The sponsor conditions: income, insurance and accommodation

Last updated: 16 August 2026Legal review: Bayraktar Attorneys3 min read

Applicants prepare for this permit by assembling their own documents. That is the wrong end. The conditions in Article 35 are imposed on the person sponsoring the application, and a file fails far more often because the Turkish spouse's income evidence was thin than because the foreign spouse's passport translation was.

Income

The threshold has two components. The household must have a total monthly income at least equal to the minimum wage, and at least one third of the minimum wage must be attributable to each person in it. A couple with no children is therefore assessed against a figure meaningfully above the bare minimum wage; each child raises it again.

What counts is documented, regular income. In descending order of how comfortably directorates accept it:

• Employment — payslips for the recent months plus an SGK service breakdown (hizmet dökümü) and an employer letter. The cleanest case.
• Self-employment or a company — tax registration, the last annual return, and an accountant's certified income statement.
• Rental income — title deed, lease, and the declared rental income on the tax return. Undeclared rent proves nothing.
• Pension — the pension authority's payment record.
• Savings — accepted as support, rarely as the whole case. A balance is not an income.

Health insurance

The foreign spouse must be covered for the whole permit period. Two routes:

• SGK dependent cover through the Turkish spouse's own registration. Usually the strongest, because it is state cover and it independently evidences the family relationship — the spouse is registered as a dependent, which is itself a fact about the marriage.
• Private policy meeting the minimum conditions set for residence permit purposes. Buy from an insurer that issues the standard-compliant product; policies written for travellers are refused.

The policy must cover at least the requested permit period. Where you are asking for two years and the policy runs for one, expect the permit to be cut to match the policy.

Accommodation

Housing must meet general health and safety standards for the number of people in it. Proof is one of: the title deed if the Turkish spouse owns the home, a lease notarised before a Turkish notary, or a notarised undertaking from the owner where the couple live with family. An unnotarised private lease is the single most common documentary rejection at this limb; get it notarised. The firm's guide to accommodation options for residence permit applications covers the less usual arrangements.

The address on the housing evidence must match the address both spouses are registered at. A mismatch here does more damage than a weak lease, because it feeds directly into the genuineness assessment.

The family-order record

The sponsor must have no conviction for offences against the order of the family within the preceding five years. This is checked directly and is rarely an issue — but where it exists it is absolute, and the file should not be run until it has been addressed.

Assembling it

Collect the sponsor's file first, then the applicant's. The order matters because the sponsor's evidence takes longer to obtain — SGK records, tax certificates, notarised leases — and because a weakness there may change the strategy. Where the income is not going to be met, the alternative is usually to look at whether the foreign spouse can qualify for a different permit category in their own right rather than to submit and hope. Once the file is ready, the application walkthrough sets out the sequence, and refusal and appeal covers what to do if it goes wrong anyway.