Turkey annual leave entitlement

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What the law actually says

Employees with at least one year of service, including any probation period, are entitled to paid annual leave of 14 working days for one to five years of service, 20 days for more than five and up to fifteen years, and 26 days for fifteen years or more. Employees under 18 or aged 50 and over get at least 20 days regardless of service. Leave is counted in working days, so the weekly rest day and public holidays falling within it are not deducted. Contracts and collective agreements may increase the entitlement and commonly do.

What happens to unused leave in Turkey

Annual leave in Turkey does not expire while the employment continues: the employee may take accumulated leave in later years and cannot be paid instead of taking it. When the contract ends, for whatever reason, Article 59 requires the employer to pay for every day of leave earned and not used across the entire period of employment, at the final wage — which is why long-serving employees’ balances should be tracked carefully.

When employment ends, the untaken balance must be paid. This is the rule across the European Union and Australia, and it is the sharpest contrast with the United States, where whether unused time is paid out depends entirely on which state the employee works in.

If you run a team in Turkey

• Write the entitlement into every contract. At least 14 days; more is fine, less is void. Collective agreements may add to it.
• Track accrual and carryover to the day, with a record of every approval. When someone leaves, the untaken balance is money you owe, and you will need to show how you got to the number.
• Budget for the payout. Every unused day on the books is a liability at that person's current pay rate — it does not disappear at year end.

If you work in Turkey

• Check your contract gives at least 14 days. Anything less is unenforceable.
• Keep your own record of approved leave. Payroll systems get changed; your notes don't.
• When you leave, untaken statutory leave must be paid out. It cannot be forfeited.

Calculating an employee's balance

Entitlement is the starting point; the working number is what an individual has actually accrued at a given date. Our accrual calculator converts an annual entitlement into a per-pay-period figure and a current balance.

Tracking Turkey leave correctly

Because untaken leave is money the employer owes, the balance has to be provable. Spreadsheets fail at exactly the moment they matter — when someone disputes what they were owed on their last day and nobody can reconstruct the record.

For a single-country team, Leavo handles Turkey accrual rules, carryover and approvals with a full audit trail. If you employ people in more than one country, statutory entitlements, carryover rules and payout obligations differ in every one — that is the case for a platform like Deel that handles multi-country employment rather than leave alone. We compare the options in our leave management software guide.

Source

Primary source: Labour Law No. 4857, Articles 53 and 59. Statutory minimums change, and collective agreements frequently exceed them — confirm against the current text before acting. See our methodology.