Your children may follow you. Your spouse will not

Last updated 18 August 2026Legal review Bayraktar Attorneys2 min readThe file

Two rules, both counter-intuitive to applicants from other systems, and one recurring practical problem when the other parent will not sign.

Why your spouse does not follow you

Naturalisation is a personal status decision, assessed against the applicant's own circumstances — their residence, their Turkish, their income, their record. Nothing about that assessment transfers, so a spouse acquires nothing automatically from the grant.

A spouse has two independent paths. They may run their own five-year period, in which case the arithmetic in the qualifying period applies to them separately and their permits are credited at their own rates. Or, once you are a Turkish citizen, they may in time use the marriage route, which requires three years of marriage subsisting as a genuine union and has its own conditions, including scrutiny for sham marriage.

Minor children

Children under eighteen may acquire Turkish citizenship together with a parent who naturalises. This is the one part of the process that genuinely extends beyond the applicant, and it is the reason many families run the application when they do — school, health cover and future status all follow from it.

Include the children in the file from the outset with their own civil status documents, translated and legalised as the document set requires. Adding a child afterwards is a separate application, not an amendment.

The consent problem

Where the other parent is a foreign national, their consent is generally required for a minor child to acquire Turkish citizenship with you. This is straightforward in an intact family and difficult in a separated one, and it is the single most common obstacle in this part of the process.

Where consent is withheld, the route is judicial: custody arrangements, the child's interests and the parental rights recognised under the applicable law all become relevant, and the outcome is not predictable from the citizenship rules alone. Begin early — the court process will outlast the citizenship timetable, not fit inside it.

Adult children, and children born later

A child who has reached eighteen is not affected by a parent's naturalisation and must qualify independently — ordinarily through their own residence, where a student permit is credited at half rate under the rate rules. Families with a child approaching eighteen should note the date and file accordingly; a few months of delay changes the child's position entirely.

Children born after you become Turkish acquire citizenship by descent, which is a different mechanism with no residence element at all — see acquisition of citizenship by birth. And once the decision is made, registration steps follow for everyone included in it: what happens after approval sets those out.