Short answer: the amount decides the route. Turkish public institutions buy opening ceremonies, congresses, award nights and promotional programmes as service procurement under Public Procurement Law No. 4734. If the estimated cost stays under the monetary limit, the institution can use direct procurement with no public notice; above it, open tender or negotiated procedure applies. Public Procurement Authority Communiqué No. 2026/1 sets the Article 22/d direct procurement limit for 1 February 2026 to 31 January 2027 at 1,021,827 TRY for administrations inside metropolitan municipality boundaries and 340,391 TRY for all others. The threshold values for goods and service procurement are 18,734,124 TRY for general and special budget administrations and 31,223,628 TRY for the other administrations covered by the Law. There is a surprise on the invoice too: under section (I/C-2.1.3.2.4) of the VAT General Implementation Communiqué, organization services supplied to public bodies carry 5/10 VAT withholding, meaning the buyer deducts and declares half of the calculated VAT. Below are the full set of limits, how direct procurement actually works, the hospitality exemption, the rule against splitting a job, notice periods and the invoicing side.
Which rules govern a public institution buying event services?
The framework is Law No. 4734. General and special budget administrations, municipalities and their affiliates, universities, state economic enterprises and the other bodies covered by the Law all buy an opening ceremony, congress, festival, promotion day or anniversary programme as service procurement. The process runs through EKAP, the Electronic Public Procurement Platform, and any firm that wants to bid needs an EKAP registration. The volume is substantial. According to the Public Procurement Authority Public Procurement Monitoring Report for 2025, total public procurement reached 3,230,125,812,000 TRY that year: 2,448,049,642,000 TRY through the tender procedures set out in the Law, 477,015,464,000 TRY under exemptions and 305,060,706,000 TRY through direct procurement. Within the procedures under the Law, service procurement accounted for 20,732 tenders and 407,054,211,000 TRY, or 16.63 percent of the total value. There is also a reverse case. If the institution is not buying a service from you but giving you the use of its own hall, square or facility, the transaction is a lease rather than a purchase and falls under State Procurement Law No. 2886. The two regimes differ in paperwork and timing, so settle which one you are in during the first conversation.
What are the 2026 direct procurement limit and threshold values?
The figures are updated every year on 1 February. Communiqué No. 2026/1 of the Public Procurement Authority was published in the Official Gazette dated 22 January 2026, issue 33145, and raised the values by 27.67 percent, the annual change in the December 2025 domestic producer price index. They apply from 1 February 2026 to 31 January 2027. The Article 22/d direct procurement limit is 1,021,827 TRY for administrations inside metropolitan municipality boundaries and 340,391 TRY for the rest. This is the first year the limit has passed one million lira. Threshold values for goods and service procurement stand at 18,734,124 TRY for general and special budget administrations and 31,223,628 TRY for other administrations under the Law. The ceiling for the negotiated procedure under Article 21/f is 3,406,508 TRY. The two brackets that set notice periods are 2,043,844 TRY and 4,087,898 TRY. Which figure gets compared matters. The estimated cost is calculated excluding VAT, and for service procurement it includes a profit and overhead allowance of up to 25 percent depending on the nature of the work. So a job worth 1.1 million lira including VAT can still sit inside the direct procurement zone at a metropolitan administration.
Is direct procurement a tender, and how does it run?
It is not. Article 18 lists the tender procedures as open tender, restricted tender and negotiated procedure; direct procurement sits in a separate article as a purchasing method. The opening line of that article describes it: in the listed cases, needs may be met directly without a public notice and without taking a bid bond. The final paragraph sets the mechanics. There is no obligation to form a tender commission or to apply the qualification criteria in Article 10; one or more people appointed by the procurement authority research market prices and buy. That has a consequence. Because it is not a tender procedure, complaints about direct procurement purchases cannot be taken to the Public Procurement Authority, and such applications are rejected on jurisdictional grounds. The Communiqué on Purchases by Direct Procurement, published in the Official Gazette of 11 July 2023, issue 32245, entered into force on 1 February 2024 and moved part of the process online. Price research can be carried out partly or fully through EKAP, the purchase can be announced on EKAP or invitations sent to interested firms, electronic price offers are submitted through EKAP and results are notified the same way. A notice is not mandatory, but where one is published at least twenty four hours must pass between the notice and the offer deadline. In other words the window can be a single day, and an agency that does not watch EKAP notifications never hears about the job. The scale is real: of the 1,701,034 direct procurement purchases made in 2025, 1,373,431 of them and 46.05 percent of the value, or 140,491,773,000 TRY, fell under the Article 22/d monetary limits, while service purchases made up 484,473 transactions and 108,042,169,000 TRY, or 35.42 percent of the direct procurement total.
Are hospitality purchases subject to the monetary limit?
No, the article keeps them separate. Article 22/d covers two things at once: needs that do not exceed the monetary limits, and purchases of accommodation, travel and catering made within representation and hospitality activities. The second group has no amount ceiling. The Public Procurement Authority tracks it as its own line in the 2025 report, with 21,754 purchases and 2,919,174,000 TRY over the year. It is not unlimited, of course; the constraint comes from spending rules rather than procurement rules, namely the appropriation the institution has budgeted for representation, hospitality and ceremony expenses and its own internal directive. The point for an agency is how narrowly the wording is drawn. The provision names three items: accommodation, travel, catering. Stage, sound system, lighting, LED screen, decor, simultaneous interpretation and the production crew are not among them and count as ordinary service procurement subject to the monetary limit. A single line package quote makes the institution's job harder. Split the offer into accommodation, transport, catering and technical production so the buyer can show in its file which item was bought on which legal basis.
Can a job be split to stay under the limit?
The Law forbids it outright. Article 5, among the basic principles, states that goods or service procurement and construction works cannot be divided into parts in order to stay below the threshold values. The same article also bars combining goods, services and works in one tender unless there is an acceptable natural link between them. The second brake is budgetary. Under Article 62/i, the annual total of expenditure made within the monetary limits in Articles 21 and 22 cannot exceed 10 percent of the appropriations set aside for that purpose without the favourable opinion of the Public Procurement Board. Exceeding that ceiling without approval is a recurring finding in Turkish Court of Accounts reports. In practice it looks like this. For a university graduation ceremony, buying the stage, the sound system, the seating and the catering through four separate direct purchases can look convenient at first. The risk sits with the institution on paper, yet the bill reaches you as well: when a file runs into an audit problem, payment slips, the work goes back out to tender and your preparation is wasted. Bundling the connected items of one event into a single purchase is the safer route for both sides.
If the limit is exceeded, which procedure and notice period apply?
Open tender is the default. Once the estimated cost passes the direct procurement limit, the institution moves to open tender, or to restricted tender where the conditions are met; the negotiated procedure is exceptional and, for manufactured goods, materials and services, applies up to 3,406,508 TRY in the 2026 period. Notice periods scale with the estimated cost. According to the Public Procurement Authority table for 2026, in an open tender the notice for goods and service procurement up to 2,043,844 TRY is published at least seven days before the tender date, between 2,043,844 TRY and 4,087,898 TRY at least fourteen days before, and above 4,087,898 TRY but under the threshold value at least twenty one days before. For tenders at or above the threshold value the period is forty days, which drops to twenty eight days in practice because preparing and sending notices electronically saves seven days and providing direct access to the tender document through EKAP saves another five, and to twenty four days where a prior notice has been published. One notice in the Public Procurement Bulletin costs 7,500 TRY in the 2026 period, 9,000 TRY with VAT. Security requirements differ from direct procurement too: the bid bond cannot be less than 3 percent of the offered price, and before signing, a performance bond of 6 percent of the tender price is taken. Budget the bank guarantee cost of both when you price the job.
What changes on the invoice: VAT withholding and stamp duty
This is the part that catches agencies out. Section (I/C-2.1.3.2.4) of the VAT General Implementation Communiqué applies 5/10 VAT withholding to all catering and organization services supplied to the designated buyers listed in section (I/C-2.1.3.1/b). Organization services include concerts, fairs, celebrations, parties, cocktails, receptions, congresses, seminars, panels, promotional events and similar work. Because the designated buyer list covers public administrations, the same job invoices differently to a public body than to a company; there is no such withholding on a corporate client. There is a floor as well. Partial withholding does not apply unless the VAT inclusive value of each transaction exceeds the invoicing threshold in force for that year, which is 12,000 TRY for 2026. The cash flow effect is concrete. On an organization job of 1,000,000 TRY excluding VAT, the calculated VAT at 20 percent is 200,000 TRY; the institution deducts and declares 100,000 TRY of it, you collect 1,100,000 TRY, and the remainder goes into a refund or offset process. Stamp duty is a separate cost. In 2026 the rate is 5.69 per thousand on tender decisions and 9.48 per thousand on contracts stating a definite amount, and for documents between public offices and private parties the private party pays. In direct procurement, where no tender commission decision is drawn up, no tender decision stamp duty arises, but signing a contract triggers contract stamp duty. On a 1,000,000 TRY contract that is 9,480 TRY, an amount that belongs inside your price.
How should you prepare before bidding on a public event?
The order of work is straightforward. Complete your EKAP registration and watch direct procurement notices too, since that window can shrink to twenty four hours. Read the technical specification item by item; when stage size, sound power, LED pixel pitch, generator capacity and crew numbers are defined there, your price has to follow those definitions. Split the offer into accommodation, transport, catering and technical production. Add the cash effect of withheld VAT, the cost of guarantee letters and stamp duty to your budget. Read the term, liquidated damages and inspection and acceptance clauses before signing, because event dates cannot be postponed and the delay penalty clause is not decorative. Tales Event works out of Istanbul and runs the whole production with one team across Turkey, from opening ceremonies and congresses to dealer meetings and gala nights, including stage, sound, lighting, LED screen, decor, exhibition stands and simultaneous interpretation. If you are on the institution side and need a realistic technical specification, or on the agency side and need the offer split into the right line items, send us the date, the headcount and the venue and we will come back with an itemised budget.
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