Turkey Administrative Boundaries Download

What this tool is for

Administrative boundaries are usually the first dataset you need when you build a thematic map, show statistics by province or district, check which districts a project falls into, or use a regional outline as a base in a CAD drawing. This tool offers the boundaries of all 81 provinces (il) and 973 districts (ilçe) of Turkey on a single page: pick the units you need, choose a coordinate system and download a file that GIS or CAD software opens directly. There is no sign-up and no server-side processing.

How to use it

1. Choose the level with the buttons at the top: Provinces or Districts.
2. Tick units in the list. For the whole country, "Select all" is enough. At district level, ticking a province selects all of its districts; the ▸ button next to a province lets you switch districts on and off one by one. The search box accepts province names, district names and licence-plate codes. Clicking a unit on the map also changes the selection.
3. Pick the resolution. The detailed version was prepared with a tolerance of about 30 m, the simplified one with about 500 m. For a country-wide thematic map the simplified version is usually enough and the file is several times smaller.
4. Choose the target coordinate system. For ITRF96 TM and UTM, the zone is chosen from the central longitude of the selection; for Kocaeli, for instance, TM30 (EPSG:5254), and for UTM 35N or 36N.
5. Press the button of the format you need. Shapefile and KMZ downloads arrive as a zip that also contains a README file.

Output formats

• Shapefile (.zip): a polygon layer with .shp, .shx, .dbf, .prj and .cpg files. Attributes are written in UTF-8, and the .cpg file declares it, so Turkish characters (ç, ğ, ı, İ, ö, ş, ü) display correctly.
• GeoJSON: standard GeoJSON when WGS84 is selected; with a projected system, a crs member is added.
• KML and KMZ: for Google Earth and similar viewers; always WGS84, as the KML specification requires.
• DXF: every ring is written as a closed LWPOLYLINE, and names can be added as text on a separate layer. Choose TM or UTM to work in metres in CAD.
• CSV: for every unit, its code, name, the latitude and longitude of its centroid, x and y in the selected system, and the area in km².

Attribute fields keep their Turkish names: il_kodu (province code, the licence-plate number, identical to ISO 3166-2:TR), il_adi (province name), ilce_adi (district name), alan_km2 (area), merkez_lat and merkez_lon (centroid); the province layer also has ilce_sayisi (number of districts) and nuts3, and both layers carry wikidata and osm_id. OpenStreetMap does not store an official district code, so none is provided; to match districts with other tables, use the province code together with the district name.

Data and method

The boundaries come from the administrative boundary relations in the OpenStreetMap database (provinces: admin_level 4, districts: admin_level 6). The source file is the Geofabrik Turkey extract with OSM data as of 26 September 2026. The data is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0; it may be used in commercial projects with the credit "© OpenStreetMap contributors".

Preparation steps: district polygons were assembled from the relations, each district was assigned to the province it lies in, and one island record tagged at district level that is not a district (Kara Ada off Bodrum) was removed. The resulting district count equals the official figure of 973. Because the OSM province relations of coastal provinces also cover territorial waters, province boundaries were produced by dissolving the district boundaries, which gives land boundaries and makes the province and district layers match exactly. Simplification used a topology-preserving method that simplifies shared edges of neighbouring units together, so no gaps or overlaps appear between units.

Areas were computed from the full-resolution geometry as geodesic areas on the WGS84 ellipsoid (Karney's method), so they carry no error from a planar projection. The centroid is computed in an equal-area projection and can fall outside concave shapes. Coordinate transformations use proj4js 2.9.0 (MIT); for ED50 systems the Turkey-specific EPSG:1784 "ED50 to WGS 84 (30)" parameters are applied. Zip files are created with JSZip 3.10.1 (MIT) and the map with Leaflet 1.9.4 (BSD-2-Clause); icons come from Lucide (ISC). Basemaps belong to Esri and OpenStreetMap contributors, and their tiles load from those providers' servers.

Accuracy limits

• Not official: OpenStreetMap boundaries are mapped by volunteers from various open sources and are not endorsed by HGM or TKGM. Consult the official source for property, zoning, tax or legal matters.
• Positional accuracy: OSM boundaries combine different open sources and volunteer mapping; there is no single documented accuracy figure, and in places they can differ from the official line by tens of metres. The 30 m simplification tolerance of the detailed version adds to that.
• Currency: the data reflects OSM as of 26 September 2026. The dataset is regenerated as new districts or boundary changes are entered into OSM.
• Projection over wide areas: a single TM or UTM zone distorts scale over areas wider than a few degrees. For the whole of Turkey, WGS84 or separate downloads per province give better results, and the tool warns you in that case.

For professional projects

If your organisation needs administrative boundaries combined with neighbourhood, block and parcel data in a managed GIS, or a custom boundary dataset maintained over time, learn more about Rodosto Teknoloji or get in touch.