⚖️ Turkish Citizenship for Spouse and Children: Who One Investment Carries

Turkish citizenship for spouse and children lets an investor’s foreign spouse and both spouses’ minor or dependent children acquire citizenship in one file.

The rule sits in Article 12(1)(b) of Turkish Citizenship Law No. 5901. It names the investor, the investor’s foreign spouse, and the minor or dependent foreign child of the investor and of the spouse. Every investment route in Article 20(2) of the Implementing Regulation leads into that single provision, so the family rule is identical whether the qualifying asset is an apartment in Istanbul, a bank deposit or a private pension contract (the threshold changes from route to route; the family does not).

The statute is short. The practice around it is not. Which date decides a teenager’s age, whose signature a stepchild’s file needs, what “dependent” means for an adult son or daughter, and what happens to the whole household if the investment is broken early: none of these answers appears in the one sentence of Article 12, and several of them are stated wrongly in guides that are still circulating in 2026.

What does Turkish citizenship for spouse and children actually cover? The investor’s foreign spouse, the investor’s minor children, the spouse’s minor children from an earlier relationship, and any child of either spouse who is legally dependent. No additional investment is required for any of them, and each receives citizenship on the same terms as the investor.

That is the statutory side. The calendar side is where families lose members of the file without anyone having made a mistake with the money.

When is a child too old to be included? A family can apply on time and still be late for one of its children. The General Directorate of Civil Registration and Citizenship now measures minority on the day the citizenship decision is issued, not on the day the file is submitted, and the regional administrative court that decides these disputes with final effect has upheld that practice.

The boundary is equally firm with the generation above.

Who stays outside the file, however close they are? Parents remain foreign family: part of the household, outside the nationality. A mother or father cannot be included in the citizenship application, and the family residence permit under Article 34 of Law No. 6458 does not cover parents either, so a parent who wants to live in Turkey needs a residence permit on a ground of their own.

The last question is the one that matters only after everything has gone right.

How can one broken investment reach every person in the family? The spouse and children acquire citizenship through the investor, and they share the investor’s exposure. Article 32 of Law No. 5901 applies a cancellation decision to the spouse and children who acquired Turkish citizenship through the person whose grant is cancelled, and the Directorate treats a failure to keep the investment for three years as a ground for cancellation.

Oznur & Partners is an Istanbul law firm whose citizenship practice is led by Founding and Managing Partner Fatih Oznur, a lawyer registered with the Istanbul Bar Association. In family files the firm fixes three points before any funds move: the decision date that every child must be inside, the consent documents any child from an earlier relationship will need, and the fallback route for anyone the provision does not reach.

⚖️ Who Qualifies for Turkish Citizenship Through a Family Member’s Investment?

Three categories of family member qualify through an investor’s file: the investor’s foreign spouse, the minor children of the investor and of the spouse, and the dependent children of either spouse. The legal source is Article 12(1)(b) of Law No. 5901, and the same wording appears in Article 31(1)(j) of Law No. 6458, which grants the investor and the same family members the short-term residence permit that precedes the citizenship file.

Two features of that wording decide more family files than any other. The first is the phrase “of the investor and of the spouse”. A stepchild (the spouse’s child from an earlier marriage or relationship) is inside the provision by the words of the statute, not by administrative discretion. The second is the word “dependent”, which extends the provision beyond age eighteen for a child who cannot live independently, but which no statute or regulation defines.

The family rule does not change with the investment route. The table below lists the routes in Article 20(2) of the Implementing Regulation and shows that the family provision attaches identically to each of them; what differs is the holding condition that the family’s status will depend on.

This page covers the family provision across all routes. The route-specific family questions for the private pension route, such as how the three-year term in the system interacts with a teenager’s age, are covered on our page on family rights with BES citizenship. Parents, siblings, in-laws and adult children who are not dependent are outside Article 12(1)(b) on every route, and each of them needs a route of their own.

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⚖️ Why Does the Decision Date, Not the Application Date, Decide a Child’s Place?

A child is included in the grant only if still a minor on the day the citizenship decision is issued. Many guides still say that a child who turns eighteen during processing remains eligible because they were under eighteen at submission. That statement described an earlier administrative practice; it does not describe the current one.

Law No. 5901 is silent on the point. It does not say whether minority is measured on the filing date or the decision date. For several years the General Directorate read the silence in favour of families and processed children who had been minors when the parents applied. The Directorate later ended that practice without any change to the law or the regulation, and began declining children who had turned eighteen by the time the parents’ file was concluded. First-instance administrative courts sided with families; the Ankara Regional Administrative Court, which decides these cases with final effect, reversed course in 2025 and upheld the administration.

The consequence is that a family’s investment date, filing date and contract date are all irrelevant to a teenager. The only date that counts is one the family does not control. Article 20(1) of Law No. 5901 makes the acquisition effective from the decision date, which also means the reverse is true: a child who was seventeen when the decision was issued stays a Turkish citizen after turning eighteen the following week.

Does the choice of investment route change the risk for a family with a seventeen-year-old? It changes the length of the path in front of the file, not the rule. The real estate route requires a licensed valuation report and a title deed annotation before the residence and citizenship stages. Financial routes such as the bank deposit or the pension route have fewer preparatory steps. Across all routes, the residence permit under Article 31(1)(j) of Law No. 6458 comes first, and the citizenship stage on a complete file typically takes three to six months. The Ministry’s timing is outside anyone’s control; the time spent before the file reaches the Ministry is not.

The planning rule is simple enough to write on one line and hard enough that families miss it. Where a child’s eighteenth birthday falls within the months a complete file needs, every document for that child is prepared before the qualifying investment is made, the route with the shortest preparation is preferred where the family’s finances allow it, and any consent from another parent is secured first. A file that loses three weeks to an apostille can lose a child with them.

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⚖️ Stepchildren, Earlier Marriages and the Other Parent’s Consent

Stepchildren qualify, but a child with a living parent outside the marriage usually needs that parent’s consent. Article 12(1)(b) of Law No. 5901 covers the minor children of the investor and of the spouse, and Article 20(2) adds the condition: a child in the custody of the mother or the father acquires citizenship with that parent only if the other parent consents, and if consent is refused, a court in the country of the parent’s habitual residence decides.

The consent is a listed document, not a courtesy (and not one the civil registry waives because the other parent is hard to reach). Form Vat-4, the General Directorate’s application form for exceptional acquisition, requires a document showing the other parent’s consent, made before a notary or an authorised officer in Turkey, or before a Turkish consulate or the competent authorities of the relevant country abroad, together with a duly certified Turkish translation.

The rule catches three kinds of household. An investor with a child from a first marriage needs the former spouse’s consent. A spouse bringing a child from an earlier relationship into the file needs the consent of that child’s other biological parent. A couple who share children only with each other need no outside consent, because Article 20(2) provides that children of parents who acquire citizenship together acquire it with them.

A refusal is not the end of the route, but it changes the calendar. The court process runs in the other parent’s jurisdiction, under that jurisdiction’s procedure, and it does not stop a child’s birthday. For a child of fifteen the delay may be absorbed; for a child of seventeen it can decide the outcome (which is why the child’s age, not the family’s budget, sets the order of work). For that reason the consent is requested first, before a property is reserved or a deposit is placed, so that a refusal can be taken to court while the investment is still a plan.

The consent also needs care in drafting. A declaration that names the wrong child, omits the child’s passport details or is signed before an authority whose certification cannot be apostilled will be returned. Where the other parent lives in a country outside the Apostille Convention, the chain runs through that country’s authorities and the Turkish consulate. These are the files in which our team starts with the consent and works backwards to the investment date, not the other way round.

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⚖️ Dependent Adult Children: The Category the Law Names but Never Defines

A child over eighteen can be included in an investor’s file only as a dependent child, and Turkish law uses the word “dependent” without defining it. Article 12(1)(b) of Law No. 5901 and Article 31(1)(j) of Law No. 6458 both speak of the minor or dependent child of the investor and of the spouse, and legal scholarship has recorded that the absence of any official explanation of the term creates legal uncertainty.

Many summaries of the programme translate “dependent” as “living with a disability”. The statute does not say that. Disability is the clearest case of dependency, and it is the case most likely to be accepted (a severe chronic illness is the case that comes up next most often), but the text is wider than the most common paraphrase of it. An adult child whose dependency rests on another ground is not excluded by the words of the law; the question is whether dependency can be proved to the administration’s satisfaction.

Proof is the practical problem. The Vat-4 application form is built around minor children, with a section for up to three children per form, so an adult dependent does not fit the form’s structure and has to be presented with supporting evidence: medical and official records establishing the dependency, evidence of the parent’s support, and civil records linking the child to the investor or the spouse. The assessment is individual, and it can be refused.

For that reason a dependent adult child is planned as a separate track inside the family file, with a fallback. If the family’s position is that the child is dependent, the evidence is assembled before the investment, and the family decides in advance what happens if the claim is not accepted: a separate qualifying investment in the child’s own name, or a residence-based route.

The same word appears in Turkish immigration law. Article 3 of Law No. 6458 defines family members for international protection purposes as the spouse, the minor child and the dependent adult child, and the residence permit rules use the same concept. A family that has already documented a child’s dependency for a residence permit has a starting point, although the citizenship assessment is made separately.

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⚖️ The Spouse: A Named Applicant, Not an Automatic Beneficiary

The investor’s spouse becomes a Turkish citizen only by being named in the application. Article 20(2) of Law No. 5901 states that acquiring Turkish citizenship by a decision of the competent authority does not affect the nationality of the spouse. The spouse therefore enters the file as an applicant in their own right, with a passport, civil status documents and biometric photographs, and receives citizenship by the same decision.

The marriage must be legally valid and documented. The Vat-4 form asks for the marriage certificate of a married applicant, the divorce document of a divorced one, and the spouse’s death certificate for a widowed one, and every foreign document is presented with apostille or consular legalisation and a notarised Turkish translation. The most common failure in a spouse’s file is not the marriage itself but the names (marriages registered in non-Latin scripts are the usual source): a surname spelled one way in the passport and another way in the marriage record is a discrepancy the civil registry asks to be explained.

Once granted, the spouse’s citizenship is not conditional on the marriage continuing. A divorce after the decision does not by itself end it. Cancellation under Article 31 of Law No. 5901 requires the grounds set out there, namely false statements or the concealment of material facts in the acquisition, and a marriage entered into only to obtain citizenship is the kind of fact that can meet that test. Questions of property and custody after a separation are a family law matter, covered on our page on divorce involving a foreign spouse.

The investment route and the marriage route are separate. A foreign national married to a Turkish citizen can apply under Article 16 after at least three years of marriage, provided the couple lives in family unity. A spouse who marries a citizen-investor after the investor’s grant is not covered by the investor’s file and uses the Article 16 route instead. Under Article 58(2) of the Implementing Regulation, a spouse who acquired citizenship through that marriage route is not affected if the investor’s grant is later cancelled.

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⚖️ Parents, Siblings and Adult Children: The Routes That Remain

Parents, siblings and adult children who are not dependent cannot acquire citizenship through the investor’s file, and each of them needs either a residence permit or a qualifying route of their own. Article 12(1)(b) of Law No. 5901 stops at the spouse and the children, and no degree of financial dependency extends it upward or sideways.

Parents are the relatives most often assumed to be eligible. They are not covered by the citizenship provision, and they are not covered by the family residence permit either: Article 34 of Law No. 6458 grants family residence to the sponsor’s foreign spouse, the minor children of the sponsor or the spouse, and their dependent children.

A parent who wants to live in Turkey applies for a short-term residence permit on one of the grounds in Article 31, for example owning real estate in Turkey (the property can be in the parent’s own name, separate from any qualifying investment). Our guide on how to get a residence permit in Turkey sets out those grounds, and our note on retiring in Turkey without citizenship covers the position of parents who intend to settle.

An adult child has two realistic routes. The first is a separate qualifying investment in the child’s own name, at the same threshold as the parent’s and in a separate file. The second is the general naturalisation route in Article 11 of Law No. 5901, which requires five years of uninterrupted legal residence and other conditions. Article 20(3) sends children who were not processed with their parents to exactly that route once they reach majority.

A Turkish citizen parent helps an adult child on the general route. Among the ways an applicant can confirm a decision to settle in Turkey under the general route, the General Directorate lists having a mother, father, sibling or child who has already acquired Turkish citizenship. The parent’s investment does not carry the adult child into citizenship, but it can support the child’s own naturalisation file years later.

Siblings and in-laws stand where adult children stand, without the Article 20(3) link. For any of these relatives the practical question is whether they need nationality or only the right to live in Turkey, because the residence permit answers the second need at a fraction of the cost of a second investment. Our page on residence permits for investors covers the residence side in detail.

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⚖️ Residence Permits for the Family Before the Decision

Every family member in an investment file holds a residence permit before holding citizenship. Article 31(1)(j) of Law No. 6458 grants a short-term residence permit to foreigners who make an investment of the scope and amount set by the President, together with their foreign spouse and the minor or dependent foreign children of the investor and of the spouse, and the citizenship file is built on that permit.

The investment permit is longer than an ordinary short-term permit. Article 31(2) caps ordinary short-term permits at two years per issue but excludes the investment category from that cap, and Article 31(5) allows permits under point (j) to be issued for up to five years at a time. In practice the permit is a step towards the citizenship decision rather than a status the family lives under for long, but its terms matter if the decision is delayed.

The permit can also outlast one member’s eligibility. A child who turns eighteen before the citizenship decision, and who is not dependent, stops being a family member for the purposes of point (j). Under Article 29 of Law No. 6458, a foreigner whose residence ground ends may apply for a permit that fits the new purpose of stay, so the child moves to a residence ground of their own (study, for example) rather than overstaying under the family’s permit.

The residence stage is also where the biometric attendance typically falls. The investor and the spouse usually attend once in person; minor children are generally not required to attend that step. Our page on residence permits for investors covers the stage in detail, including the documents each family member needs for it.

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⚖️ Children Born After Citizenship Is Granted

A child born after the parents become Turkish citizens is Turkish by descent and needs no investment, no application and no connection to the original file. Article 7 of Law No. 5901 provides that a child born within marriage to a Turkish mother or father, in Turkey or abroad, is a Turkish citizen from birth.

The administrative step is registration, not acquisition (families sometimes prepare a second citizenship file that was never needed). A birth abroad is registered through the Turkish consulate responsible for the place of birth, and a birth in Turkey through the civil registry. For a child born outside marriage to a Turkish father and a foreign mother, Article 7 requires that paternity be established under the applicable procedure before the child is recorded as Turkish; a child born outside marriage to a Turkish mother is Turkish by birth.

Children born after the grant also stand outside the family’s exposure to a later cancellation. Article 58(2) of the Implementing Regulation provides that children born after the person became a Turkish citizen are not affected by a cancellation of that person’s citizenship. A family whose investment is later questioned keeps its youngest members’ status intact, whatever happens to the members who acquired citizenship through the file.

A child born while the file is pending is in a different position from a child born after the grant. Until the decision is issued, the parents are not yet Turkish, so a baby born between filing and decision does not acquire citizenship by descent under Article 7. The child is, however, a minor child of the investor under Article 12(1)(b), and the family’s lawyer notifies the civil registry and adds the child’s documents to the pending file so that the newborn is included in the same decision. A child left out of the decision would otherwise have no derivative route of their own until adulthood.

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⚖️ When One File Fails: How Cancellation Reaches the Whole Family

A cancellation of the investor’s citizenship extends to the spouse and children who acquired citizenship through the investor. Article 32 of Law No. 5901 states that a cancellation decision is also applied to the spouse and children who acquired Turkish citizenship depending on the person concerned. The family’s citizenship is derivative, and so is its exposure.

The grounds for cancellation sit in Article 31: citizenship acquired through false statements or through the concealment of material facts. The General Directorate’s published procedure for foreign investors goes further and states that investors must keep meeting the investment conditions for the full three-year period, failing which the citizenship decision is cancelled under Article 31. Legal scholarship has questioned whether a later breach of a holding condition fits a provision written for deception at the time of acquisition (a fair question, but not one a family should test with its own passports), but a family’s planning should follow the administration’s stated position.

The three-year conditions differ by route, and each is a condition the whole family depends on. On the real estate route, a no-sale undertaking is recorded on the title deed for three years. On the deposit, bond, fund and pension routes, the asset must be held for three years, and on the pension route it must remain within the fund scope set by the Insurance and Private Pension Regulation and Supervision Authority. A sale, early withdrawal or transfer during that period is a family event, not a personal one.

Loss and cancellation work differently. Loss of citizenship under Article 29, which covers specific acts such as unauthorised service to a foreign state against Turkey’s interests, is personal, and Article 30 provides that it does not affect the spouse or children. Cancellation under Article 31 is the mechanism that travels through the family. Children born after the grant, and a spouse who later acquired citizenship through marriage under Article 16, are protected by Article 58(2) of the Implementing Regulation.

The detail of the grounds is set out in our guide on whether Turkish citizenship can be revoked after approval, and the post-approval obligations that most often create exposure are covered in our note on post-approval compliance risks. For families, the practical rule is that the three-year calendar is managed as a household commitment, with every family member’s status tied to it.

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⚖️ Documents Each Family Member Needs in a Citizenship File

The investment evidence is filed once; every personal document is filed per person, and all of them must agree with each other. The Vat-4 form lists the core set: the applicant’s passport, a birth certificate or civil registry extract showing identity, a civil registry extract or equivalent proving the family link to the spouse and children, civil status documents, the other parent’s consent where a child is in one parent’s custody, the service fee receipt, and two 50×60 mm biometric photographs.

Every document issued abroad is presented with an apostille, or with consular legalisation where the issuing country is not a party to the Apostille Convention, and with a notarised Turkish translation. The complete list for the pension route is on our page covering the documents required for a BES citizenship application, and the property route has its own additional set of valuation and title documents.

The Vat-4 form carries one choice families rarely expect: each applicant may request a Turkish first name and surname, and each child’s form section asks which surname the child will take. Keeping existing names written in Turkish spelling is the default and the usual choice (letters without a Turkish equivalent are transcribed). A family that wants a Turkish surname, or wants the children’s surnames aligned with a stepparent’s, decides that before filing, because a later change is a separate civil registry procedure.

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⚖️ After the Decision: Military Service and the Family’s Existing Nationality

Sons who acquire Turkish citizenship at twenty-two or older are treated as having completed military service. Article 43 of Military Service Law No. 7179 provides that persons who later acquire Turkish citizenship perform military service like Turkish nationals entering the service age that year according to their age and education, and that those who were twenty-two or older in the year of acquisition, or who document service in their former country, are deemed to have served.

For younger sons the position is different. A son who acquires citizenship before the year he turns twenty-two, and who has no documented service elsewhere, falls under the ordinary military service obligation, with the right on request to a two-year deferral from the date of acquisition, after which he is processed with the cohort entering service age that year. Article 43 also keeps the possibility of call-up in mobilisation. A family with a teenage son includes that obligation in its planning (it is the question fathers of fifteen-year-olds raise first), alongside the paid military service option available under Article 9 of the same law.

The family’s existing passports are a separate question. The document list on the Vat-4 form does not include any renunciation of the applicant’s current nationality, and Turkish citizenship by investment does not require it. Whether each family member may keep their existing nationality is decided by the law of that other country, not by Turkish law, and some countries withdraw nationality from citizens who acquire another one voluntarily.

That check is made per person. A spouse and children may hold different nationalities from the investor, and a rule that is harmless for one of them can cost another an existing passport. The home-country position of each family member is confirmed before filing, together with the tax consequences of the family’s new status covered in our guide to establishing Turkish tax residency.

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⚖️ Eight Mistakes That Remove Family Members From a Citizenship File

Most family members who fall out of a citizenship file are removed by the file’s preparation, not by the law. The eight mistakes below account for the family-specific failures our team sees when reviewing files prepared elsewhere, and each has a point at which it could have been prevented.

1. Relying on the filing-date rule for a teenager. The file is submitted when the child is seventeen on the assumption that submission fixes eligibility. Under current practice the decision date governs, so the child’s documents should have been complete before the investment, and the route chosen for the shortest path to a decision.

2. Treating the spouse as automatically included. Article 20(2) of Law No. 5901 says the investor’s acquisition does not affect the spouse’s nationality. A spouse who is not named in the application, with a full document set, is not in the decision (however obvious the marriage may be on the investor’s own documents).

3. Leaving the other parent’s consent until the end. The consent for a child from an earlier relationship is requested after the investment, the other parent refuses or delays, and the court process abroad outlasts the child’s minority. The consent should have been the first document requested, before any funds moved.

4. Presenting a dependent adult without evidence or a fallback. An adult child is listed as dependent with a short medical letter and no plan for refusal. Dependency is undefined in the statute and individually assessed, so the evidence needs to be complete and the alternative route agreed in advance.

5. Assuming parents can follow. Parents are promised citizenship or a family residence permit by an intermediary. Neither is available through the investor’s file, and the parent’s residence ground has to be built separately under Article 31 of Law No. 6458.

6. Letting four document chains disagree. A surname transliterated differently in a passport, a birth certificate and a marriage record is a discrepancy in a single-applicant file; in a family of five it is a discrepancy multiplied across parallel chains that must all agree with each other.

7. Treating an early exit as a personal decision. The investor sells the property or withdraws the deposit before three years, believing only their own status is at stake. Article 32 of Law No. 5901 extends a cancellation to the spouse and children, which makes the holding period a household commitment.

8. Ignoring the home country’s nationality rules. The family files without checking whether each member’s current country permits a second nationality. Turkish law does not require renunciation, but another country may withdraw its own nationality automatically, and that check is made per person, not per household.

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⚖️ Choosing a Route When the Family Composition Is Complicated

For a family, the right investment route is the one whose timing and holding condition fit the most vulnerable member of the file, not only the investor’s finances. The family provision is identical on every route, but the path to the decision is not, and the three-year condition that follows it binds everyone.

Four family profiles change the analysis in practice. A household with a child of sixteen or seventeen needs the route with the shortest preparation and a file whose documents are ready before the investment. A household with a child from an earlier marriage needs the consent secured, or the court process under way, before committing funds. A household with a dependent adult child needs the dependency evidence prepared and a fallback investment or residence plan agreed. A household whose liquidity needs may change within three years needs a holding condition it can keep, because an early exit is a family event.

The routes also differ in what they leave the family with. A property purchase can later give parents a residence ground in their own right if the property is placed in their name after the three-year period, and an inheritance plan for real estate in Turkey follows Turkish succession rules covered on our page on inheritance law for foreigners in Turkey. Financial routes leave no asset in Turkey after the holding period ends (other than the returned funds, if the family keeps them in a Turkish bank), which suits families whose connection to the country is the passport rather than the property.

The comparison of routes on threshold, holding period and compliance burden is set out in our citizenship by investment comparison, and the regulatory sequence from investment to decision is described in our guide on how to obtain Turkish citizenship. The family analysis is the layer that sits on top of both: which member of the household the chosen route puts at risk, and what is done about it before the first transfer.

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⚖️ How Our Istanbul Team Handles Family Citizenship Files

Oznur & Partners handles family citizenship files from Istanbul as one matter, with the investment, the residence permits and every family member’s citizenship documents reviewed together. The firm acts only for the investor and receives no commission from developers, banks or intermediaries, which matters in family files because the question of whether the family should proceed at all sometimes has a negative answer.

The work starts with a family map, not with the investment. Each member is placed in a category under Article 12(1)(b), each child’s eighteenth birthday is set against the realistic decision date, each child with a parent outside the marriage is matched with the consent or court process it needs, and each relative outside the provision is given a residence or investment fallback. Only then is the route chosen.

Most of the process runs remotely under a power of attorney granted to the firm’s lawyers, prepared before a notary or Turkish consulate and apostilled where it is issued abroad. The investor and spouse typically attend in person once for biometric registration connected to the residence permit stage; minor children generally are not required to travel for that step. Consent declarations from parents abroad are coordinated with the relevant consulate or foreign notary so that they arrive in a form the civil registry accepts the first time.

Communication is direct in English, and our team works with Arabic- and Russian-speaking families through the same file. The firm’s broader citizenship practice, including the transaction and compliance work that precedes a family file, is described on our page for our Turkish citizenship law firm, and family law matters that arise alongside a citizenship file are handled by our family lawyers in Istanbul.

Families also come to the firm with files already under way, prepared by another adviser or by a developer’s in-house team. In those cases the first task is an audit of the family side of the file: whether every member is named, whether any child is approaching eighteen against the likely decision date, whether consents are on file in an acceptable form, and whether the holding condition fits the family’s plans for the next three years. Correcting a family file before the decision is routine; correcting it afterwards usually means a separate route for the person left out.

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➡️ Questions and answers about Turkish citizenship for spouse and children
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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

✅ Are spouse and children included automatically when I apply for Turkish citizenship by investment?

They are included without any additional investment, but not automatically. Article 20(2) of Law No. 5901 states that acquisition by decision does not affect the spouse’s nationality, so the spouse and each child must be named in the application with their own documents.

✅ My child turns 18 while the file is being processed. Will they still be included?

Only if the citizenship decision is issued before the eighteenth birthday. Current practice of the General Directorate, upheld by the Ankara Regional Administrative Court in 2025, measures minority on the decision date. Statements that submission before eighteen is enough describe an earlier practice.

✅ Can my stepchildren get Turkish citizenship through my investment?

Yes. Article 12(1)(b) of Law No. 5901 covers the minor or dependent children of the investor and of the spouse. The consent of the stepchild’s other biological parent is usually required under Article 20(2).

✅ What if my former spouse refuses to consent for our child?

Article 20(2) of Law No. 5901 provides that, without consent, the matter is decided by a court in the country of the parent’s habitual residence. Because that process can take longer than the citizenship file, consent should be requested before the investment is made.

✅ Can my parents get Turkish citizenship if I invest?

No. Parents are outside Article 12(1)(b) of Law No. 5901. They are also outside the family residence permit in Article 34 of Law No. 6458, so a parent who wants to live in Turkey needs a short-term residence permit on an independent ground, such as owning real estate.

✅ Can an adult child with a disability be included?

Possibly, as a dependent child. The statute covers dependent children of any age but does not define dependency, so inclusion follows an individual assessment of documented evidence. A fallback route should be planned in case the claim is not accepted.

✅ What route does an adult child have if they cannot be included?

Either a separate qualifying investment in the child’s own name, or the general naturalisation route in Article 11 of Law No. 5901, which requires five years of uninterrupted legal residence. A parent who is already a Turkish citizen can support the child’s settlement evidence on that route.

✅ Does my spouse lose Turkish citizenship if we divorce?

Not because of the divorce itself. Once granted, the spouse’s citizenship does not depend on the marriage continuing. Cancellation requires the Article 31 grounds of false statements or concealment of material facts, such as a marriage entered into only to obtain citizenship.

✅ If my citizenship is cancelled, does my family lose theirs too?

Family members who acquired citizenship through your file do. Article 32 of Law No. 5901 applies a cancellation to the spouse and children who acquired citizenship through the person concerned. Children born after your grant, and a spouse who later acquired citizenship through marriage, are protected by Article 58(2) of the Implementing Regulation.

✅ Will my son have to do military service in Turkey?

Not if he is 22 or older in the year he acquires citizenship, or documents military service in his former country. Under Article 43 of Military Service Law No. 7179 he is then deemed to have served. A younger son follows the ordinary rules, with a two-year deferral available on request.

✅ Do my children have to give up their current nationality?

Turkish law does not require it; the Vat-4 document list contains no renunciation. Whether each child may keep the other nationality depends on the law of that country, which should be checked for each family member separately.

✅ Can we choose Turkish names for the children in the application?

Yes. The Vat-4 form allows each applicant to request a Turkish first name and surname and asks which surname each child will take. Keeping existing names in Turkish spelling is the default, and the choice should be made before filing.

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⚖️ Related Legal Resources

🔹 Investment Routes That Carry the Family

• Turkish Citizenship by Investment Paths: the routes in Article 20(2) of the Implementing Regulation, from the USD 400,000 property route to the USD 500,000 financial routes.
• Buying Property in Turkey for Citizenship: the licensed valuation, the three-year no-sale annotation and the title deed steps that precede the family’s residence permits.
• Family Rights with BES Citizenship: how the three-year term in the private pension system and the SEDDK fund scope interact with a family file.

🔹 Residence Before and Beyond Citizenship

• Residence Permit for Investors in Turkey: the short-term permit under Article 31(1)(j) of Law No. 6458 that covers the investor, spouse and children before the citizenship decision.
• Turkish Immigration Lawyers: residence and work permits for relatives outside the citizenship provision, including parents and adult children.

🔹 After the Grant

• Can Turkish Citizenship Be Revoked After Approval: the Article 31 cancellation grounds and the Article 32 extension to the spouse and children.
• Turkey 20-Year Tax Exemption: the foreign-sourced income exemption for new tax residents, which depends on tax residency rather than on citizenship.

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⚖️ Conclusion: A Household That Becomes Turkish Together

The family provision in Turkish citizenship law is one sentence long, and it is generous. A spouse, the children of both spouses, and children who remain dependent all travel on a single investment, with no second threshold and no reduced status. For most families the statute is the easy part.

What decides the outcome is everything the sentence leaves unsaid: a decision date that governs a teenager’s place, a consent that a former partner controls, a word like “dependent” that no text defines, and a three-year condition whose breach travels through the whole file. None of these is a reason to hesitate over the investment. Each is a reason to map the household before making it.

The families who move through this process intact are rarely the ones with the simplest composition. They are the ones who treated the family as the first question and the investment as the second, and who knew, before the first transfer, exactly who would be inside the decision when it arrived.

The statutory texts referred to on this page can be verified in Turkey’s official legislation database at mevzuat.gov.tr.