When a serious accident happens at a Turkish workplace, the employer’s first legal deadline is measured in days, not weeks: the event must be reported to the local law-enforcement authority immediately and to the Social Security Institution (SGK) within three working days, under Article 13 of Social Insurance and General Health Insurance Law No. 5510. What follows is not one proceeding but three: an inspection and administrative penalty file under Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331, a recourse claim by SGK for everything it pays the injured worker or the heirs, and a criminal investigation. They run in parallel, on different timetables, before different authorities, and what the employer writes in the first of them is read in the other two.
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This page addresses the employer side of that crisis: notification duties, the documentary file an inspection turns on, administrative fines and work stoppage, and the recourse and civil exposure that follows. The wider employment framework sits on our labor and employment law page, and the sequencing of the three proceedings is set out in more detail in our note on the employer’s three fronts after a workplace accident.
What must the employer notify, and to whom, after a workplace accident?
Article 13 of Law No. 5510 defines a workplace accident broadly: events at the workplace, events caused by the work being carried on, events during a period when the worker was sent elsewhere on duty and was not doing the main job, the nursing breaks of a breastfeeding insured worker, and the journey to and from the place of work in a vehicle provided by the employer, in each case an event that renders the insured physically or mentally disabled immediately or later. The breadth matters, because commuting and off-site incidents the statute treats as workplace accidents are the ones employers most often fail to report.
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For employed insureds the notification duty falls on the employer: immediately to the competent local law-enforcement authority, and to SGK within three working days of the accident. The statute then adds an exception that is easy to miss: where the accident occurs somewhere outside the employer’s control, the three-working-day period runs from the date the employer learns of it, not from the accident.
Article 14 of Law No. 6331 layers a record-keeping duty on top. The employer keeps records of all workplace accidents and occupational diseases and prepares reports on them, and must also investigate near misses and prepare reports on them: events that caused no injury or death but damaged the workplace or work equipment, or had the potential to harm a worker or damage the workplace or work equipment. Health service providers separately report accidents reaching them to SGK within ten days, which means a hospital record can surface an unreported accident long after the employer has decided to treat it as a minor incident.
What does a labour inspection after an accident examine?
A labour inspection after an accident is a documentary exercise. The inspector tests whether the duties in Article 4 of Law No. 6331 were discharged in a form that can be proved, and the answer is usually visible in five or six files.
| Duty | What the inspector looks for | Provision |
|---|---|---|
| Risk assessment | A current assessment covering the affected group of workers, the equipment and chemicals selected, the layout of the workplace, and groups requiring a special policy, such as young, elderly, disabled, pregnant and breastfeeding workers | Art. 10/1 |
| Supervision | Evidence that the employer monitored and inspected compliance with the measures taken and had non-conformities corrected, not merely that measures existed on paper | Art. 4/1 (b) |
| Health surveillance | Examinations on recruitment, on change of job, on return to work after repeated absences due to a workplace accident, occupational disease or health reasons where the worker requests it, and at regular intervals; in hazardous and very hazardous work, a fitness report before the worker starts | Art. 15/1-15/2 |
| Training and qualification | Training before starting work and on any change of job, equipment or technology; in hazardous and very hazardous work for which vocational training is mandatory, documented vocational training, without which the worker may not be employed at all; additional training before an injured worker returns | Art. 17/1, 17/3, 17/4 |
| Consultation | Worker or worker-representative views taken before appointing safety personnel and before determining protective measures and equipment | Art. 18/1-18/2 |
| Safety committee | A committee where fifty or more employees work on continuous work lasting more than six months; in principal-subcontractor structures, coordination secured by the principal employer | Art. 22/1-22/2 |
| Emergency planning | Identified emergencies, emergency plans, trained and equipped teams for prevention, evacuation, firefighting and first aid, and drills actually carried out | Art. 11/1 |
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Two provisions defeat the most common employer defence. Article 4/2 states that receiving services from specialists or organisations outside the workplace does not remove the employer’s responsibilities, and Article 4/3 adds that the workers’ own safety obligations do not affect them. Article 8/2 then completes the circuit: the appointed workplace physician or occupational safety specialist identifies deficiencies and notifies them to the employer in writing, and it is the employer that answers for putting them right. A file of unactioned written warnings is the single most damaging document an inspection can find.
What fines and work stoppage can follow a workplace accident?
Article 26 of Law No. 6331 sets a separate fine for each breached duty. The figures printed in the statute are nominal amounts (set in 2012, some amended in 2015), and under Article 17/7 of Misdemeanours Law No. 5326 fixed administrative fines are increased at the start of each calendar year by the revaluation rate announced under the Tax Procedure Law, so the current tariff must be read from the applicable year’s revaluation rather than from the statutory text; what matters structurally is how the fines multiply. Several are charged per employee (health surveillance, information, training, personal protective equipment) and several repeat monthly for as long as the breach continues, including the failure to appoint a workplace physician or occupational safety specialist and the failure to carry out a risk assessment.
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On top of that, Article 26/3 applies an uplift by headcount and hazard class:
| Workplace | Low hazard | Hazardous | Very hazardous |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fewer than 10 employees | Same amount | +25% | +50% |
| 10 to 49 employees | Same amount | +50% | +100% |
| 50 or more employees | +50% | +100% | +200% |
Two qualifications are worth pleading. Article 26/4 provides that where work has been stopped, the administrative fine is not imposed for the act that caused the stoppage. Article 26/5 provides that the uplift table does not apply to fines already multiplied by the number of employees. Jurisdiction is also split: fines are imposed with reasons by the provincial director of the Labour and Employment Agency and paid within thirty days of notification, except fines for the Article 14 notification duty, which SGK imposes directly and which are notified, appealed and collected under Article 102 of Law No. 5510.
Work stoppage under Article 25 is the measure with the sharpest commercial consequences. A panel of three labour inspectors may order the stoppage within two days of the finding, and where urgent intervention is required the inspector who made the finding stops the work immediately, valid until the panel rules. The decision goes to the civil administrative authority within one day and is enforced through law enforcement within twenty-four hours, or the same day in urgent cases. The employer has six working days from enforcement to challenge it before the labour court; the challenge does not suspend the stoppage, and the court’s decision, given within six working days, is final. Throughout the stoppage, Article 25/6 requires the employer to keep paying the workers left idle or to give them other work without any reduction in pay, and Article 25/8 punishes having work carried out without permission in a stopped workplace with three to five years’ imprisonment. For fatal accidents in mining workplaces specifically, Article 25/A adds a two-year ban on participating in public procurement where the employer’s fault is established by a court decision.
One further point of currency: the entry into force of Articles 6 and 7, which govern the appointment of safety personnel, has been postponed repeatedly for public bodies and for low-hazard workplaces with fewer than fifty employees, and the Constitutional Court annulled the most recent postponement date in a July 2025 ruling. Employers in that group should check the position as it currently stands rather than rely on a deferral.
What can SGK and the injured worker claim from the employer?
The recourse claim is usually the largest number in the file. Under Article 21/1 of Law No. 5510, where the accident or occupational disease resulted from the employer’s intent or from conduct contrary to health-protection and occupational safety legislation, SGK makes the employer bear the payments made or to be made, together with the first capitalised value of any income awarded, as at the date the income began. The provision then sets its own two limits, and both are defensive tools: the amount recovered cannot exceed what the insured or the beneficiaries could themselves have demanded from the employer, and the principle of unavoidability is taken into account in determining the employer’s responsibility. Where the event was caused by a third party’s fault, Article 21/4 directs half of the payments made or to be made and of the first capitalised value against that third party and, where at fault, against those who employ it, which is where subcontracting chains and equipment suppliers become relevant.
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Late notification carries its own charge under Article 21/2, and employing a worker in work for which the legislation requires a fitness report, without that report or contrary to it, makes the employer bear, under Article 21/3, the temporary incapacity benefit paid for an illness that existed before the worker started that work or resulted from being employed in work unsuitable for the worker’s constitution.
Alongside the recourse claim, the worker or the heirs bring their own compensation claim. Article 417/2 of the Code of Obligations No. 6098 obliges the employer to take every measure necessary for occupational health and safety and to keep tools and equipment complete, and Article 417/3 makes compensation for death, damage to bodily integrity or breach of personality rights subject to the rules on liability for breach of contract. The consequences are structural: the ten-year limitation period of Article 146 applies, and under Article 112 the employer must prove that no fault can be attributed to it rather than the claimant proving that it can. Article 3/3 of Labour Courts Law No. 7036 keeps pecuniary and non-pecuniary compensation claims arising from workplace accidents and occupational disease, and the related determination, objection and recourse actions, outside the mandatory mediation gateway that applies to most employment claims, so they arrive as litigation from the start; how they are run is covered on our workplace disputes and litigation page.
Where Foreign-Workforce Files Overlap
Where the injured worker is a foreign national, the accident file immediately exposes the employment-permission file behind it: whether the worker held a valid work permit, whether it matched the employer and the workplace, and whether social-security registration was completed before the first day are all established in the same inspection, each with its own penalty regime. Employers running mixed workforces should read this page together with our note on employer compliance when engaging foreign workers, and check that the training and instructions required by Article 17 were given in a language the worker actually understood, a point that recurs in fault allocation. The contract terms recording job description, workplace and duties, which the inspection reads closely, are addressed on our employment contracts page.
Our Approach
We work from the way these files are decided rather than from the order in which they arrive. That means securing the notifications and the documentary record in the first days, taking a single consistent position on causation and fault across the inspection, the recourse action and the prosecution, and using the statutory limits (the Article 21/1 ceiling, unavoidability, Article 26/4 and Article 26/5) where the facts support them.
