The Costs of a Turkish Citizenship Application: Which Items Are There?

Published: 9 October 2026 · Reading time approximately 8 minutes

The official application fee is usually the smallest part of the budget. What inflates the total is the spending done to become ready to apply: obtaining the foreign documents, certifying them, translating them, having them notarised and, where necessary, renewing them.

This article does not give a price list. Instead it gives something more useful: the full list of cost items, which of them are paid per person and which per document, which item carries the risk of being paid twice, and the typical mistakes that inflate the cost unnecessarily. Since official fees are updated every year we give no figures here; the authority that publishes the current amounts is the Directorate General of Civil Registration and Citizenship, and they must be confirmed from the official source before payment.

Cost items: the full list

The budget of a citizenship file consists of four groups.

1. The official application fee

This is the service fee or charge taken for a citizenship application. Three things need to be known. First, it is updated every year; calculating with last year’s figure is misleading. Second, it can vary with the route of application; applications made by the general route, through marriage and by other routes are not assessed under the same item. Third, it is per person; if you are applying in the same period as your spouse or your adult child, this fee arises separately for each applicant.

The fee is paid before the application file is submitted and the proof of payment is added to the file. If the application is refused, no refund of the fee paid should be expected; the fee is taken in return for the examination of the application, not in return for a positive decision.

2. The cost of obtaining the foreign documents

This is the least predictable item in the file, because it depends entirely on the practice of the institutions in your own country.

• Obtaining documents such as a birth record, a civil registry record, a marriage record and, where there is one, a divorce judgment from your own country
• The institutional charges paid for these documents
• The cost of obtaining them through a representative if you are not in your country
• Shipping and courier expenses
• The cost of obtaining a document again where it is required to be recently dated

In many files this item comes out larger than the official application fee, and it is the one most often overlooked when the budget is planned.

3. The certification and translation chain

For a foreign document to be accepted for processing in Türkiye it has to pass through a chain, and every link in that chain is a separate cost.

• Apostille: required if the country issuing the document is party to the Hague Apostille Convention, paid per document and in the issuing country
• Consular certification: if the country is not party to the convention, this route is followed instead of an apostille, paid per document
• Sworn translation: required without exception if the document is not in Turkish, calculated according to the volume of the document
• Notarisation: where it is required for the translation to be accepted by an official authority, paid according to the notary tariff

The critical point here is this: this chain runs per document, not per file. If you have seven documents, the apostille is paid seven times, the translation seven times and the notarisation seven times. What inflates the total is not the price of a document but the number of documents.

4. Costs that continue throughout the process

The citizenship process is not short, and throughout that time you have to maintain your existing status.

• Residence permit renewals: the application being in progress does not remove this obligation; when the process approaches two years this item repeats several times
• Foreign health insurance: continues as long as it is required for the residence permit
• The cost of completing deficiencies: obtaining a requested document again, having it translated again or obtaining a recently dated version
• Costs arising if the investigation is renewed: the police search is valid for one year, and if the file is not finished in that time a renewal may be needed
• Optional consultancy fee: if you run the file yourself this item does not arise

The three things that really inflate the cost

The real difference in cost comes not from the price of the items but from how many times the same item is paid.

First, documents being translated again. This is the most common repeat cost and the reason is usually the spelling of a name. When a name outside the Latin alphabet is written in two different ways in two different translations, the documents do not confirm one another and the file comes back. Having all the documents translated with the same spelling decision and, where possible, by the same hand keeps this item to a single payment.

Second, a document being required with a recent date. For some documents a requirement of being recently dated applies. Obtaining a document very early and then waiting for months means obtaining the same document a second time. The correct order is this: first plan the whole file, then obtain the date-sensitive documents last.

Third, the process extending by itself. When a file comes back because of a missing document, the cost does not rise only by the amount of that document: the residence permit is renewed once more, the insurance is paid for another year, the investigation may be renewed. A file submitted complete from the outset is the single intervention that most reduces the total cost.

Is there a difference in cost in an application through marriage?

The list of items is the same; their weight changes. The official application fee may be assessed differently according to the route of application; the current amount needs to be confirmed. In an application through marriage the documents relating to the marriage, that is the marriage record and, where there is one, the judgment showing that a previous marriage has ended, are added to the chain, and these documents too pass through the apostille, translation and notary links.

No translation cost arises for the Turkish spouse’s documents; only the foreign spouse’s documents enter the chain. If both spouses are foreign, citizenship is a separate file and a separate fee for each spouse, because citizenship does not pass to a spouse automatically.

Common mistakes

• Budgeting with last year’s figure found on the internet
• Calculating only the official application fee and not counting the document, certification and translation items at all
• Not knowing that the translation cost is paid per document rather than per file
• Obtaining the date-sensitive documents at the very start and then waiting
• Having the documents translated in different places and not unifying the spelling of names
• Not putting the residence permit and insurance costs for the whole process into the budget at all
• Expecting the fee paid on a refused application to come back
• Trusting package prices offered with a promise of a guarantee; a citizenship decision is an administrative discretion and no service provider can guarantee its outcome

What do we do?

Because the amounts are updated every year we give no figures here. Instead, in a consultation we work out together how many documents your file contains and which items will arise, and we calculate with the current fees. On the translation side we quote a net price according to the page and word count, and by settling the spelling of names in a single decision across the whole file we prevent repeat costs. Send us your document list and let us work out the items together.