Turkey Company Register: How to Search the Ticaret Sicili and Verify Turkish Companies (2026)

1. What is the Turkish company register?

Turkey splits its register between the offices that keep it and the gazette that publishes it. The Ticaret Sicili, the trade registry, is a state register of the facts about traders that third parties need to know. Under article 24 of the Turkish Commercial Code (Law No. 6102), the Ministry of Trade sets up trade registry offices inside the chambers of commerce and the chambers of commerce and industry, and those offices keep the register under the Ministry's supervision. There are 238 of them, in every province and in some large districts.

Since 1 January 2015 all 238 offices have worked in MERSİS, the Central Registry Record System (Merkezi Sicil Kayıt Sistemi) run by the Ministry of Trade. Registrations, changes, and deletions are carried out in MERSİS and the records are kept there. Unless the law or the Trade Registry Regulation says otherwise, what an office registers is then announced in the Türkiye Ticaret Sicili Gazetesi, the Turkish Trade Registry Gazette, which the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (TOBB) publishes in Ankara every working day. The announcement is not a formality. Under article 36 of the Code, a registry entry takes effect against third parties from the business day after it appears in the gazette, and under article 37 third parties may rely on the announcement if it differs from the entry.

In short: the registry office holds the file, MERSİS holds the record, and the gazette is where the outside world gets to read it.

2. How to search the Ticaret Sicili step by step

The public side of the register is the Trade Registry Gazette's website. It offers two tools: a trade-name check that anyone can run, and the archive of announcements, which needs a member account or an e-Devlet login. When we tried to look up Turkish Airlines for this guide, the name check stopped at an image security code and the archive at its login, and we do not solve CAPTCHAs, so there is no company record below. The steps describe what the site itself shows.

1. Open the Trade Registry Gazette site

   Go to ticaretsicil.gov.tr, run by TOBB. The home page leads to İlan Görüntüleme (view announcements), Onaylı Suret İşlemleri (certified copies), Abonelik (subscriptions), and Unvan Sorgulama (trade-name check), and the same links sit in the Hızlı Erişim (quick access) menu on the right of the inner pages. The ENGLISH button in the top bar switches the menus and the search form to English.

2. Run the trade-name check

   Unvan Sorgulama has one field for the trade name (Unvan) and a security code (Güvenlik Kodu) shown as a distorted image, which you retype before you click SORGULA. The form opens without an account. The site describes what comes back: whether the name is in use and, if it is, at which trade registry office and under which number it is registered.

   

3. Search on the registered Turkish name, not the brand

   A trade name may be in a foreign language, but the words for the business activity and the company type must be Turkish. Anonim and limited company names must contain the words Anonim Şirket or Limited Şirket and at least one business activity, so registered names run long, like the example on the name-check page, A İnşaat Otomotiv Tekstil Sanayi ve Ticaret Anonim Şirketi. If you were given a brand, ask for the full trade name and the MERSİS number first.

4. Create an account or log in with e-Devlet

   To read announcements you have to log in; the site calls this the free gazette query. Registration asks for a member type (person, company, bank, government agency, chamber or exchange, or embassy), a name, an email address, and a password, and the trade registry number field is optional. The member login asks for an image security code as well. There is also a login through e-Devlet, the Turkish government gateway.

5. Read the company's announcements

   İlan Görüntüleme opens the archive back to 1957. Every announcement can be saved as a PDF and printed, and you can order a certified copy, e-signed for TRY 75 or wet-signed for TRY 225 at 2026 prices. Read them in date order: incorporation, capital changes, board appointments and resignations, moves, and, at the end of a company's life, the liquidation notices.

6. Go to the registry office for certified register documents

   The gazette gives you announcements, not register extracts. A certified copy of the register's contents, or a certified statement of whether a particular fact is registered, comes from the trade registry office that holds the file. The Trade Registry Regulation lets anyone ask for these, against costs and a fee (harç).

3. What data is public and what it costs

Reading the gazette is free once you are logged in. What costs money is anything certified and anything in bulk. TOBB publishes its prices per year, and the figures below are the 2026 rates.

Two things stand out. First, bulk access is priced like infrastructure. Even the cheapest tier is close to half a million lira a year, and a subscription starts by sending the gazette a wet-signed form with the bank receipt for the full fee. TOBB's own price sheet works it out at roughly half a lira per notice, assuming 930,000 notices a year. Second, several structured fields are tied to incorporations. The price sheet offers the address and capital fields for incorporations (kuruluşlar için) only. Level 3 adds tax numbers, NACE codes, and lists of partners and representatives, with Turkish ID numbers masked except for the first three and last two digits.

Publishing is paid for by the companies. Under the tariff in force since 1 January 2026, a company notice costs TRY 5.53 a word, an incorporation notice TRY 2.48 a word, and a sole trader's opening notice a flat TRY 708, while closures and registrations the office makes on its own initiative are published free.

What the gazette's tools do not give you: an accounts search, revenue, or employee counts. The gazette's searchable PDFs explicitly leave out financial tables, and in the Commercial Code's chapter on company financial statements, the articles headed İlan (announcement) and Özet finansal tabloları (summary financial statements) were repealed in 2012. Listed companies publish their statements on KAP.

4. Turkish legal forms, briefly

Article 124 of the Commercial Code lists five types of commercial company: kollektif, komandit, anonim, limited, and cooperative. Kollektif and komandit companies count as partnerships of persons, while the anonim şirket, the limited şirket, and the komandit company with share capital count as capital companies. Sole traders whose business is a commercial enterprise are registered as well.

When you read an older incorporation notice, keep the date in mind. Presidential Decision No. 7887 of 24 November 2023 raised the minimum capital from TRY 50,000 to TRY 250,000 for an anonim şirket, and from TRY 10,000 to TRY 50,000 for a limited şirket.

5. How to verify a Turkish company: a practical checklist

1. Get the full trade name and the MERSİS number

   Ask for both in writing. Under article 39 of the Commercial Code, commercial letters must show the registry number (sicil numarası), the trade name, and the head office, so a letterhead without them is already a question. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Run the trade-name check

   Search the exact trade name on Unvan Sorgulama and note the registry office and the number it returns. Check both against the company's letterhead and documents. If the office differs from the one on their documents, ask why before you go further.

3. Read the announcements in the gazette

   Log in and pull the company's announcements, from the incorporation notice onwards. Later notices record capital changes, appointments, resignations, and moves. If the index and the text disagree, trust the text: TOBB warns that announcement types are coded by hand and can be wrong.

4. Check who may sign, and how

   TOBB's level 3 data feed describes each representative by role, manner of representation (temsil şekli), and start and end date, with a separate list of joint representatives. Look for the same points in the appointment notices: check that the person signing is listed, that their appointment has not ended, and whether they can bind the company alone or only together with someone else.

5. Look for calls to creditors

   Look through the announcements for a call to creditors (alacaklılara çağrı). The gazette publishes them for liquidation, mergers, demergers, and capital reductions, and one dated shortly before your deal is worth asking about.

6. Ask the registry office for a certified statement

   For a large contract, ask the trade registry office for a certified copy of the entry or a certified statement of whether a specific fact is registered. If a document you receive carries a MERSİS verification code, enter it in the Belge Doğrulama (document verification) box on the MERSİS site.

7. Compare with the company's website

   Capital companies subject to independent audit must open a website within three months of registration. By law it shows the registry number, the trade name, and the head office, and for an anonim şirket the board members and the committed and paid-in capital. A gap between the website and the gazette is a reason to ask.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: the Turkish register is fast, and its announcements carry legal weight. The limits are about how the public is allowed to reach it:

• A security code on the free search. The trade-name check makes you retype an image code for every query, which rules out scripted checks.
• A login for everything else. Announcements, certified copies, and the archive all sit behind e-Devlet or a member account, whose login asks for a security code too. The Ministry of Trade's e-Devlet company query (Ticari İşletme ve Şirket Sorgulama) is no way round it: it opens only after identity verification by e-Devlet password, mobile signature, e-signature, Turkish ID card, or internet banking, and then shows the businesses in which you yourself are an owner, partner, or officer.
• Notices, not a company profile. The gazette's free tools give you a name check and a stream of announcements. A company's board and capital today have to be pieced together from notices published over years.
• Two numbering systems. MERSİS numbers are unique and permanent, but older documents can still show a trade registry number, given together with its registry office.
• Index codes can be wrong. As TOBB itself warns, announcement types are coded by gazette staff, coding errors happen, and the published text is what counts.
• No accounts search. The gazette's site has no accounts search, and its searchable data feed leaves out financial tables. Revenue and employee counts are not among its fields either. Listed companies report on KAP.
• Bulk access is priced for institutions. TRY 484,932 a year for the basic feed and TRY 1,427,688 for the detailed one, started with a wet-signed form and a bank transfer.
• Not every business is in it. The register covers merchants (tacir) and their commercial enterprises. A craftsman's or tradesman's business (esnaf işletmesi) that stays below the income threshold for a commercial enterprise falls outside it.

If you check one Turkish supplier a year, none of this matters. If you onboard hundreds, it is the whole problem.

7. Access Ticaret Sicili data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 1,411,287 Turkish entities. Records are enriched with revenue, employees, industry codes, and contact data that the register's free tools do not show.

Our Company Data API lets you look up any Turkish entity by name, registration number, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start and no security code to retype. It is used by developers, banks, and insurers across 190+ countries, so Turkish checks work exactly like checks anywhere else.

GET /v1/companies?country=TR&name=Turkish+Airlines

We show the request only. Our attempt to pull Turkish Airlines from the official register stopped at the security code of the trade-name check, so there is no register-verified value to put in a sample response, and we would rather print none than invent one. Run the query yourself to see the full record.

8. Turkey vs other company registers

Turkey announces what it registers and makes the public work for it: a security code to search, a login to read, and a six-figure price for bulk. For context: