Objective: Metabolic syndrome (MetS) includes several cardiovascular (CV) risk factors. This study aimed to assess CV risk of MetS, contribu-tion of its components to the risk, and whether MetS provides additional risk beyond its components.Methods: The Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) Turkey cohort included 3933 individuals aged between 35 and 70 years, with a median follow-up of 8.9 years. MetS was diagnosed as the presence of any of the following criteria: high blood pressure, high fasting plasma glucose, abdominal obesity, low HDL-cholesterol, or high triglycerides. The primary outcome was the composite of fatal CV events, non-fatal myocardial infarction, stroke or heart failure, adjusted for age, sex, smoking, family history of CV diseases, and LDL-cholesterol.Results: The primary outcome was more common in the MetS group [178 (9.2%) vs. 70 (3.5%); corresponding incidence rate of 11.3 vs. 4.2 per 1000 person-years; log-rank p<0.001]. Each component was significantly associated with the primary outcome; however, when the components were sequentially included in the model, abdominal obesity and high triglycerides did not provide additional risk on top of the other three com-ponents. The hazard ratio for MetS for the primary outcome was 2.12 (95% confidence interval 1.59–2.81, p<0.001), and the discriminative ability (c-statistics) of the models with MetS and the components was similar.Conclusion: MetS increases the risk of CV events more than two-fold. High blood pressure, high fasting plasma glucose, and low HDL-cholester-ol are the top three components of MetS for CV risk. MetS and its components have a similar discriminative ability for CV events.(Anatol J Cardiol 2020; 24: 192-200)