If a company in Türkiye engages a foreign national, the compliance burden sits on the company, not on the worker. Act No. 6735 on the International Labour Force makes it unlawful for a foreign national to work, or to be given work, without a permit unless another statute or a treaty says otherwise (Article 6), requires the employer to notify the Ministry within fifteen days of the start and the end of the work and of anything that would require the permit to be cancelled (Article 22), and provides administrative fines for each foreign worker, doubled where the breach recurs (Article 23).
What that framework does in practice is less obvious than the headline. Very few penalties assessed against employers arise from a deliberate decision to employ someone without a permit. They arise from a permit that was granted correctly and then stopped matching reality — a wage that drifted below the declared figure, a transfer to another branch that nobody filed, an unpaid leave period that was never notified, a resignation that closed the payroll record but not the permit. Each of those is a separate, individually fineable event, and each is discoverable years later from records the employer itself created.
Who Carries the Duty
Article 22 attaches the notification duty to “employers engaging foreign nationals,” alongside foreign nationals holding independent or indefinite permits in their own right. Article 23 attaches the fines to “the employer or the employer’s representative.” Neither phrase is defined by reference to who signed the contract, so the first question in any engagement involving a group company, a client site, a staffing arrangement or a payroll intermediary is which entity is the employer in law. That question has to be answered before the work starts, because the fine is assessed per foreign worker against whichever entity turns out to hold the role.
The permit itself is not a general licence to work in Türkiye. Article 10 grants a first permit for at most one year, to work in a specified job at a specified workplace belonging to a given natural person, legal person or public institution, or at that person’s workplaces in the same branch of activity. Extensions run for at most two years on the first extension and three thereafter with the same employer; an application to work for a different employer is treated as a first application again. The mechanics of that application, including the ratio of Turkish citizens the Ministry looks for, are set out separately in our note on the employer’s work-permit application and the 1:5 rule. This page is about what happens after it is granted.
The Fifteen-Day Notification Duty
Article 22 names three triggers, and they are cumulative rather than alternative: the start of work under the permit or exemption, the end of it, and any circumstance that would require cancellation. Article 61 of the Implementing Regulation on the International Labour Force Act (Official Gazette, 2 February 2022) adds that other matters for which the Regulation creates a notification duty must be notified within their own periods, that notifications are made through the electronic system, and that where the duty is breached the Act’s notification sanctions are applied to the employer.
The same Article contains the one genuine simplification in the regime: the social security entry declaration filed for a permit holder, and the exit declaration filed on the permit expiry date, are deemed to have been made to the General Directorate, so no second filing is required for those two events. Permit exemptions issued for up to three months are exempt from the notification duty altogether. Everything outside those two carve-outs still needs its own notification — and the third trigger, “circumstances requiring cancellation,” is the one that catches employers, because it points at a list most employers have never read.
The limit of that shortcut is drawn in the same paragraph. For foreign nationals exempt from social security obligations, the entry and exit notifications are made to the General Directorate in the ordinary way, so the route through the social security filing does not operate for that group — which is the group secondment arrangements most often fall into. Article 25 of the Implementing Regulation resolves a related friction: where the date on which the permit document is notified to the employer differs from the permit start date, social security notifications made within one month of that notification date count as made in time. That covers a document that arrived late; it does not cover a document that arrived and was left unopened.
Keeping the Permit Aligned With Reality
Article 56 of the Implementing Regulation lists the grounds on which a permit is cancelled without any request from the employer or the worker. Several of them are ordinary payroll and HR events.
| Event | Rule | Employer's obligation |
|---|---|---|
| Worker does not actually start | Implementing Regulation Art. 25 | Work must begin within one month of the permit start date for a domestic application; from abroad, within one month of entry and in any event six months from the start date. |
| Wage falls below the declared figure | Implementing Regulation Arts. 56 and 60 | Social security obligations must be discharged on the wage and full-time basis declared in the application; a later contract variation reducing the wage or converting full-time to part-time cannot be made. |
| Move to another branch or another duty | Implementing Regulation Art. 26 | Employer files through the system; the new branch must be registered in the employer's trade registry record, the work must not require prior authorisation or occupational qualification and must be similar or compatible, and the General Directorate must approve. |
| Unpaid leave | Implementing Regulation Art. 30 | Suspension by unpaid leave and its end must be notified at least one day in advance; by agreement the suspension runs for at most ninety days, and the residence right cannot be exercised after the tenth day of suspension. |
| Permit cancelled | Implementing Regulation Art. 56/3 | The cancelled permit document is returned to the Ministry within fifteen days of the cancellation notice. |
Article 60 also requires supporting documents to be filed with the social security institution where the worker is on certified sick leave, within the maternity provisions of the Labour Act, in police custody or detention, affected by a strike or lockout at the workplace, temporarily outside Türkiye, prevented by force majeure, or under a suspended permit. Those are precisely the situations in which an under-reported month is otherwise read as a wage shortfall.
The list in Article 56 is not exhausted by the five rows above. Failing to start work as Article 25 requires, failing to notify a suspension within its period or leaving the permit suspended for more than ninety days, and a finding that social security obligations have been performed incompletely or not at all are cancellation grounds in the same Article. The Act points the same way: Article 15 of Act No. 6735 lists, among the cases in which a permit is cancelled without any request from the foreign national or the employer, a finding that the person has worked contrary to the Act and the ending of that work for any reason. What these grounds have in common is that none of them needs anything from the employer — cancellation can happen without the employer knowing, and that does not displace the fifteen-day duty in Article 22.
Two Regimes, Two Sets of Fines
The work-permit regime and the social security regime run on different deadlines, are enforced by different inspectorates, and produce independent penalties. Article 22 of Act No. 6735 says so expressly, and adds that Türkiye’s bilateral and multilateral social security treaties are reserved — which matters for seconded staff, whose home-country cover may displace the Turkish contribution but never displaces the permit requirement.
Under Act No. 5510, Article 8 requires the entry declaration to be filed before insurance cover begins, subject to narrow exceptions for construction, fishing and agricultural workplaces and for a newly registered workplace’s first month. Article 102 then sets the fine at one minimum wage per insured person for a late or irregular filing, two minimum wages where the omission is established by a court decision or by inspection, and five where a further omission is established at the same workplace within a year. A voluntary filing made within thirty days of the deadline, coupled with payment within fifteen days of notification, reduces those to a quarter. The wider payroll, contract and termination framework these obligations sit inside is set out in our guide to employing staff in Türkiye as a foreign employer.
The Article 23 fines under Act No. 6735 work differently. They are fixed amounts written into the Act in 2016, uplifted every calendar year by the revaluation rate under Article 17 of Misdemeanours Act No. 5326 — so the figures in the published text of Article 23 are not the amounts assessed today, and the current year’s figures should be taken from the Ministry’s annual announcement rather than from the statute. What matters structurally is the ranking: the fine for breaching the notification duty is the lowest tier, the fine on the employer for employing without a permit is the highest, and both are assessed for each foreign worker.
Inspection, and Why a Fine Can Arrive Without One
Article 23 gives the inspection function to Ministry labour inspectors and to social security inspectors and auditors. It also provides that where public administration inspectors or law-enforcement officers, in the course of any inspection or check carried out under their own legislation, find that an employer engaging foreign nationals has not met its obligations, the situation is reported to the Ministry. The sanction itself is then imposed by the provincial director of the Labour and Employment Agency, on the basis of the reports and minutes sent in.
Article 64 of the Implementing Regulation adds a route that does not involve a workplace visit at all: leaving aside foreign nationals whom treaties, international conventions or special statutes allow to work without a permit, where information and documents reaching the Ministry establish clearly that foreign nationals have been employed without a permit or exemption, the sanctions are applied on the strength of those documents. In other words, a mismatch between two datasets the State already holds is enough. Fines are payable within one month of notification under Article 23/4, and Article 17 of Act No. 5326 reduces a fine by twenty-five per cent where it is paid within its payment period — expressly without affecting the right to challenge it.
The time dimension should not be overlooked either. Article 20 of Act No. 5326 sets the investigation limitation period for misdemeanours carrying an administrative fine at three to five years according to the severity of the fine, running from the date the act was committed. Article 3 of the same Act provides that its provisions on the remedy apply where another statute does not provide otherwise — which is why the route against a fine imposed under Act No. 6735 is read from the decision itself rather than from a general rule.
The Fine Is Not the Ceiling
Three consequences sit behind the penalty, and they are usually larger than it.
Removal costs. Article 23 requires the employer or the employer’s representative to meet the accommodation costs of an unauthorised worker and of any spouse and children, the costs of their return, and health expenditure where required. Amounts met from the migration authority’s budget (Göç İdaresi) are recovered from the employer as a public receivable under Act No. 6183.
The contract survives. Article 394 of Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 provides that a service contract whose invalidity is established subsequently produces all the provisions and consequences of a valid contract until the relationship is brought to an end. Work already performed without a permit is still work performed under a contract, and the employer’s own regulatory breach is not an answer to a claim for the wages and entitlements earned by it. Drafting that anticipates this — clear wage terms, documented working time, a written statement of conditions where no written contract exists, as Article 8 of Labour Act No. 4857 requires within two months (it does not apply to fixed-term contracts of one month or less) — is part of the compliance file rather than a separate exercise, and is dealt with on our employment contracts page.
Equal treatment. Article 5 of the Labour Act prohibits discrimination in the employment relationship on grounds of language, race, colour and comparable grounds. A worker who establishes a strong probability of breach shifts the burden to the employer, and the remedy is compensation of up to four months’ wages together with the rights withheld. Two-tier arrangements for foreign staff are visible in payroll records and are not cured by the permit.
Employers Engaging Workers Under Temporary Protection
A separate instrument applies here, and it is stricter on quota than the general regime. The Regulation on Work Permits of Foreigners under Temporary Protection (Official Gazette, 15 January 2016) provides that a person under temporary protection may not work or be given work without a permit; that the application is made by the employer through the e-Government portal, and not earlier than six months after the temporary protection registration; that the permit is tied to the province in which the person is permitted to remain; and that wages may not be below the minimum wage.
The quota is the operative constraint: the number of workers under temporary protection at a workplace may not exceed ten per cent of the Turkish citizens employed there, with a maximum of one such worker where total headcount is below ten, unless the employer documents from the provincial Labour and Employment Agency directorate that no Turkish citizen of the same qualifications could be found for the job in the four weeks before the application. Where temporary protection is ended or cancelled, the work permit is cancelled with it — an event that falls squarely within the fifteen-day notification duty. This is an area where the rules have been amended repeatedly, so the position should be checked against the current Official Gazette text on the date of the engagement rather than against a general recollection of it.
Where This Sits
Read together, Act No. 6735 and its Implementing Regulation treat the work permit as a continuing statement about a specific job at a specific workplace on specific terms, and treat every departure from that statement as a separate reportable event. The compliance question for an employer is therefore not “does everyone have a permit,” but “does what the file says still match what payroll is doing” — a question that is answered by reconciliation, on a schedule, and evidenced. That reconciliation, and the response to a sanction notice once one is issued, form part of the wider labour law work on which these obligations are advised. Where the same workforce raises health and safety duties — training, risk assessment and the notification timetable that follows an accident — those sit on our occupational safety compliance and post-accident employer representation page.
