Working Time, Overtime and Annual Leave in Türkiye

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. 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. 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) — broadly the period running from 20:00 to 06:00 — is capped at 7.5 hours per shift, and a change of shift may not leave a worker on nights indefinitely without rotation. 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, which as a rule must be given in writing and renewed at the start of each year. A blanket clause buried in the contract is weaker than an annual, specific consent, and its absence hands the employee an argument. Second, overtime is capped at 270 hours per calendar 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.

Where the contract folds a fixed number of overtime hours into the salary, Turkish courts accept the arrangement only up to 270 hours a year — and only if the wage genuinely reflects it. Anything worked beyond that ceiling must still be paid separately at 1.5x. A “salary includes all overtime” clause is not the shield employers assume it to be.

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) of at least 24 hours, 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.

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	14 working days
More than 5 up to 15 years	20 working days
More than 15 years	26 working days
Any worker under 18 or over 50	At least 20 working days

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 here the law places the weight squarely on the employer. The burden of proving hours worked, overtime performed and leave taken lies largely with the employer, who is expected to keep contemporaneous records. Where those records are missing, incomplete or self-serving, courts do not simply dismiss the claim — they accept the employee’s account supported by witnesses, payroll patterns or indirect evidence, then apply an equitable reduction (hakkaniyet indirimi) to temper it. In practice that means a poorly documented employer loses the argument before it starts, and litigates only over how much.

The lesson is not that overtime or leave is dangerous, but that undocumented overtime and leave is. A signed annual 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, the compulsory precondition for almost every employee money claim, and only reach a judge if mediation fails. 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 overtime consent in writing and renew it; keep an accurate record of hours and a live leave ledger; respect the 270-hour, 7.5-hour night 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.