For an r-uniform hypergraph H and a family of r-uniform hypergraphs F, the relative Turán number ex(H, F) is the maximum number of edges in an F-free subgraph of H. In this paper we give lower bounds on ex(H, F) for certain families of hypergraph cycles F such as Berge cycles and loose cycles. In particular, if C 3 denotes the set of all 3-uniform Berge -cycles and H is a 3-uniform hypergraph with maximum degree ∆, we prove ex(H, 1) e(H), and these bounds are tight up to the o(1) term.