Tax deduction of 90 mln liras from YouTubers

Neşe Karanfil - ISTANBUL

The Treasury and Finance Ministry has made a tax deduction of about 90 million Turkish Liras from more than 10,000 YouTubers.

A simple taxation procedure has been introduced for those who produce content on social media and develop mobile applications.

With a regulation made in late 2021, a 15 percent withholding tax was deducted from YouTubers who opened a bank account and earned income below a certain limit. Within this framework, the number of YouTubers who opened an account with the bank was 10,663 in 2022, according to the data from the Revenue Administration.

When the regulation first came out, the limit was determined as 600,000 liras. As the limit is increased every year by the revaluation rate, it became 880,000 liras in 2022. Last year, content creators who earned income below this number had to open accounts in banks established in Türkiye to benefit from this exception.

If it is determined that an account is not opened in a Turkish bank and that the entire revenue is not deposited into the said account, a content creator may face tax penalties.

In addition, taxpayers who are found to have benefited from the exemption despite not meeting the conditions may also have to pay the missing taxes with penalties.

While the total revenue within the scope of the earnings exemption in social media content creation was 592.3 million liras, 88.9 million liras were deducted from this revenue.

In the development of applications for mobile devices, 13.4 million liras were generated, while 2 million liras were deducted from this revenue.

Thus, it was understood that Youtubers and social media content creators generated total revenue of 605,654,000 liras in 2022. A withholding tax of 90,903,000 liras was deducted from this income.