The first employment contract a startup signs is usually a copy of the founder’s last one, and the first payroll is run by an accountant who was told the salary in net. By the tenth hire the company has ten slightly different contracts, no written remote-work terms, an overtime practice nobody has documented and a growing severance liability that does not appear on the management accounts. Turkish labour law is protective, formal and, for a small employer, more forgiving than founders fear, provided the basics are set up once and applied consistently. This article walks through what the Labour Law No. 4857, the surviving Article 14 of the former Labour Law No. 1475 and the Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331 require of a company with fewer than thirty employees, in the order the questions arise: the contract, the trial period, working time and overtime, remote work, leave, termination and the costs it triggers, and the compliance items that live outside the contract. It complements our articles on non-compete and non-solicit clauses, getting employee IP into the company and family members on the payroll.
The contract: written, indefinite, and in Turkish
Article 8 of Law 4857 says an employment contract is not subject to any form unless the Law provides otherwise, then immediately provides otherwise: contracts for a term of one year or more must be in writing, and where no written contract exists the employer must, within two months at the latest, give the employee a written document showing the general and special working conditions, daily or weekly working time, base wage and any supplements, the pay period, the term if fixed, and the provisions the parties must observe on termination. These documents are exempt from stamp duty. The default and the right choice for almost every startup hire is an indefinite-term contract; Article 11 allows a fixed-term contract only where objective conditions such as a defined task or event justify it, and chained fixed-term contracts without a substantial reason are treated as indefinite from the start. A fixed term does not buy flexibility; it removes notice and job-security questions but creates a claim for the unexpired term if the company ends it early. Because the Law No. 805 on the Compulsory Use of Turkish by Economic Enterprises requires Turkish companies to keep their transactions and documents in Turkish, the contract should be in Turkish or bilingual with Turkish prevailing; an English-only contract is a litigation risk, not a nullity in practice, but a court may refuse to rely on its terms against the employee.
The trial period and the probation myth
Article 15 allows a trial period of at most two months, extendable to four months only by collective agreement. During the trial either party may terminate without notice and without compensation, and the employee keeps wages and rights for the days worked. Two consequences are often missed. The trial period counts towards seniority for annual leave (Article 53 expressly includes it) and for severance. And “probation” in the Anglo-American sense of a longer evaluation period with easier dismissal does not exist; after two months the ordinary notice rules apply, although for a company below thirty employees the substantive job-security regime discussed below does not.
Working time, overtime and the 270-hour ceiling
Article 63 caps normal working time at forty-five hours a week, distributed equally over the working days unless otherwise agreed; by agreement the weekly hours may be distributed unevenly, with no day exceeding eleven hours, provided the average over two months does not exceed the normal weekly time. Article 41 defines overtime as work above forty-five hours a week and prices it at the hourly wage increased by fifty per cent; where the contract sets a shorter week, hours between the contractual and the forty-five-hour limit are “work for additional hours” paid at a twenty-five per cent premium. The employee may choose compensatory time off instead (one hour thirty minutes per overtime hour), to be used within six months. Overtime requires the employee’s consent, and its total may not exceed 270 hours in a year. Startup practice of “salary includes overtime” is lawful only within limits: courts accept a contractual clause that the wage covers overtime up to the 270-hour annual ceiling if the wage is well above the minimum, and require actual records; a founder who cannot produce time records loses the evidential argument. The 2026 gross monthly minimum wage is 33,030 lira; every wage promise should be expressed and recorded as gross, because the net-to-gross conversion moves with the employee’s cumulative income-tax bracket during the year.
Remote and hybrid work
Since Law No. 6715 of 2016, Article 14 of Law 4857 defines remote work as a written employment relationship in which the employee performs the work at home or, through technological means of communication, outside the workplace, within the employer’s work organisation. The written contract must set out the description of the work, how it is performed, its duration and place, wage and payment terms, the equipment provided by the employer and the obligations to protect it, how the employer communicates with the employee, and the general and special working conditions. Remote workers may not be treated differently from comparable on-site employees without a substantial reason, and the employer must inform and train them on health and safety, provide health surveillance and take safety measures for the equipment it supplies. The Remote Work Regulation (Official Gazette 10 March 2021, No. 31419) fills in the procedure, including the rules for switching an existing on-site employee to remote work on request and the employer’s duties on data protection. A startup that hires remote from day one should build these terms into its standard contract rather than adding a side letter later; a company in a technopark should also read the outside-Zone rules in our technopark incentives article before promising unrestricted remote work.
Leave, and the liabilities that accrue quietly
Article 53 entitles an employee who has completed one year, including the trial period, to paid annual leave of at least fourteen days for one to five years’ service, twenty days for more than five and less than fifteen years, and twenty-six days for fifteen years and more; employees aged eighteen or under and fifty or over get at least twenty days. The right cannot be waived, unused leave is paid out on termination at the final wage, and a company that lets leave accumulate is building a liability. The larger accrual is severance. Article 14 of the former Labour Law No. 1475, kept in force by Law 4857, entitles an employee with at least one year’s service whose contract ends in the qualifying ways (employer termination other than for the immoral or dishonourable conduct in Article 25(II), the employee’s justified termination, military service, retirement, marriage of a female employee within one year, death) to thirty days’ wages for each full year of service, pro rata for the remainder, calculated on the final gross wage including regular benefits and subject to a ceiling indexed to the highest civil servant’s retirement bonus. For a growing team the severance accrual can equal several months of payroll within a few years; investors will ask for the calculation, and a clean personnel file per employee is what makes it possible. Notice pay under Article 17 runs from two weeks for service under six months to four weeks (six months to one and a half years), six weeks (one and a half to three years) and eight weeks (over three years); the employer may pay it in lieu, and the periods can be increased but not reduced by contract.
Termination below thirty employees, and the day you cross the line
Article 18 requires an employer with thirty or more employees to base the termination of an indefinite-term contract of an employee with at least six months’ seniority on a valid reason connected with the employee’s competence or conduct or the requirements of the business, and Articles 19 to 21 give that employee the reinstatement claim with up to four months’ back pay and a four-to-eight-month compensation if reinstatement is refused. Below thirty employees none of this applies; the employer may terminate with notice (or pay in lieu) and severance, and only the equal-treatment and anti-discrimination rules of Article 5 and the bad-faith compensation of Article 17 constrain it. That freedom ends the day the headcount reaches thirty, counting all employees of the employer in the same line of business across workplaces, so a company approaching the line should introduce written performance processes and termination reasoning before it needs them. Immediate termination for cause under Article 25 (health, immoral or dishonourable conduct including breach of trust and unauthorised absence, force majeure) must, for the conduct cases, be exercised within six working days of learning of the conduct and in any event within one year (Article 26), and defeats severance only in the Article 25(II) cases.
Outside the contract: registration, safety and data
Three compliance items sit outside the employment contract and are checked first in any audit. Social security: under the Social Insurance and General Health Insurance Law No. 5510 the employee’s commencement declaration must be filed with the Social Security Institution before the start date, and monthly premium declarations follow; unregistered work is the single most expensive labour-law mistake a startup can make. Health and safety: Law No. 6331 applies to every workplace regardless of size; every employer must have a risk assessment, provide training and, depending on the hazard class and headcount, appoint or contract an occupational-safety specialist and workplace doctor, with the employer itself permitted to undertake certain duties in less-hazardous workplaces with fewer than fifty employees after training. Personal data: employee data is processed on the legal bases in Article 5 of the KVKK, mostly the performance of the contract and legal obligations rather than consent, and the company needs a privacy notice for employees and applicants, a retention rule for CVs and personnel files, and care with monitoring and biometrics, on which the Board’s decisions have been strict.
Can we hire the first engineers as freelancers on invoices?
Only if they are actually independent: their own clients, their own hours, their own tools, no hierarchy. A “freelancer” who works full time for one company under its direction is an employee in substance, and the reclassification brings premiums, penalties, severance and tax back to day one.
Do we need a workplace regulation or handbook?
Not by statute for a small employer, but a short internal regulation referenced in the contract is the cleanest way to bind employees to remote-work, IT-use, confidentiality and disciplinary rules, and Article 22 requires any substantial later change in working conditions to be notified to the employee in writing; a change the employee does not accept in writing within six working days does not bind the employee.
Can equity or options replace part of the salary?
Equity can sit alongside, never below the gross minimum wage in cash, and any cash component described as wage attracts premiums and tax. Option grants are governed by the plan rather than the employment contract; see our ESOP article for the tax treatment.
Related: severance pay · notice pay · gross and net salary · fixed-term contract.
Sources. Labour Law No. 4857 (Articles 5, 8, 11, 14, 15, 17–22, 25, 26, 41, 53, 63); Labour Law No. 1475 (Article 14); Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331; Social Insurance and General Health Insurance Law No. 5510; Remote Work Regulation (Official Gazette 10 March 2021, No. 31419). Statute links open the official Turkish texts on mevzuat.gov.tr.
This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Please seek legal support for an assessment of any specific matter.
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