In Turkey, it is a common practice for employers to provide meal aid to their employees. Meal aid can be in the form of directly providing meals to employees in the workplace, or it can be in the form of giving employees money for meals or cash equivalents such as meal cards or tickets.
Meals provided by employers to employees are exempt from tax under certain conditions.
If meals are served at the workplace or in its outbuildings
All benefits provided by giving meals to service personnel without cash payment are exempt from the Income Tax base.
Likewise, if food purchased from outside is distributed to employees at the workplace, exception will be applied without any upper limit.
Meal aid provided to employees in cash or with cards such as TICKET, SODEXO, or cash payments made by the employer to third parties
In cases where employers do not provide meals in the workplace or its outbuildings, but this service is provided in businesses that provide food services, the part of the payments made to these businesses that does not exceed 170 Turkish Liras of the daily meal cost for each employee for the days worked will be exempt from income tax for the calendar year of 2024.
Likewise, in cases where employers do not provide meals in the workplace or its outbuildings and the meal service is provided by giving meal cards and/or meal vouchers, one day’s meal cost for the days worked for each employee, as not to exceed 170 Turkish Liras, will be exempt from the income tax base for the calendar year of 2024.
Exception applications for Meal Aids are determined by the Income Tax General Communiqué No. 186, which is still in force. According to the provisions of the Communiqué, it has been clearly stated that VAT will not be included in the exemption application.
However, the communiqué only mentions the VAT on the ingredients during the meal prepared by the employer, and the VAT paid to the restaurant when the ready meal is purchased by the employer and distributed to the employee will be exempt.
The date of the notification in question is 1995, and meal cards were not included in the communiqué. Therefore, in our opinion, if meal aid is provided through cards such as TICKET, SODEXO, the Income and Stamp Tax exemption can be considered as 170 + VAT = 187 TL, since the VAT fee is mainly included in the meal cost.
However, this should be considered that there are also opinions in the doctrine and implementation who are defending that VAT is not included within the exemption and VAT to be deducted.
