The best ATM in Istanbul, Turkey is a coveted title. There’s a lot of banks that accept international cards, but some of them will try to extract more money from you via service fee or dynamic currency conversion (DCC).

The best ATM is HSBC (only 1000 lira at a time, mixed denominations).

The Best ATM: HSBC

At the moment, HSBC has no extra fees and serves mostly 100 TL bills with some 50 and 20 TL.

In February 2020, QNB used to allow large transactions, no fees, and serving only 100 TL bills, but this is no longer the case as of June 2020.

Depending on the ATM, they may try to apply DCC, so when the DCC menu comes up, make sure to click Istemiyorum (it was on the left side), which means: “I do not want.” Make sure you say no to DCC. DCC is very bad (Google it).

See the table below for a relative comparison.

ATM Comparisons

Credit for this table, updated in November 2022, goes to a reader that emailed me a TripAdvisor article. The ones with exact rates are ones that I checked myself. The others, according to the TripAdvisor article, are around 6%.

If you have any updates or additions to this table, please add them below in the comments.

Bank	Non-DCC Fee	Notes
HSBC	None	Most or all HSBC seem closed
HalkBank	None	50/100 TL bills
Ptt Bank	None
Fibabanka	None
Sekerbank	None
ING Bank	None
ZiraatBanksi	None
VakifBank	Yes
AKBANK	Yes
QNB Finansbank	5%
Garanti	Yes
Bankamatik	Yes
TEB	5%
YapiKredi	Yes
Denizbank	4%

Fees on the card side

This is not really an advertisement, since I don’t really make money from this blog.

In addition to the fees charged by the owning bank of the ATM, the owning bank of the card might also have foreign transaction fees. I use Charles Schwab (for my god-bless USA of bank account), which has no fees. It also waives ATM fees, but I’ve actually never been sure if that works for international bank fees such as the ones above.

If for whatever reason this inspires you to sign up for Schwab, I have this referral link.