Sector balance sheets: reading the accommodation sector's debt and profit ratios

Sector balance sheet statistics are the yearly aggregated financial statements of all real-sector firms paying corporate tax in Türkiye, published jointly by the Central Bank (TCMB) and TÜİK since 1990. Accommodation is NACE 55, published separately from food and beverage service. Each edition covers a set of recent years and appears after the year it reports on, so check the release date and the years covered on the publisher's own page before you rely on any figure.

A credit officer slides one page across the table: your balance sheet on the left, a column of sector ratios on the right, and nothing on the page saying where the right-hand column came from. Most owners have never opened the file it is built from. After reading this, you will know which file it is, which rows of it describe accommodation, how to compute the same ratios from your own statements, and exactly where the comparison stops being fair.

What are the sector balance sheet statistics?#

They are the yearly, aggregated financial statements of all real-sector firms in Türkiye that pay corporate tax, produced jointly by the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (TCMB) and TÜİK and published since 1990. The stated purpose is monitoring: according to the TCMB, the series exists to follow developments in the real-sector firms that shape the Turkish economy and to give the public comprehensive, regular information about them.

The raw material is not a survey. Firms prepare solo balance sheets and income statements under the Tax Procedure Law's uniform chart of accounts and file them with their corporate tax return; the statistics aggregate what was already filed. Because the population is defined by tax status, a lodging business that does not pay corporate tax is outside it. Check whether your own legal entity is inside before you compare anything.

Read every ratio twice. The asset-weighted value is dominated by the largest balance sheets in the group; the quartiles show the distribution, with extreme values excluded by Tukey's hinges, a rule for placing the quartile boundaries that keeps outliers from stretching them. Access is through EVDS, the TCMB's Electronic Data Delivery System, under Statistics, Real Sector Statistics, Sector Balance Sheets. The same figures appear in the TÜİK bulletin released the same day.

Where does accommodation sit in the tables, and how do you download it?#

Accommodation is NACE 55, published in its own files, separate from food and beverage service at NACE 56; at the top letter level the two are combined into section I, so you must go down to the two-digit file to isolate lodging. NACE is the activity classification that gives each line of business a code. Using the wrong level is the most common mistake: section I mixes hotels with restaurants, and a restaurant-heavy group pulls the numbers.

The latest edition, Sektör Bilançoları 2026, covers 2023 to 2025 and was released on 16 September 2026 at 10:00 as TÜİK bulletin No. 58019, with the TCMB publishing at the same moment. The next edition is due in September 2027. Financial statements come as separate files for letter, two-digit and three-digit sectors, plus one panel file for four-digit sectors. The three-digit sub-sectors 551 to 559 are published, so you can narrow the comparison if your operation fits one of them.

Classification changed: 2023 to 2025 follow NACE Rev. 2.1, while the 2009 to 2023 archive uses NACE Rev. 2. A series that crosses 2023 crosses a classification boundary, so check which revision a given year belongs to before you draw a trend. The ratio tables are a separate download from the statements; take both, because the statements let you check a figure and the ratio tables save you the arithmetic.

Which ratios matter for a hotel company?#

For a hotel company, five families do most of the work: liquidity, financial structure, debt composition, profitability and the weight of finance expenses; turnover ratios matter less because a hotel carries little inventory.

Liquidity covers the current ratio, the acid-test ratio and the cash ratio. In a hotel, part of current liabilities is guest deposits and prepayments, so a low current ratio is not automatically a problem, and a very high one can mean idle cash. Financial structure covers leverage and equity to total assets; a hotel's assets are mostly buildings, so the denominator moves with asset revaluation and with inflation adjustment, and you should compare two years only if both are on the same basis.

Debt composition, published as bank loans to total liabilities, separates bank debt from trade payables and from shareholder loans; a property financed by an owner loan will look less bank-indebted than an identical one financed by a bank. Profitability covers gross, operating and net profit margins, return on assets and return on equity; a small equity base inflates return on equity, which is common in hotel companies held with thin capital. Finance expenses to net sales is the published stand-in for interest cover, but it bundles interest with foreign-exchange and other finance charges, so treat it as a warning light, not a covenant test. Receivables turnover in a hotel is shaped mostly by agency and tour-operator payment terms, so read it as a collections calendar, not as efficiency.

Do not carry a number out of this section. Every value must be read in the TCMB table with its year attached; nothing here is a benchmark on its own.

How do you compute the same ratios from your own statements?#

Compute them from your own year-end balance sheet and income statement using the published definitions, write the formula next to each figure, and state which column of the sector table you are comparing against.

Start from the same chart of accounts. If your accountant files under the uniform chart of accounts, the mapping from your lines to the published ratios is direct, and the bank can reproduce your arithmetic. Fix the period first: use the same fiscal year as the edition you are comparing with, and say whether your figure is solo or consolidated.

For example, an invented 120-room property with current assets of 40 and current liabilities of 35 has a current ratio of 1.14; total liabilities of 180 against total assets of 300 give leverage of 0.60 and equity to total assets of 0.40; finance expenses of 18 on net sales of 200 are 9 percent; a net profit of 12 on the same sales is a 6 percent net margin. All figures are illustrative.

Compare against the right column. The asset-weighted value describes the large balance sheets in the group; the quartiles describe the spread. Saying which one you used is half the argument. The sector table stops at net profit; gross operating profit and flow-through are management numbers you build yourself from the same P&L, which the guide to GOP margin and flow-through walks through.

Where does the comparison stop?#

It stops at four places: the unit is a company rather than a property, the group mixes very different hotel types, the population of firms changes every year, and inflation accounting is applied but not documented in the methodology.

Company, not property. A legal entity can own several hotels, or a hotel plus a travel agency, and the aggregated statement describes the entity; a single property compared with a sector of multi-property companies is not a like-for-like test. NACE 55 also spans city hotels, resort hotels, all-inclusive operations, apart accommodation and small pension-type businesses, and the asset-weighted value is dominated by the largest balance sheets, which are rarely the reader's.

The TCMB metadata states the data have no temporal consistency, because the set of firms filing returns changes every year; for NACE 55 the count went from 15,445 firms in 2023 to 17,146 in 2024 and 17,637 in 2025 (TCMB and TÜİK, Sektör Bilançoları 2026). Part of any year-on-year change is a change in who is counted. Each release also revises earlier years, so a figure you copied last September may not match this September's file; keep the edition name with the number. And the lag matters: the 2025 figures arrived in September 2026 and the next edition is due in September 2027, so this is a historical benchmark, never a current reading of the market.

Nothing in the publication says a ratio is healthy or safe, and how a bank scores a hotel is not public. Treat any threshold you are given as someone's decision, and confirm your own case with your accountant.

What should you ask your accountant before a bank meeting?#

Ask three questions: which of your years are inflation-adjusted and on which lines, which entity and period the bank will compare, and what your ratios are on the same definitions as the sector table.

Question one: which of our last three years are inflation-adjusted, and on which income-statement lines does the adjustment sit? Without that answer, a three-year trend can be an accounting artifact. Question two: which legal entity and which period will the bank compare, and is our figure solo or consolidated? A group company compared with a single-property sector figure is a mismatch the bank will notice. Question three: what are our current ratio, leverage, equity to total assets and finance expenses to net sales, computed on the published definitions, and what moves each one most?

Bring the edition with you. A printout that names the edition, the years covered and the release date survives a challenge; a bare ratio does not. If the meeting turns to next year's plan, the guide to reading inflation and exchange-rate expectations is the natural companion, because it tells you what the market expects inflation and the exchange rate to do while your debt is outstanding.

What can the sector table not tell you?#

It cannot tell you how a department performs, what a sold room costs, or what a property is worth, because it carries financial statements and financial ratios and no operating statistics at all.

The published ratio list is financial: liquidity, structure, turnover and profitability. There is no occupancy, no average rate and no guest count, so the table cannot benchmark a revenue management decision. Rooms, food and beverage, spa and other revenue are merged into one company statement, so a weak department is invisible in the aggregate. Cost per room sold has to be built from your own ledger, line by line, as the guide to cost per occupied room shows, and it is the number that changes behaviour fastest.

For a new project, the sector table describes existing companies, not a market; official tourism tables do that job, and the guide to official tourism data in a feasibility study explains which to use and how to cite them. Use the sector balance sheet statistics for what they are: a check on whether your balance sheet and your margins look unusual for the activity code you file under, and a way to ask better questions of your own numbers.

What to do next#

Before the next bank meeting, download the current edition of the sector balance sheet statistics for Türkiye (opens in a new tab), write its edition name, years and release date on the page, compute your own liquidity, leverage and finance-expense ratios on the published definitions, and take the whole set to your accountant with the three questions above. The table is a mirror held at a distance: it shows whether your company looks unusual for its activity code, and it stops exactly where your own ledger begins.