Endekslemenin Aritmetiği: Türkiye’de Ücret Vergisi Tarifesinde Dilim Kayması (2022–2026 Dönemi İçin Bir Ölçüm ve Bir Nötrleştirme Önermesi)

The Arithmetic of Indexation: Bracket Creep in the Turkish Wage Income Tax Schedule, 2022–2026. This working paper uses payroll simulation to examine how tax bracket indexation affected employees with constant real gross wages. Above-inflation indexation in 2023 created a buffer, which weakened as subsequent threshold adjustments lagged inflation. In 2026, the threshold relevant to wage earners rose by 21.2 percent against consumer price inflation of 30.9 percent. The timing and size of the real net wage decline vary by earnings level. The paper derives a neutralisation result: under the modelled minimum wage tax exemption, changing a threshold below the annual minimum wage tax base leaves tax liability unchanged for workers earning above the minimum wage. Turkish manuscript with an English abstract. JEL H24, E31, H23, J31, K34. Zenodo version: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22818390.