Terminating an Employee in Türkiye: Valid Reasons and Job Security

For a foreign company used to at-will employment, dismissal in Türkiye is the point where the two systems diverge most sharply. There is no lawful way to simply let someone go. Every termination of an indefinite-term contract needs a ground recognised by the Labour Act No. 4857 (İş Kanunu), and the ground you choose decides three things at once: whether you must give notice, whether severance is owed, and whether the employee can sue to get the job back. Getting the analysis right before you act is the whole game — a dismissal assembled after the decision rarely survives a Turkish labour court. This guide is the termination companion to our overview of employing staff in Türkiye.

Two Routes Out: Just Cause and Valid Reason

Turkish law offers an employer two distinct doors, and confusing them is expensive.

Just-cause termination (haklı nedenle fesih) under Art. 25 is immediate. It applies where the employee’s conduct or situation makes continuing the relationship intolerable — a serious breach of duty, dishonesty, prolonged unauthorised absence, or comparable misconduct listed in the article. No notice is required, and where the ground falls under Art. 25/II (the employee’s own serious misconduct), no severance pay (kıdem tazminatı) is owed. The trade-off is discipline: just cause must be exercised within six working days of the employer learning the facts, and in any event within one year of the event. Miss that window and the right to terminate for cause lapses, leaving you to fall back on the more expensive route.

Valid-reason termination (geçerli sebeple fesih) under Art. 18 is the workhorse for ordinary partings — underperformance, a genuinely redundant role, or repeated minor conduct problems that fall short of just cause. It is not immediate: the employer must give the statutory notice period (bildirim süresi) or pay in lieu, and severance is due once the employee has at least a year of service. What a valid reason buys is protection against reinstatement — provided it is real, documented and properly served.

The instinct to reach for “just cause” to avoid paying severance is the single most common — and most costly — error foreign employers make. If a court later finds the misconduct did not rise to just cause, the employer owes the withheld severance and notice, and, in a covered workplace, may face a full reinstatement claim on top.

The Job-Security Regime: When Dismissal Needs a Provable Reason

The heavier protections switch on only when the workplace crosses a threshold. Under Arts. 18–21, the job-security regime (iş güvencesi) applies where three conditions are met together:

Condition	Requirement
Workplace size	At least 30 employees (counted across the employer’s workplaces in the same line of business)
Employee seniority	At least 6 months’ service at that workplace
Contract type	An indefinite-term contract

Where all three hold, the employer can no longer dismiss on a bare valid reason alone. The reason must be connected to the employee’s capacity, conduct, or the operational needs of the business; it must be stated in writing; and for a conduct-based dismissal the employer must first take the employee’s written defence before deciding. Skip the writing, skip the defence, or rely on a reason that cannot be proved, and the dismissal is not merely wrongful — it is invalid, which is a different and worse category of exposure.

Below 30 employees, or before six months’ service, the regime does not apply. The employer still needs a lawful ground and still owes notice and severance on a qualifying termination, but the dismissal cannot be undone by a reinstatement order. This is one reason the exact headcount and each employee’s start date matter far more in Türkiye than a foreign employer expects.

Reinstatement: How a Dismissal Is Challenged

An employee who believes the job-security rules were breached does not sue for damages in the first instance — they sue to get the job back. The route is fixed and time-barred at every step.

First, the employee must apply to mandatory mediation (arabuluculuk) within one month of receiving the termination notice. Since Law No. 7036 came into force on 1 January 2018, mediation is a precondition for reinstatement claims and for almost every employment money claim; our guide to workplace mediation and labour litigation walks through how that stage actually runs. If mediation fails, the employee files a reinstatement claim (işe iade davası) at the labour court within two weeks of the final mediation minutes.

If the court finds the dismissal invalid, it orders reinstatement. The employer then has a choice with a price attached:

• Take the employee back within one month of the judgment becoming final; or
• Decline — in which case the employer pays job-security compensation of four to eight months’ wages, the amount scaled to the employee’s seniority.

Either way, the employer also owes up to four months’ wages for the idle period (boşta geçen süre) between the dismissal and the ruling. These sums stack on top of the severance and notice that were already due — so an invalid dismissal of a long-serving employee can cost the better part of a year’s payroll for that role. Because the stakes are this high, termination in a covered workplace is a matter to plan with counsel rather than improvise; it is core to our termination and severance and workplace disputes and litigation work.

Severance, Notice and How the Ending Is Classified

The classification of the termination governs the money. The mechanics of the two main payments — the graduated notice period and the 30-days-per-year severance formula, both keyed to how the contract ends — are set out in detail in our guide to severance and notice pay in Türkiye. The point to hold on to here is that the reason you record drives the payment you make: a valid-reason dismissal pays notice and severance; a genuine Art. 25/II just-cause dismissal pays neither; and a dismissal a court reclassifies pays everything, plus the job-security premium. Note too that the severance formula is calculated on the all-in (“giydirilmiş”) wage and is capped at a statutory ceiling that is revised twice a year — so figures move, and current numbers should always be confirmed at the time of termination.

Collective Dismissals

Where the parting is driven by the business rather than the individual, a separate regime applies. Under Art. 29, an employer dismissing workers for operational reasons (toplu işçi çıkarma) on a collective scale — from at least 10 workers, with thresholds that rise for larger workplaces — must give written notice to İŞKUR, the workplace trade union and the regional labour directorate at least 30 days before the dismissals take effect. This is a procedural duty layered on top of, not instead of, the individual rules: each affected worker in a covered workplace still enjoys the job-security protections, so a restructuring has to satisfy both the collective-notification timetable and the valid-reason standard for every person let go.

The Practical Takeaway

Dismissal in Türkiye rewards preparation and punishes haste. Decide the ground before you act, confirm whether the 30-employee, six-month, indefinite-term test is met, put the reason in writing, take the defence where the law requires it, and pay what the classification demands. The employer who documents the reason, the evidence and the timing before serving notice controls the outcome; the one who improvises a “just cause” to save a severance payment usually meets it again — with interest — at mediation or in the labour court.