Payroll in Turkey: employer costs, taxes & compliance (2026)

Running payroll in Turkey means handling a predictable monthly cycle, but there are several moving parts. Each pay period you calculate gross salary, withhold income tax and the employee's share of social security contributions, add the employer's own social security contributions on top, and file the relevant declarations with the authorities. Everything runs in Turkish lira, and the filings are in Turkish, which catches a lot of foreign employers off guard.

This guide walks through what an employee actually costs, how the pay cycle works, what leave and termination rules you need to bake into your payroll process, and when it makes sense to hand the whole thing to a specialist.

The gap between an employee's gross salary and what you actually pay out each month is meaningful in Turkey. Employer social security contributions add roughly a fifth on top of gross salary, so if you budget only for the take-home number you will undershoot your real cost noticeably. See the table below for the exact rates.

The total tax wedge, which captures all taxes and contributions as a share of overall labor cost, sits above 40 percent. In plain terms, for every lira of value you put into employment, a significant chunk goes to tax and social security before the worker sees it. That is worth understanding when you are pricing up a hire or benchmarking a compensation package.

Salaries in Turkey are paid monthly. There is no statutory thirteenth-month payment, so you do not need to budget for or accrue one. The monthly minimum wage is set by the government and reviewed periodically, and as of mid-2026 it sits at 33,030 TRY per month, so that is your floor for any full-time employee. Make sure your payroll system updates that figure whenever the government revises it, because running someone below minimum wage, even briefly, creates real problems.

From a payroll operator's perspective, the things that tend to surprise people are the notice and severance obligations. Notice sits at roughly six to seven weeks for a typical employee, and severance can reach more than twenty weeks of pay, so both need to be treated as potential final-pay liabilities, not afterthoughts. On the leave side, Turkey has 14 public holidays per year, all of which affect payroll calculations and accrual schedules. Maternity leave runs sixteen weeks and paternity leave one week, and while the social security system covers much of the cost, you still need to track accruals and coordinate the payments correctly.

If you do not have a legal entity in Turkey, you cannot run payroll there directly, and setting one up takes time and ongoing administrative effort. Even with an entity, keeping up with contribution rate changes, minimum wage updates, and local filing requirements in Turkish is genuinely time-consuming. A global payroll provider or employer of record handles the entity question, keeps the rates current, and manages the monthly filings locally. That tends to make sense for companies with a small number of Turkish hires or those that are still testing the market before committing to a full local setup.