Can a Foreigner Register a .tr Domain? TRABIS Rules by Zone, Restricted Names, Expiry and the 2026 Change of Authority

Yes. A foreign person or company can register a .tr or .com.tr domain. Since TRABIS, the Turkish registry system, replaced the old Nic.tr on 14 September 2022, names under .tr, .com.tr, .net.tr, .org.tr, .web.tr, .gen.tr, .biz.tr, .info.tr and .tv.tr go to whoever applies first, with no Turkish company, address or trademark and no documents. Documents come back in only two cases: nine institutional zones such as .gov.tr, .edu.tr and .av.tr, and “restricted” names such as Türkiye, a province, or words like bank and finance. You can check availability on our .TR domain page.

Checked on 13 November 2026 against the Turkish Internet Domain Names Regulation (Official Gazette 7 November 2010, amended 20 April 2021), the Internet Domain Names Communiqué (2013, last amended 10 June 2023), the dispute resolution Communiqué (amended 30 December 2021), Law No. 7590 (Official Gazette 31 July 2026) and the registry’s own statistics dated 12 November 2026. Article numbers below refer to those texts. Registry rules change, so this page gives sources rather than prices.

Who runs .tr now: the 2026 move from BTK to the Cybersecurity Presidency

Most pages about .tr still name the wrong authority. Until 2022 the zone was run by Nic.tr at the Middle East Technical University; then the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) took over and launched TRABIS. In 2026 the authority changed again:

• Law No. 7590, adopted on 24 July 2026 and published in the Official Gazette on 31 July 2026 (No. 33326), added Article 60/A to the Electronic Communications Law: the Cybersecurity Presidency (Siber Güvenlik Başkanlığı) is now the body that sets “strategies and policies” for internet domain names and regulates them. The same law removed domain names from the BTK’s duties.
• The existing rules still apply. Until the Presidency issues its own secondary regulations, the current regulation and communiqués stay in force and every reference to the BTK is read as a reference to the Presidency (Law 7545, provisional article 2, added by Law 7590).
• TRABIS itself now carries the Presidency’s name and says .tr processes “will continue to be carried out in line with the relevant legislation”. IANA’s root zone record for .tr, last updated on 5 July 2026, still lists the BTK as manager.

For a registrant, nothing about eligibility changed on 31 July 2026. What changed is who will write the next version of the rules, so the section numbers below are the ones to check if a new regulation appears.

Which .tr zones are open, and to whom

The Regulation lets “real or legal persons” apply, with no nationality or residency condition (Art. 7), and allocates names in two ways: undocumented, where the first application to reach TRABIS wins, and documented, for the zones listed in its annex (Art. 8). Registration counts are TRABIS’s own, as of 12 November 2026.

Zone	Who can register it	Documents	Open to foreigners?	Active names
.com.tr	Anyone; commercial use intended	None since 14 Sep 2022	Yes	1,049,434
.tr (example.tr)	Anyone; first-come, first-served since 4 Sep 2024 after priority rounds	None	Yes	207,648
.org.tr, .net.tr	Anyone	None since 14 Sep 2022	Yes	32,772 / 29,031
.gen.tr, .web.tr, .info.tr, .biz.tr, .tv.tr	Anyone	None	Yes	9,454 / 7,554 / 3,454 / 3,014 / 1,206
.name.tr, .bbs.tr, .tel.tr	Anyone	None	Yes	2,244 / under 1,000
.av.tr	Lawyers, law offices and law partnerships; the name must match the lawyers’ names	Bar certificate	No	10,405
.dr.tr	Medical doctors and doctors’ partnerships	Professional proof	No	under 1,000
.gov.tr, .pol.tr, .tsk.tr	Public bodies, police, armed forces	Institutional documents	No	11,467 (.gov.tr)
.edu.tr, .k12.tr	Universities recognised by YÖK; schools	Institutional documents	No	1,688 (.k12.tr)
.bel.tr	Municipalities in the Interior Ministry’s records	Institutional documents	No	1,403
.kep.tr	Registered e-mail (KEP) service providers	Licence documents	No	under 1,000

Documented applications are signed with a Turkish qualified electronic signature (BTK Board Decision 2020/DK-BTD/346, Art. 4), which in practice closes those nine zones to anyone outside the Turkish profession or institution they serve. In total TRABIS reports 1,372,440 active .tr names, 1,059,102 of them registered after TRABIS opened; .com.tr alone is 76% of the zone.

The plain .tr name (example.tr) did not exist for the public until 2024. It was released in stages: free to public bodies that already held the matching .gov.tr, .edu.tr or similar name, then priority for certain .org.tr holders, then priority for existing holders by extension, and finally first-come, first-served applications on 4 September 2024, with allocations from 12 September 2024 (BTK decisions 2023/İK-BTD/244 and 2024/DK-BTD/37). Any example.tr still free today is open to anyone.

What the registry asks of a foreign registrant

No Turkish company, office, residence permit or trademark is required for the open zones. What the rules do require is data, not documents. Under Article 14 of the Communiqué, the registrar must collect:

• For an individual: full name, phone, address, e-mail, and a Turkish identity number (T.C. kimlik) or a “foreign identity number”.
• For a company or organisation: legal name, phone, address, e-mail and a tax identification number.
• Administrative, technical and billing contact names and e-mails for both.

The Communiqué does not say what a non-resident without a Turkish number should enter, and registrars handle it differently: one wholesale platform tells resellers to use a placeholder number for registrants outside Turkey, while another registrar asks every company, from any country, for its tax number and tax office. If you register for a company, have your home-country tax or company registration number ready, and register in your exact legal name: a registration with incomplete or false data can be cancelled (Regulation, Art. 11).

Two other rules shape how a foreigner buys a .tr name. Every application goes through one of the registrars accredited by TRABIS (21 were listed on 13 November 2026), and those registrars must keep the systems connected to TRABIS, and their backups, inside Turkey (Regulation, Art. 17(1)(k)). And TRABIS may run its own checks and reject an application, in which case the registrar must tell you why (Communiqué, Art. 14(4)). Names cannot be reserved: until the application reaches TRABIS, anyone can take the name.

Names you cannot register, or only with documents

The syntax rule is short (Regulation, Art. 6): letters a-z, digits and hyphens only; 2 to 63 characters; no hyphen at the start or end; and the third and fourth characters cannot both be hyphens. That last rule blocks the xn-- prefix every internationalised domain name uses, so Turkish letters such as ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş and ü cannot be used: guzel.com.tr works, güzel.com.tr does not.

Name type	Rule	Who gets it	Source
Contrary to law, public order, national security, morality, health or safety	Closed list (TAKAL): never allocated	Nobody	Communiqué, Art. 34(1)
Any existing top-level domain, and the .tr second levels themselves	Also on the closed list	Nobody	TRABIS FAQ
Türkiye, Turkey, Türk, Atatürk, T.C. and their derivatives	Restricted: belongs under .gov.tr	Public bodies; elsewhere only if the authority finds a public interest	Decision 2020/DK-BTD/345, Art. 4(1)
Names of provinces and districts	Restricted: .gov.tr for governorships and district offices	Elsewhere, case by case	Art. 4(2)-(3)
Names or known acronyms of Turkish public institutions	Restricted	The institution itself	Art. 4(4)
Names of licensed banks, leasing, factoring, finance and investment firms	Restricted	Only the licensed firm (BDDK or SPK licence)	Art. 4(5)-(6)
Names containing bank, banka, finans, finance, finansman, lease, leasing, factoring or faktoring	Restricted	Licensed firms; others case by case	Art. 4(7)

For a restricted name outside the government cases, the applicant files a statement of the intended use with supporting documents, and the authority decides (Art. 6(3) and 7). In practice that means a company document (an activity certificate issued within the last six months, a trade registry certificate or the Trade Registry Gazette notice) or a certificate from the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office plus the owner’s ID, and the domain must match the distinctive part of that name. Until the documents are accepted the order stays pending; if they are not, the name is not granted and we refund the registration fee.

Term, renewal and what happens after expiry

A .tr name is allocated for 1 to 5 years, and after a renewal the remaining term can never exceed five years (Regulation, Art. 8(5) and 9(4)). At Register.Domains you can register all seven extensions we sell for 1 to 5 years. The expiry sequence is set by the Regulation:

When	What happens	Article
At least 3 months before expiry	Your registrar must e-mail you a renewal reminder	Art. 9(1)
Expiry date, not renewed	The domain’s use is suspended for 2 months; you can still renew during that time	Art. 9(3)
End of the 2 months	The name is reopened and published on TRABIS’s list of reallocated names	Art. 9(3), 12(1)
First month after reopening	No new applications are accepted (two months if the name was cancelled or given up)	Art. 12(1)-(2)
After that	First-come, first-served again	Art. 12(3)

Two more rules are easy to miss: if you give up a name or it is cancelled, the fee is not refunded (Art. 10(3) and 28(6)), and under Article 34 of the Electronic Communications Law a .tr domain name cannot be seized, as TRABIS’s FAQ points out.

Transfers, resale and WHOIS privacy

• Changing registrar: ask your current registrar for the authorisation code and give it to the new one. The losing registrar has 24 hours to answer, after which the transfer counts as accepted; it cannot refuse the code because of an unpaid bill and cannot charge you for it (Communiqué, Art. 23-24). The remaining term does not change.
• The 60-day lock: TRABIS rejects a transfer within 60 days of the first registration or of the last transfer, or while the domain is frozen by a dispute (Art. 25(2)).
• Selling a .tr name: for three years after TRABIS opened, names could only change hands through inheritance, a merger, or the sale of the matching trademark, patent or registered work. The Regulation’s general sale article took effect three years after TRABIS went live (Art. 13 and 33(1)(a)), so since 14 September 2025 .tr names can be sold through the registrar’s owner-change form. TRABIS’s English FAQ still says sale details “will be announced”.
• WHOIS: the registry directory shows the domain, name servers, registrar and dates. For an individual, name, address and e-mail are published only with explicit consent; without it they are hidden and the registrar publishes an anonymised e-mail that forwards to you. For a company, all of it is published, no consent needed (Communiqué, Art. 19). Register.Domains does not sell a separate privacy add-on for .tr. You can look up any name with our .TR WHOIS lookup.

Disputes: the .tr dispute resolution service

Instead of the UDRP, .tr has its own arbitration system run by three authorised providers: BTİDER, TOBBUYUM (the TOBB arbitration centre) and the Istanbul Arbitration Centre (ISTAC). TRABIS counts 819 resolved disputes as of 12 November 2026. A complainant has to show all three conditions (Regulation, Art. 25), as under the UDRP, but the details differ:

Point	.tr dispute service	UDRP
Rights that count	Trademark, trade name, business name or other distinctive sign owned or used in commerce	Trademark or service mark
Bad faith	Registered or used in bad faith	Registered and used in bad faith
Response time	10 days, plus up to 10 more on request	20 days
Decision	Within 15 days of the file closing, plus up to 5	Typically 14 days after the panel is appointed
Language and panel	Turkish unless the parties agree otherwise; arbitrators must be Turkish citizens	Language of the registration agreement
Going to court	The decision is applied after 10 business days unless a court injunction is notified	10 business days to file a court action

The domain is frozen while the case runs (dispute Communiqué, Art. 16). Names registered before TRABIS opened can only be challenged this way if they were renewed after 14 September 2022 (Regulation, provisional Art. 1(9)). For a foreign brand owner the practical point is the language: defending or recovering a .com.tr name means a case in Turkish, so registering your own name first is cheaper.

What some registrar pages still get wrong

• “Requires a local presence in Turkey.” True before 14 September 2022 for .com.tr; not since. The Regulation sets no residency condition.
• “Turkish characters (ç, ğ, ş…) are allowed.” The Regulation allows a-z, 0-9 and hyphens only, and bars the xn-- pattern.
• “Managed by Nic.tr” or “by the BTK”. Nic.tr closed in 2022; since Law 7590 the regulator is the Cybersecurity Presidency.
• “Register for up to 10 years.” Five years is the maximum, including renewals.

Checklist: registering a .tr or .com.tr from abroad

1. Pick the zone: .com.tr for a business, .tr for the shortest address, or .web.tr, .gen.tr, .info.tr, .biz.tr or .tv.tr. All are open to foreigners.
2. Check the name: 2-63 characters, a-z, digits and hyphens, no Turkish letters, and none of the restricted words (Türkiye, a province, bank, finance, leasing…) unless you can document a right to it.
3. Register in your exact legal name; a company should have its tax or registration number ready.
4. Use an e-mail you read: the renewal reminder and any dispute notice arrive there.
5. Choose up to 5 years and turn on auto-renewal: an expired name stops working on the expiry date.
6. Wait 60 days before moving the domain to another registrar.
7. If the brand matters in Turkey, register both the .com.tr and the .tr: they are separate names, and any free example.tr is first-come, first-served.

Several other countries in the region follow similar rules; see our guide to registering a .il domain as a foreigner, the Middle East domains page, and, for countries that do require a local presence or trustee, our ccTLD local presence requirements by country. Current prices for every country domain are on the ccTLD price list.

Ready to register? Search for your .tr or .com.tr domain: no Turkish address, company or trademark needed.