Can You Vape in Turkey? The Law, the Allowance and What You Can't Buy

Yes. You can take your vape to Turkey, and you can use it when you get there. What Turkey has banned is buying and selling them.

That distinction matters more than anything else on this page, because almost every guide collapses it into "vapes are banned in Turkey" and leaves you thinking you'll be arrested at Dalaman.

You won't. But there is a limit on what you're allowed to bring, it's written down in a Turkish government circular, and the number nearly everyone is publishing is out of date. We'll show you the actual document.

Is vaping legal in Turkey?

It depends entirely on which verb you're asking about.

What you're doing	The position
Bringing your own vape in	Legal, within limits. Turkish customs expressly allow it. See below.
Having one and using it	Legal. No Turkish law makes personal use an offence.
Using it in a bar, cafe or on a bus	Fineable. Same rules as a cigarette. 1,764 lira in 2026.
Bringing in more than the allowance	Held at the border. Given back when you leave. Smuggling quantities are criminal.
Buying one there	Effectively impossible. Nothing is legally on sale.
Importing to sell	Banned, and criminal. One to five years for commercial quantities.

Here's how Turkey got here. A Presidential Decision published in the Official Gazette on 25 February 2020 banned the import of e-cigarettes, e-hookahs, their devices, parts and liquids, whether or not they contain nicotine.

Turkey never actually passed a law saying "you may not sell vapes." It didn't need to. It banned imports, and it has never granted anyone a licence to manufacture them domestically. Between those two facts, there's no legal way for a shop to get stock. The sale ban is a side effect, not a statute.

And critically: none of it touches personal use. The import ban was made under the Customs Law. It's a border measure. Turkish lawyers are consistent on this point, and they lean on the constitutional principle that there's no punishment without a law: no Turkish statute makes using a vape an offence, so no penalty can be applied to a user for using one.

Which is not the same as "anything goes", and we'll be straight with you about the two places it stops. Bring in more than your allowance and that's a customs matter, and at commercial volumes a criminal one. Use it somewhere tobacco is banned and you're fineable, exactly like a smoker. Both of those are further down this page.

How many vapes can you take to Turkey?

This is the bit everyone gets wrong, so we're going to be precise.

The Turkish Ministry of Trade published Circular 2020/7 on 31 March 2020, titled "Entry and Transit of Electronic Cigarettes and Similar Goods Carried by Passengers." It carves out a personal allowance from the import ban. In the official English text, passengers over 18 may bring:

You get "one electronic device that the passenger is currently using". And then, separately, you get one of the following: up to 200 heated tobacco sticks, or cartridges and liquid "not exceeding 30 ml in total", or up to 10 disposable vapes.

The Turkish word between those three is veya. It means or. They are alternatives, not a shopping list, and you pick one lane.

Then, on 19 September 2024, Circular 2024/18 changed it. One line, and it's blunt: the phrase "up to 10 disposable electronic cigarettes" was amended to read "up to 3 disposable electronic cigarettes".

So the actual, current allowance is:

Your device	One, and it has to be one you're actually using.
Then pick one: e-liquid or pods	30ml total. That's three 10ml bottles.
Or disposables instead	3. Not 10. It was cut on 19 September 2024.
Or heated tobacco sticks	200. Not relevant to most vapers, but it's the third option.
Minimum age	18.

Go and look at what else is on the first page of Google for this. You'll see "10 disposables" almost everywhere, and you'll see "10ml of e-liquid" in a good few places too. Both are wrong. The 10 disposables figure has been dead since September 2024, and the 10ml figure appears to be someone misremembering the disposables number and sticking "ml" on the end of it.

You can see how it happened. The big tobacco-control reference database that most people quote still carries the old figure, and its page is stamped "last updated January 2022." Everyone copied it, and nobody went back to check whether Turkey had changed its mind. It had.

We've read the Ministry of Trade's own PDFs for both circulars, in Turkish, rather than trusting a translation.

The 30ml limit is not the 100ml airport rule

Worth separating these, because they get muddled constantly.

The 100ml container rule at the airport is a security rule about liquids in your hand luggage. The 30ml is a Turkish customs rule about how much e-liquid you're allowed to import. Clearing security at Manchester tells you nothing about clearing customs at Antalya. You need to satisfy both.

And be honest with yourself about 30ml. If you're a 10ml-every-three-days vaper, a fortnight in Marmaris is 40 to 50ml, and the allowance doesn't stretch. There's no clever workaround we can offer you. What we can tell you is what actually helps: a low-power pod kit running higher-strength nic salts sips liquid rather than gulping it. A sub-ohm kit by a pool will drink your entire 30ml allowance in four days.

What happens if you go over the limit?

Not much, and this is the reassuring bit.

The circular says it plainly. Anything over the allowance is "taken to the warehouse for the accompanied luggage of the passengers to be delivered to them when leaving the country." If you don't claim it on the way out, it gets destroyed.

Read that again, because almost every UK site tells you excess vapes are "confiscated". They aren't. The documented consequence of bringing too much e-liquid is that Turkish customs hold it for you and hand it back when you fly home. It isn't a fine, and it isn't a criminal matter.

The prison sentences you'll read about are in the Anti-Smuggling Law, which was amended in November 2021 to name electronic cigarettes explicitly. They bite at commercial volumes: one to five years for bringing in stock outside the customs process. That is a smuggler's problem, not a holidaymaker's.

We should be straight about the limits of what we know here. We could not find a single documented case of a British tourist having a personal vape seized at Antalya, Dalaman, Bodrum or Istanbul. Not in a news report, not in a court record, not in a government statement. Every site that says devices are "routinely confiscated" is a vape shop with no source. The legal mechanism for holding excess quantities is real and written down. The stories about it happening to holidaymakers are not.

Where can you vape in Turkey?

Outdoors, mostly fine. Indoors, treat it exactly like a cigarette.

Turkey's smoke-free law is Law 4207, and it's strict. It bans smoking in indoor workplaces and public buildings, on all public transport, in restaurants, cafes and bars, and in school grounds including outdoors. It even reaches outdoor spectator areas at sports and cultural events.

Now here's the part the Foreign Office doesn't tell you. In 2013, Turkey bolted a single sentence onto that law: "every kind of hookah and cigarette which contains no tobacco but is used in a manner imitating a tobacco product is deemed a tobacco product." That sentence pulls your vape into the entire smoking ban.

So legally, vaping in a Turkish bar is the same offence as lighting a cigarette in one. The penalty comes from the Misdemeanour Law, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry publishes the amount every year. For 2026 it's 1,764 Turkish lira. Do it twice in a year and it doubles.

Note that it isn't only indoors. The same law reaches the open-air spectator areas of sports grounds and cultural and entertainment venues. So a football match or an outdoor concert is caught, even though you're standing under the sky.

Being straight with you again: that's a smoking fine that reaches vapes through a definitional sentence, and we found no record of it ever actually being handed to a tourist for vaping. We're not going to tell you people are getting fined left and right, because we can't show you one who was. What we can tell you is what the law says, and the law says a bar is a bar.

Vaping outdoors on a street isn't an offence, as far as we can establish. It's the bars, cafes, shops, terminals, buses and stadium stands that carry the risk.

Can you buy vapes in Turkey?

No. Not legally, not anywhere, not in a shop, not in a bazaar, not at the airport.

Nothing is licensed for sale, so nothing is legitimately on the shelves. And yet people plainly are vaping in Turkey, which tells you what you'd expect: there's an illegal market.

That's not us guessing. A study by researchers at TOBB University and Cornell, published through the National Bureau of Economic Research, found the import ban "led to the emergence of an illegal market for these products" and that "despite the ban, a significant number of consumers currently use vapes." The same work found Turkish consumers were willing to pay 37 to 50 per cent less for illegal vapes than legal ones, which tells you what they think of the quality.

Turkish customs seized over 1.8 billion lira of smuggled vape product in five years, and 2025 was a record year for raids. Whatever's being sold under a counter in Marmaris came through that pipeline. It has never been notified to a regulator, it's never been tested, and nobody can tell you what's in it.

So the practical rule is simple: take everything you need, because you cannot replace anything out there. Not a coil, not a pod, not a bottle. If your only device dies on day two, your holiday is a nicotine-free one.

What to actually pack

Given one device, 30ml, and no way to buy a replacement, the packing list writes itself.

Take a refillable kit rather than disposables. Three disposables won't last a week, and the moment they're dead you're stuck. A refillable device plus 30ml of liquid goes considerably further, and it's the same one device either way.

Take spare coils. Plural. This is the single most common way a vape holiday goes wrong, and it's entirely preventable for a few quid. Coils don't count as your device, and they're not a liquid.

Take higher-strength e-liquid than you'd normally run. If you're squeezing a fortnight out of 30ml, a 20mg nic salt in a low-power pod will keep you satisfied on a fraction of the liquid a 3mg shortfill would.

And charge it before you go. Turkish sockets are the two-round-pin type, so you'll want an adaptor anyway.

The one thing that could genuinely ruin your holiday

It isn't nicotine. It's a CBD or THC cart in the bottom of your bag.

The Foreign Office is about as blunt as it ever gets on Turkey: "Illegal drugs, including cannabis, carry severe penalties. You should expect a long prison sentence of 4 to 24 years and heavy fines for possessing, using or smuggling illegal drugs, including when transiting through airports."

And it adds: "Airports in Turkey have excellent technology and security for detecting illegal items. This is also used to scan the baggage of transiting passengers."

Read that last clause twice. You don't have to be going to Turkey. Changing planes in Istanbul is enough.

We looked hard for a Turkish government source clarifying whether CBD is treated differently from cannabis, and we couldn't find one. Every confident answer we found was on a cannabis blog or a vape shop. So we're not going to give you a threshold or a percentage, because we'd be making it up.

What we'll give you instead is the only advice that's safe in the absence of an answer: don't take a CBD or THC cartridge to Turkey. Not one. A nicotine vape and a cannabis cart are near-identical objects in a hand-luggage tray, and they're four to twenty-four years apart in law.

What if you're just changing planes in Istanbul?

Genuinely useful distinction, this one, and it cuts both ways.

For vapes, air transit is exempt. The circular says so directly: the entry rules apply to transit passengers arriving by land or sea, but "there is no restriction for passengers who will transit our country by air", because your bag never enters Turkish customs territory. Flying through Istanbul with 100ml in your case is not a Turkish problem.

For drugs, transit is no protection at all. The FCDO says the penalties apply "including when transiting through airports", and that Turkish scanners are pointed at transit baggage specifically.

The vape rules let you through. The drug rules don't.

Is Turkey about to change the law?

Possibly, and the direction is tighter rather than looser. But nothing has actually happened yet, and we're going to be careful about the difference.

There are two draft bills floating around. One, from December 2024, would put three to six years in prison on people who produce, sell or possess vapes for commercial purposes. Some outlets reported that as "prison for possessing a vape", which is a misreading. Those two words are doing all the work.

The second, from April 2026, is more sweeping. It would write e-cigarettes and heated tobacco into the statutory definition of a tobacco product outright, and it sets a target o