Payment Processing · Buyer guide
Turkey is one of the few card markets where the central bank sets the price a bank may charge a shop, and it moves that price with interest rates. In March 2020 the ceiling on a single-payment credit card sale was 1.23%. It fell to 1.26% in December 2022, then rose quickly once the central bank began raising interest rates in mid-2023, reaching 3.56% in November 2023. It has stayed there every month since, through November 2026.
The cap is only half the story. Many small online shops in Turkey do not sign a separate agreement with each bank: they use a licensed payment institution such as iyzico or PayTR, which gives them one contract covering cards from every Turkish bank, and the caps are written for banks. Here is what each route costs, read from the central bank's tables and the providers' own Turkish pages on 30 October 2026.
The rules are in the central bank's Communiqué 2020/4 on fees banks may charge commercial customers, most recently amended in January 2026. Article 20 sets the most a bank may charge a merchant, assuming the bank pays the money over the next day:
Three details change what you actually pay. The caps exclude BSMV, the tax on banking and insurance transactions. They fall if the bank holds your money longer, by an amount tied to the number of days, and a bank may hold credit card takings for at most 40 days and debit card takings for at most 15. And apart from these merchant fees and charges passed on to the cardholder with your consent, a bank may take no other fee on the sale amount. These are maximums: the central bank's table says banks set their own rates below them, by agreement with each merchant.
The communiqué's scope article covers fees charged by banks, and the central bank's table describes the caps as what banks may charge. It does not mention payment or electronic money institutions, several of which publish rates above the cap. That matters because the providers many small online shops use are payment institutions.
Param, which advertises 2.29%, has been run by the TMSF as trustee since July 2026 and has paid merchants' outstanding balances only in part, in stages, so we have left it out. Moka United, formed by merging İş Bankası's Moka with OYAK's United Payment, sets its price for each business. Payment institutions pay 5% BSMV on their commissions rather than 20% VAT, so check whether a quoted rate includes it: iyzico's does.
Take a shop that sells 80 orders a month of TRY 500 each, all single-payment credit card sales: TRY 40,000 of takings.
The gap between the dearest published price and the cap is about TRY 300 a month here, before BSMV on the bank's fee. What the payment institutions sell for it is one contract covering every Turkish bank's cards and instalment programmes, and checkout tools, often with faster approval. On debit cards, where a bank may charge no more than 1.04%, the gap is wider: none of the payment institutions' pages we read lists a separate debit rate.
Retailers that must issue till receipts take cards either through a new-generation cash register (ÖKC) linked to the card terminal, or through an Android POS approved under tax communiqué VUK 507 that issues e-receipts, so check that a device suits your tax setup before you sign.
Turkish shoppers expect to split a credit card purchase into monthly instalments (taksit), often at the cash price. The merchant pays for that. A bank may add up to 1.78 points for each extra instalment under the cap. iyzico says each bank sets its own instalment surcharge and that a merchant can absorb all or part of it to offer instalments at the cash price, with the rates shown in the merchant panel. PayTR pays an instalment sale out in full on the agreed payout date and works with the main bank card programmes, including Bonus, Maximum, World, Axess and Paraf. Neither publishes its instalment rates.
The banking regulator, BDDK, limits how many instalments a card purchase may have, by sector, and bans them on some goods. Its published table bars instalments on food and restaurant meals, fuel, jewellery, telecoms, cosmetics and gift cards, among others, and sets a general maximum of 12. Card instalments on new phones are banned. A BDDK decision of 1 October 2026, followed by a Trade Ministry rule published on 15 October, raised the 12-month limit on consumer loans for phones to TRY 40,000, but left the card ban on new phones in place; refurbished phones may be sold in up to 12 card instalments. Confirm the limit for what you sell with your provider.
Article 17 of Law 5464 on bank cards and credit cards is blunt. A merchant that has signed a card agreement must accept debit and credit cards, including during sales, and may not ask the cardholder for a commission or a similar extra payment for using one. The penalty is that the provider terminates your merchant agreement, and no new one may be signed for a year. Article 18 also requires a sign at the entrance showing that cards are accepted.
So the cost of taking cards has to go into your prices. With a bank, the 3.56% cap and the 1.04% debit cap are the ceiling to negotiate down from; a payment institution's single rate for every card is easier to run but, on a debit-heavy till, not cheaper.
Turkey is not on Stripe's list of supported countries, and PayPal says it stopped operating there in June 2016 and that sellers in Turkey cannot receive payments. A business outside Turkey that wants to take Turkish cards can use a cross-border provider: EBANX says it accepts Visa, Mastercard and Troy cards and bank transfers in Turkey without a local entity, and dLocal's documentation lists Turkish cards, including Troy. Neither publishes a price list for Turkey. Troy is the domestic card scheme run by BKM, Turkey's interbank card centre.
Card use in Turkey is large and still growing: BKM reported about TRY 3.0 trillion of card payments in September 2026 alone, up 35% on a year earlier, of which TRY 901 billion was online. Inflation is part of that growth. Annual consumer price inflation was 29.73% in September 2026, according to the statistics office, its first reading below 30% since 2021.
For the region, see our guides to card fees in Greece, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
