Working time in Türkiye is governed by Labour Act No. 4857 (İş Kanunu): the general working week is capped at 45 hours, and every hour worked beyond it is overtime, paid at the normal hourly wage increased by 50% and limited to 270 hours per year per employee (arts. 63 and 41, in force as at July 2026). Annual paid leave vests once the employee completes one full year of service and, as at July 2026, may not be less than 14 working days for one to five years of service, 20 days for more than five and less than fifteen years, and 26 days from fifteen years upward, with a 20-day floor for employees aged 18 or under and 50 or over (art. 53). All of these are statutory minimums: a contract or collective agreement may improve on them, never reduce them.
Most Turkish employment disputes do not begin with a dramatic dismissal. They begin with the quiet arithmetic of everyday work: an hour logged past the 45-hour week, a leave balance that was never properly tracked, a night shift that ran long. Each of these is governed by clear rules in Labour Act No. 4857 (İş Kanunu), and each becomes a claim only when the paperwork behind it is thin. For a foreign company employing staff in Türkiye, working time and leave are not administrative housekeeping — they are the mechanics that decide exposure, and they are the reason so many files eventually land in mandatory mediation and the labour courts. This guide sets out how those mechanics work, and where they most often go wrong. It sits alongside our broader guide to employing staff in Türkiye.
The 45-Hour Week
The statutory working week is capped at 45 hours for full-time employees, in force as at July 2026. For employees in underground mining work the ceiling is lower: 7.5 hours a day and 37.5 hours a week. By default those hours are divided equally across the working days, but the parties may agree to distribute them unevenly — a balancing period (denkleştirme) — provided no single day exceeds eleven hours and the average over the reference period stays within 45 hours a week. That reference period is two months, extendable to four months by collective bargaining agreement and to six months in tourism (art. 63, as at July 2026). This flexibility is useful for seasonal or shift-based operations, but only if the arrangement is agreed in writing in advance; applied retroactively to defeat an overtime claim, it will not hold.
Two further limits frame the ordinary day. Night work (gece çalışması) is separately restricted, in both the length of the shift and the way it is organised: the ceiling on a night shift is shorter than that of an ordinary working day, and shifts must rotate rather than leave a worker on nights indefinitely. Breaks are mandatory and scale with the length of the day, and they do not count as working time.
Overtime: Rate, Consent and the 270-Hour Cap
Time worked beyond 45 hours in a week is overtime (fazla çalışma), paid at 1.5 times the ordinary hourly wage. The employee may instead elect to take time off in lieu — 1.5 hours of free time for every hour of overtime worked — to be used within six months. Two conditions constrain the practice, and both are commonly overlooked by foreign employers used to a more informal approach.
First, overtime requires the worker’s consent (art. 41, in force as at July 2026). A blanket clause buried in the contract is weaker than a specific, documented and current consent, and its absence hands the employee an argument. Second, overtime is capped at 270 hours per year for each employee. The cap is a protective ceiling, not a target; exceeding it does not void the employee’s right to be paid for the extra hours, but it does expose the employer to administrative penalties.
Contracts that fold a fixed number of overtime hours into the salary are common, but the statutory framework still bites: overtime may not exceed 270 hours a year, the uplift is a statutory minimum, and the arrangement holds only so far as the wage genuinely reflects the hours. A “salary includes all overtime” clause is not the shield employers assume it to be.
A distinct category sits just below the 45-hour line and is routinely missed. Where the contractual weekly working time is agreed at less than 45 hours, work exceeding the agreed average but still within 45 hours is not overtime at all: it is work at extra hours (fazla sürelerle çalışma), paid at the normal hourly wage increased by 25%, with 1 hour 15 minutes of free time per hour as the alternative to the uplift (art. 41/3-4, in force as at July 2026). A 40-hour contract therefore generates two different rates in the same week — 25% between 40 and 45 hours, 50% above 45 — and payroll built on a single blended rate will be wrong in one direction or the other.
A related trap concerns senior staff. Employees whose wage clearly already accounts for extended hours, or who fall outside Labour Act No. 4857 into the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 (TBK), may not be able to claim overtime in the ordinary way — but the boundary is narrow and fact-specific, and misjudging it is costly.
Weekly Rest and Public Holidays
After a working week, every employee is entitled to an uninterrupted weekly rest (hafta tatili), and — importantly — it is paid as though worked even though no work is done. Türkiye also observes paid national and public holidays (ulusal bayram ve genel tatil). Work on those days is voluntary in principle: it requires the employee’s agreement and attracts additional pay for the day worked, on top of the holiday pay already due. Employers who roster staff onto public holidays as a matter of routine, without consent or the premium, accumulate a liability that surfaces years later in a wage claim.
A narrow carve-out for licensed tourism accommodation. Since Law No. 7553 of 10 July 2025 amended Article 46, workers in accommodation facilities holding a tourism operation certificate issued by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism may take an accrued weekly rest within the four days following the day on which it accrued, but only on the worker’s written request or consent. Where that is done, the part of the work performed on the accrued weekly rest day corresponding to a normal daily working period is not counted in calculating overtime. The consent is not permanent: the worker may withdraw it on thirty days’ written notice to the employer. Outside certificated accommodation facilities the ordinary rule is unchanged, and nothing here permits the rest to be dropped or converted into pay.
Annual Paid Leave
The right to annual paid leave (yıllık ücretli izin) vests once the employee completes one full year of service, and it grows with seniority. The tiers are fixed floors that a contract may improve on but never cut.
| Length of service | Minimum annual leave |
|---|---|
| 1 to 5 years (5 included) | 14 working days |
| More than 5 and less than 15 years | 20 working days |
| 15 years and more (15 included) | 26 working days |
| Any worker aged 18 or under, or 50 or over | At least 20 working days |
These minimums are in force as at July 2026. Note the boundary at fifteen years: an employee who has completed exactly fifteen years falls in the 26-day band, not the 20-day one. Employees working in underground works have each band increased by four days — 18, 24 and 30 days respectively (art. 53, as at July 2026).
A few features of the regime routinely catch employers out. Leave is counted in working days, and weekly rest days and public holidays falling within a leave period do not consume the entitlement. Leave cannot lawfully be replaced by extra pay while employment continues — the point is rest, not a cash top-up. And accrued leave carries over; it does not expire at year end simply because the employer failed to schedule it.
The most consequential rule is what happens at the end. Accrued but unused leave is paid out in cash on termination, calculated on the employee’s last wage, and it is owed however the contract ends — including a resignation without cause. Because entitlement is a matter of arithmetic once service dates are known, unused-leave pay is one of the easiest claims for an employee to prove and one of the hardest for an employer to resist. It is a line item that employers building a Turkish team consistently underestimate, and it belongs in any severance and final-pay calculation on exit.
Why Records Decide These Cases
Working-time claims turn less on the law than on the evidence, and the law makes the employer the keeper of that evidence. Article 41 of Labour Act No. 4857 requires the employee’s consent for overtime; Article 56 obliges the employer to keep a leave record (izin kayıt belgesi) showing employees’ annual paid leave; and Article 75 requires the employer to keep in each employee’s personnel file every document and record it must prepare under the law, and to show them to the competent authorities on request. Article 6 of the Turkish Civil Code leaves each party to prove the facts on which it bases its right, so the employee must prove the overtime claimed. Where the employer cannot produce the records the law required it to keep, however, it has nothing of its own to set against the employee’s witnesses, payroll patterns or indirect evidence. A poorly documented employer therefore argues from a weak position from the start.
The lesson is not that overtime or leave is dangerous, but that undocumented overtime and leave is. A signed overtime consent, an honest record of hours, and a leave ledger with countersigned forms convert contested claims into settled facts. Their absence does the opposite.
Because overtime, leave pay, weekly-rest pay and holiday premiums are monetary claims, they cannot go straight to court. They run first through mandatory mediation under Law No. 7036, in force since 1 January 2018 and the compulsory precondition for almost every employee money claim, and only reach a judge if mediation fails. The mediator must conclude the application within three weeks of appointment, extendable by a maximum of one further week (art. 3, as at July 2026), so the window in which records must be assembled is short. That makes the quality of the underlying records decisive twice over: they shape what a mediator can realistically broker, and they shape what a court will later find.
For a foreign company, the practical takeaway is unglamorous but reliable. Fix the working-time pattern and any balancing period in the contract; capture and document overtime consent, and keep it current; keep an accurate record of hours and a live leave ledger; respect the 270-hour overtime cap and the night-work and weekly-rest limits; and reconcile unused leave on exit. Getting these routine details right is far cheaper than defending the claims they generate — a point our labour and employment practice makes to every employer before the first hire, not after the first dispute.
