every month. The 2026 reset was an attempt to close some of it.
Rates are charged per mille, not per cent. The figures above come from Articles 8 and 18 of Law No. 1319 and are expressed in binde — thousandths. A residence in a metropolitan municipality is taxed at two per mille of its tax value, which is 0.2 per cent, not 2 per cent. Thirty provinces carry metropolitan status for this purpose, among them Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Antalya, Muğla, Bursa and Aydın. Confirm the current rate and your own assessment with a licensed Turkish tax adviser before budgeting from it.
How a 2026 tax value is actually built
The arithmetic below follows the official worked example published in General Communiqué No. 89 (Official Gazette, 31 December 2025, issue 33124, 5th repeated). It is the clearest illustration of why the 2026 reset mattered — and of the ceiling that blunted it.
Start from the street’s old unit value
In the Communiqué’s example, a plot of 1,500 square metres sits in a municipality where the minimum plot unit value applied for 2025 was 600 lira per square metre. Multiplied by the surface area, the plot’s 2025 tax value was 900,000 lira. That is the baseline everything else is measured against.
Apply the committee’s new four-year figure
For the 2026–2029 cycle, the takdir komisyonu assessed the same street at 4,000 lira per square metre — a figure determined before 30 June 2025 and announced ahead of the new period. Applied straight to the same 1,500 square metres, that would give a 2026 tax value of 6,000,000 lira: not quite seven times the previous year’s base.
Test it against the statutory ceiling
Provisional Article 23 of Law No. 1319, as amended by Law No. 7566 of 4 December 2025, provides that building and land tax values calculated for 2026 cannot exceed the 2025 tax value plus twice that value. Municipalities are required to run this comparison themselves. Here the ceiling is 900,000 + (900,000 × 2) = 2,700,000 lira.
Take the lower of the two
Because 6,000,000 lira exceeds the ceiling, the value actually applied for 2026 is 2,700,000 lira. Worked backwards over 1,500 square metres, that is an effective unit value of 1,800 lira per square metre — well above the old 600, well below the committee’s 4,000. In the tax value, fractions below one thousand lira are ignored; in the tax itself, fractions below one lira are ignored.
Add the building, if there is one
Where a building stands on the plot, its cost element is added to the land or land-share value. The Communiqué’s second example uses a 120 square-metre first-class masonry residence and the official construction cost per square metre, which rose from 5,092.42 lira for 2025 to 6,535.61 lira for 2026. Those annual cost figures for 2026 were announced in General Communiqué No. 87, published in the Official Gazette of 9 August 2025, issue 32981. A separate rule in Law No. 1319 prevents a new building from being taxed on less than its land or land-share value for the four budget years following completion.
Carry it forward to 2027, 2028 and 2029
The capped 2026 figure is not a one-year concession — it becomes the base the rest of the cycle is calculated from. For the following years, the tax value is found by increasing the previous year’s value at the revaluation rate determined for that year under Law No. 213. This is the change Law No. 7566 introduced: Article 29 previously said half the revaluation rate, and the word “half” was removed. Interim-year increases are therefore larger from here than under the old regime.
Six things this number quietly controls
Rayiç bedel is filed under “property tax”, but the legislation deliberately reaches further than that. Provisional Article 23 states that its values apply to any tax, fee or financial obligation calculated on the property tax value.
Your annual property tax
The direct use. Emlak vergisi is charged on the tax value at the per-mille rates in Articles 8 and 18 of Law No. 1319, and is assessed annually in January and February of the budget year following the valuation year.
The floor under your title deed fee
Law No. 492 provides that the land registry and cadastre fee on a transfer is calculated on the declared transfer and acquisition price, but not on less than the property tax value. You cannot legitimately declare below rayiç bedel.
Exposure if a price is under-declared
Where it is established after registration that the fee was paid on less than the property tax value, or that the declared price did not reflect the real position, the fee on the difference is assessed additionally or ex officio.
The valuable housing tax
This separate tax is pegged to the building tax value determined under Article 29. Owners of residences whose 2025 building tax value exceeded 15,709,000 lira were required to file a declaration by 20 February 2026, to a tax office of the Ministry of Treasury and Finance.
The cultural heritage contribution
Under Article 12 of Law No. 2863, as amended by Law No. 5226, a contribution for the protection of immovable cultural assets is accrued at 10 per cent of the property tax assessed on you, and collected by the municipality alongside the tax itself.
Relief where use is restricted
Where a building, plot or land has its use restricted by legislation imposing public order, the property tax is collected at one tenth for as long as the restriction lasts. Once lifted, full liability resumes from the following budget year.
Rayiç bedel vs market value
They are measuring different things for different purposes. Treating either as a substitute for the other is where foreign buyers get into trouble.
| Rayiç bedel / vergi değeri | Market value | |
|---|---|---|
| Set by a municipal valuation committee | Yes | No |
| Specific to your individual property | No — street-level unit value | Yes |
| Reset on a fixed four-year cycle | Yes | No — continuous |
| Base for your annual property tax | Yes | No |
| Acts as the floor for the title deed fee | Yes | No |
| What the fee is actually charged on if higher | No | Yes — the declared price |
| Negotiable between buyer and seller | No | Yes |
| Established by a licensed appraiser | No | Yes — in a valuation report |
| Capped by statute for 2026 | Yes — provisional Art. 23 | No |
| Confirmed by the municipality | Yes | No |
The distinction matters most at the land registry counter. A property valuation report prepared by a licensed appraiser estimates market value; the rayiç bedel on the municipality’s books is a separate, lower, administrative figure. The declared sale price must be the real one, and in any event cannot fall below the tax value. The practice of writing a reduced figure on the deed to shrink the fee is not a grey area — it exposes the buyer to an additional assessment later, and it inflates the eventual capital gain when the property is sold on.
Not sure what your Turkish property is assessed at?
We check the municipal tax value, the title deed record and the annotations before anything is signed — and tell you plainly where the two numbers sit.
When the money is actually due
Article 30 of Law No. 1319 splits the annual property tax into two instalments. The first falls in March, April and May; the second falls in November. For an owner reading this in the autumn, that second instalment is the live one — and it is the single most common thing non-resident owners miss, because no demand reaches them abroad. Municipalities increasingly accept payment online, but the obligation does not depend on a reminder arriving.
There is a separate declaration duty that catches new owners and new builds. Under Articles 23 and 33, a bildirim must be given to the municipality where the property sits when a new building is completed, when part of it is brought into use before completion, or when one of the circumstances that alters the tax value arises. The declaration is made within the budget year — but where the change happens in the final three months of the budget year, it must be made within three months of the event. If you have bought, built, extended or converted, that duty is yours, not your agent’s.
One more point of timing that is easy to misread: property tax is assessed every four years, in January and February of the budget year following the year the valuations were made. That is why the 2026 figures were settled in mid-2025 and why the ceiling in provisional Article 23 had to be legislated in December 2025, weeks before the assessments landed.
What a foreign owner should actually do
Three things, none of them complicated. First, find out your number. Take the il, ilçe, mahalle, ada and parsel from your title deed — or look the parcel up through the land parcel enquiry — and ask the municipality’s emlak servisi for the assessed value on file. Many municipalities publish a rayiç bedel enquiry online.
Second, check that the municipality has you. A surprising number of foreign-owned properties sit on municipal records under a previous owner, which means the bills go nowhere and the arrears accumulate quietly. If you bought and never filed a bildirim, assume this applies to you until you have confirmed otherwise.
Third, keep the tax value in view when you sell. Because the 2026 reset raised it so steeply in many streets, it is no longer the trivially small number long-standing owners remember. See our guides to property taxes in Turkey and taxes in Turkey for foreigners.
Confirm current figures before you rely on them. Turkish valuation rules, rates and thresholds change frequently, and the amounts quoted here are drawn from the official 2026 communiqués and the professional guidance current when this page was written. Rayiç bedel in particular is set street by street and can only be confirmed by the municipality holding the record. Treat this page as orientation, not as advice on your own property, and verify your position with a licensed Turkish tax adviser or lawyer before acting on it.
Rayiç bedel — frequently asked questions
What foreign owners ask once the first tax assessment arrives and the number on it does not match the price they paid.
Where to go next
The rest of our library on Turkish property tax, title and land administration.
- Property taxes in Turkey — the full picture of what an owner pays, and when.
- Taxes in Turkey for foreigners — how non-residents are treated across the tax system.
- Tapu: the Turkish title deed — how to read what the register actually says about your property.
- Property valuation reports — the market-value appraisal, and when one is compulsory.
- Parsel sorgu — checking a Turkish land parcel online before you buy.
- İmar durumu — what can legally be built on a given plot.
- Land for sale in Turkey — where plot values and plot taxes diverge most.
- Kamulaştırma — what happens if the state expropriates your property.
- Buying property in Turkey: the pitfalls — including why under-declaring a price backfires.
- All Turkey property guides — the complete index.
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Tell us the property you are considering and we will check the municipal tax value, the title deed record, the annotations and the zoning position before anything is signed. We work with licensed Turkish conveyancers, appraisers and tax advisers.
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