Employer of Record Turkey: 6 Providers Compared

The first Istanbul offer I priced, I did the arithmetic in the wrong order. I took the lira salary, added what I assumed payroll tax would be, converted the total, and decided the number was comfortable. The number was fine. The things I had not counted were not rates at all.

Turkish employment cost is a social security percentage that behaves itself, wrapped around a severance liability that starts building in the first year and a set of statutory figures that reset twice a year. An employer of record takes the mechanics off your desk by employing the person through its own Turkish entity, filing the social security registration, and carrying the employer obligations while you keep the work and the relationship.

What a provider cannot do is change the law underneath. This guide covers what Turkish law requires before any vendor is involved, what a hire costs on top of gross salary, the currency problem that never appears on a pricing page, and six providers compared on the prices they actually publish. Every legal and contribution figure below was checked against Turkish government sources in September 2026.

How an employer of record works in Turkey

An employer of record employs your Turkish hire through a Turkish entity it already holds, so you can put someone on a compliant local payroll without registering a company in Turkey. You choose the person and agree the money. The provider signs the contract and takes on the obligations that Turkish employment law attaches to being the employer.

One deadline sets the tone for the whole arrangement. Under the social insurance law, the employer has to file the entry declaration for a new hire before the person's insurance start date, which in practice means before the first day of work, with narrow exceptions for construction, fishing, and agriculture. Most countries give you days or weeks after the start. Turkey gives you none, and late registration is an administrative fine rather than a formality.

The right-hand column is the part vendors underplay. A provider removes administration and legal exposure, not judgment. You still recruit, still decide, and still own whatever onboarding experience the person actually gets in their first month on the job.

Do you actually need one for Turkey?

Only if the person is genuinely an employee and you have no Turkish entity. Those are two separate tests, and a fair share of the people shopping this category fail the first one, which means they are pricing a product roughly ten times more expensive than the one they need.

The classification question is the expensive one. If the honest answer is freelancer, the right purchase is a contractor management product at $25 to $49 per person per month rather than an employment arrangement at ten to twenty times that. If the honest answer is employee, and you are directing the work day to day, keep reading. Guessing in your own favor is how a misclassification claim starts.

What the employer actually pays to social security

Employer contributions in Turkey come to 23.75 percent of gross pay, and a compliant employer outside manufacturing pays 21.75 percent once the Treasury discount is applied. The load arrives as four separate lines rather than one, and the employee funds a further 15 percent out of gross.

The social insurance law sets the split without ambiguity. The rates in Article 81 put invalidity, old age, and death insurance at 21 percent of earnings, of which the employer funds 12 percent and the employee 9 percent. General health insurance is 12.5 percent, split 7.5 percent to the employer and 5 percent to the employee. Short-term insurance branches, covering work accidents and occupational disease, are 2.25 percent funded by the employer alone.

The discount is worth understanding, because it is conditional rather than automatic. Two points of the pension line are funded by the Treasury only where the employer files its monthly declarations on time, pays the rest of the premium on time, and carries no premium or penalty debt to the institution. Manufacturing workplaces classified under the relevant activity code get five points instead of two, under a provisional article that runs to the end of 2026 and can be extended by presidential decision. A provider with a filing record you cannot see is the one carrying that condition on your behalf.

There is also a ceiling, and it was raised for 2026. Contributions stop accruing above monthly earnings of TRY 297,270, which is nine times the monthly minimum wage. The multiple used to be seven and a half, so the amendment that lifted it quietly increased the employer bill on every senior salary in the country.

What a Turkish hire costs on top of gross

Employer costs add roughly 26 percent to gross pay for a professional hire in Turkey, and the severance accrual is about a sixth of that. The table below models one employee on TRY 150,000 a month, with the two point discount applied and the severance accrual held at the statutory ceiling.

Two things about that table are easy to miss. Without the discount the statutory rate is 23.75 percent rather than 21.75 percent, which is another TRY 3,000 a month on this salary, and whether you get it depends on the provider's own filing discipline rather than yours. And the severance line is capped: the uncapped headline of 30 days a year would be TRY 150,000, while the ceiling holds it to TRY 73,730, which is why the accrual lands near 4.1 percent of gross rather than the 8.33 percent that a month per year implies.

Turkey has no statutory thirteenth salary, so the model runs on 12 payments. Meal allowances and commuting support are not required by law either, but they are common in Turkish professional offers, and the income tax law exempts up to TRY 300 a day for meals and TRY 158 a day for commuting paid through a transit card or ticket. A candidate moving from a Turkish employer will expect both, so ask whether the quote you were given includes them or treats them as a later pass-through, because the true cost of employing someone is set long before you pick a vendor.

Severance, notice, and the right to be reinstated

Severance in Turkey is 30 days of pay for every full year of service, owed from the first completed year and capped per year at TRY 73,729.87 for terminations between 1 July and 31 December 2026. Notice runs from two to eight weeks on top of that, and neither is negotiable downward.

The severance rule is a survivor. Article 14 of the 1971 Labour Act is the only part of that statute still in force, and it pays 30 days of wages for each completed year with a pro rata amount for the remaining months. It bites when the employer terminates for anything short of serious misconduct, and also when the employee leaves for compulsory military service, on retirement, or where a woman resigns within a year of marrying. The annual figure cannot exceed the maximum retirement bonus paid to the highest-ranked civil servant, which is the ceiling the Ministry of Treasury and Finance republishes every six months.

Notice can be paid out rather than worked, and usually is. The ladder itself sits in Article 17 of the Labour Act No. 4857: two weeks below six months of service, four weeks from six months, six weeks from eighteen months, and eight weeks beyond three years. A party that ignores the requirement owes compensation equal to the wages for the notice period, so the choice is between time and money rather than between notice and no notice.

The job security rules are where this arrangement does something unexpected. An employee at a workplace with 30 or more workers, with at least six months of service, can challenge a dismissal that lacks a valid reason: first at a mediator within one month of the notice, then in a labor court within two weeks of the final mediation record. If the court invalidates the termination and the employer does not take the person back within a month of their application, the employer owes four to eight months of wages in compensation, plus up to four months of wages for the period not worked.

Read the 30-worker test carefully. It counts the workers of the employer, across that employer's workplaces in the same branch of activity, and under this arrangement the employer is the provider rather than you. A provider employing hundreds of people in Turkey is not going to fall under the threshold, so a five-person US startup should assume its Turkish hire carries full reinstatement rights from month six. That is not a reason to avoid the model. It is a reason to document performance properly and to give the provider warning before you decide anything.

Hours, leave, and the paperwork Turkish law expects

The Turkish working week is capped at 45 hours, paid annual leave starts at 14 days and is only earned after a full year of service, and 15.5 days of public holidays sit outside that allowance. Overtime is paid at 150 percent of the hourly rate and is capped at 270 hours a year.

Leave is graded by service rather than by policy. The statutory floor is 14 days from one to five years, 20 days above five years, and 26 days from fifteen years, with a separate floor of 20 days for workers under 18 and workers over 50. Overtime needs the employee's consent, and where a contract sets the week below 45 hours the extra hours up to 45 are paid at 125 percent rather than 150 percent.

The paperwork rules catch people out more often than the hours do. A contract of one year or more has to be in writing, and where there is no written contract the employer must give the employee a written statement of the main terms within two months. Separately, a law dating from 1926 requires companies of Turkish nationality to keep their contracts, correspondence, accounts, and books in Turkish, and where a bilingual document diverges, the Turkish text is the one that counts.

That matters more than it sounds when the contract is between your hire and a provider rather than between your hire and you. Ask for the Turkish original alongside the English, have someone read the Turkish, and pay particular attention to the intellectual property assignment and to any restrictive covenant, because those are the clauses where a translation that reads fine in English can be doing something narrower in the language that governs.

Running a payroll in lira

A lira payroll reprices faster than a US budget expects. Consumer prices rose 31.51 percent in the year to August 2026, so the salary you set in January is a materially smaller salary by the autumn, and the statutory numbers underneath it are revised on a schedule of their own.

Three of those resets are worth putting in a calendar. The minimum wage is fixed for the calendar year each December and rose 27 percent for 2026, which also moves the social security floor and ceiling because both are multiples of it. The severance ceiling is revised every January and July, and it went from TRY 64,948.77 in the first half of the year to TRY 73,729.87 in the second. And the contribution ceiling itself jumped from seven and a half times the minimum wage to nine times, which raised the employer bill on senior salaries without any change in anyone's pay.

The practical consequence is that an annual review is not a review in this market. The Presidency of Strategy and Budget reported monthly inflation of 1.84 percent for August alone, so a raise decided once a year and left alone is a pay cut in real terms by the middle of it. Turkish employers of every size handle this by repricing more often, and a provider that treats a salary change as a contract amendment with a long lead time will make that harder than it needs to be. Ask how a mid-year increase is processed and how quickly it reaches the payslip.

Currency is the other half of the problem, and it runs in your direction as often as against you. Your provider bills a platform fee in dollars while funding a payroll in lira, so ask which rate is used, on which day it is set, what markup sits inside it, and whether the deposit the provider holds is denominated in dollars or lira. On a payroll of this size the currency mechanics can move more money in a quarter than the difference between the cheapest and the most expensive provider on this page.

Employer of record providers for Turkey compared

Six providers, compared on the fees they publish rather than the fees a salesperson mentions. All six publish a rate for employment, and all six publish something for contractors, which is more transparency than this category used to offer.

Two patterns surface immediately. The published band runs from $199 to $699 per employee monthly, a spread of $6,000 a year on a single Turkish hire. And not one of these pricing pages names the entity that would employ your person in Turkey, or says how the severance accrual is held, which are the two questions that decide what happens on the day the arrangement ends.

If Turkey is one market among several rather than your only one, platform breadth starts to earn its premium and the calculation changes.

The six providers reviewed

Papaya Global publishes a starting employment rate of $499 per employee monthly, below every rate here except RemoFirst, and it built the platform around payments and reporting rather than employment alone. In a market where the money moves this much, that emphasis is not a marketing distinction. It is the difference between seeing why the monthly invoice changed and arguing about it.

Turkish employer cost is four statutory lines with different bases, a discount that depends on a filing record you cannot inspect, a contribution ceiling pegged to a minimum wage that resets in January, and a severance accrual capped by a figure that moves every six months. A platform that itemizes all of that saves a conversation every quarter. The caution is the words in front of the number, because a starting rate is not a Turkey quote.

Deel publishes every rate on one page, which in this category is still not universal, and at $599 per employee monthly it sits at the market anchor rather than the top of it. For a US company making a first Turkish hire, the practical draw is that contractor management and employment live in one account, so the common shape of one employee in Istanbul and three contractors elsewhere does not need two vendors and two invoices.

Press on Turkey specifically. The pricing page says nothing about which entity would employ your person, nothing about how the severance accrual is held between now and the exit, and nothing about the currency mechanics. Ask for the Turkish contract template as well, and have the Turkish version read rather than the English one, because that is the text a Turkish court would work from.

Remote states on its pricing page that it directly owns all of its legal entities and never relies on third parties to employ workers. That is the vendor's own claim rather than a verified fact, but if it holds for Turkey it buys something concrete: one named party responsible for the entry declaration that has to be filed before day one, for the monthly premium filings the discount depends on, and for the severance settlement at the end.

The trade is price. At $699 per employee monthly it sits at the top of the published range, roughly $1,200 a year above the anchor on a single hire. It also publishes managed payroll at $29 per employee monthly for companies that already hold a local entity, and that is the product you graduate to if you eventually incorporate in Turkey, which makes the premium easier to justify when the entity is a real plan rather than a someday.

Atlas HXM publishes a starting rate of $599 per employee monthly and describes its own model as direct rather than partner-based, which puts it in the same conversation as the vendor above at a published price $100 lower. Its pricing page also runs a comparison table of rival rates, which is worth reading as marketing rather than as data, since the figures it attributes to competitors do not all match those vendors' own pages.

What to establish is whether the direct model extends to Turkey. It is a large enough market that most serious platforms hold an entity in it, so the more revealing questions are the local ones: which entity signs, what its filing record with the social security institution looks like, and whether your hire would be employed on an indefinite contract or a fixed term that Turkish law only allows where there is an objective reason for it.

Oyster publishes a rate, gives contractors a free first 30 days before charging $29, and states that setup, onboarding, and offboarding carry no additional charge. That suits a founder who wants one Turkish employee and no standing relationship to manage, and the self-serve flow is the most straightforward in this group.

The hourly advisory rate is the tell about the model. Setup, onboarding, and processing a termination are included in the subscription, but project based HR advisory is metered at $300 an hour, so if you expect to lean on the provider through a difficult exit, price that in now. A Turkish exit involves a notice calculation, a severance settlement against a ceiling that may have moved since you last looked, and a valid reason that has to survive a mediator and possibly a court, which is exactly the moment you want a person rather than a ticket.

RemoFirst publishes the lowest fee in this group by a wide margin, starting at $199 per employee monthly, and states that there are no hidden fees, no minimum contract terms, and no minimum number of employees. On one Turkish hire that gap is roughly $4,800 a year against the $599 anchor and $6,000 against the $699 tier, which is real money at small headcount.

The word in front of the number is doing work, because a starting rate is not a Turkish quote, and the vendor says as much: the fee varies with local country requirements. Turkey is a moderate market to serve, with one national pay floor and no sector wage grid, so the starting rate has a better chance of holding here than in a fragmented jurisdiction. Get the Turkish figure in writing anyway, along with the entity name, the deposit, and the severance treatment.

A provider or your own Turkish company

Use a provider while your Turkish headcount is small, and model your own limited company once it is not. The crossover usually arrives at three or four people, because the fee is charged per head while the cost of running a company is mostly fixed.

Incorporation itself is not the obstacle. The minimum capital for a Turkish limited company is TRY 50,000, which is a small figure in dollars, and the registration is a routine matter for a local firm. What the entity route really costs is attention: Turkish language bookkeeping, monthly social security and withholding declarations, an accountant on retainer, and corporate income tax at 25 percent on profit under the Corporate Tax Law.

The third row carries a warning rather than a recommendation. Engaging someone in Turkey on invoices while directing their hours and methods is the fastest route to a retroactive employment finding, and the bill covers unpaid severance, notice, leave, and social security premiums with late charges attached. If you later move the person onto your own payroll, treat it as a change of employer rather than a data migration, because continuity of service decides both the notice ladder and the severance calculation.

What to ask before you sign

Before you choose

FirstHR is not an employer of record. We hold no entity in Turkey, employ nobody on your behalf, and take on no employer liability, so if you need someone on a Turkish payroll next month, the providers above are the category to shortlist. FirstHR is an onboarding and HR platform, not a payroll provider.

This section exists because the provider decision and the HR decision are separate, and people conflate them. A provider handles the legal employment. It does not run the first week, own the signed documents, deliver the training the role requires, or keep employee records in a state where you can find them a year later.

That layer stays yours whichever route you take, and it is what we built FirstHR for: onboarding with e-signature, document management, training with completion tracking, and an employee record that holds together for a small business without a dedicated HR person, at a flat $98 to $198 per month regardless of headcount.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an employer of record in Turkey?

The party named as employer on the Turkish contract, the payslip, and every social security filing, while the person works for you in every practical sense. It signs the local contract, registers the hire before day one, remits tax and premiums, accrues the severance liability, and carries the exposure that a US company with no Turkish presence cannot carry itself.

How much does an employer of record cost in Turkey?

Published fees among the six providers here run from $199 to $699 per employee monthly. Add employer contributions of 23.75 percent of gross, or 21.75 percent where the discount applies, a severance accrual capped at TRY 73,729.87 a year, any deposit the provider holds, and a currency markup, since every fee in this category is billed in dollars against a payroll paid in lira.

What does an employer pay to SGK in Turkey?

Four lines rather than one: invalidity, old age, and death insurance at 12 percent, general health insurance at 7.5 percent, short-term insurance branches at 2.25 percent, and unemployment insurance at 2 percent. That is 23.75 percent of gross, falling to 21.75 percent for a compliant employer, and nothing accrues above monthly earnings of TRY 297,270.

What is the minimum wage in Turkey?

One national figure covers the whole country: TRY 33,030 gross a month, which nets TRY 28,075.50 after the 15 percent employee deductions, with no income tax because wages up to the floor are exempt. There is no sector grid and no regional variation. Employer cost at the floor is TRY 40,214.03 a month with the two point discount applied.

How does severance pay work in Turkey?

It builds as you go and is settled when the person leaves, at 30 days of pay for each completed year of service, with pro rata amounts for part years. Employer terminations trigger it unless there was serious misconduct, and so does a resignation for compulsory military service, on retirement, or by a woman within a year of marrying. The annual amount cannot exceed TRY 73,729.87 for the second half of the year.

How much notice do I have to give an employee in Turkey?

Two weeks below six months of service, four weeks from six months, six weeks from eighteen months, and eight weeks after three years. The employer can pay the period out instead of working it. Those figures are statutory minimums that a contract can improve, and they sit alongside, not instead of, the requirement to have a valid reason for the dismissal.

How much annual leave do employees in Turkey get?

The statutory floor is 14 days a year, rising to 20 days after five years and 26 days after fifteen, with 15.5 days of public holidays on top. Entitlement starts only once a full year of service is complete, so a hire who leaves at ten months has earned no annual leave at all under the statute, though many employers grant it anyway.

Should I use an employer of record or set up a Turkish company?

A provider first, and a company once the fee per head costs more than running one. A Turkish limited company needs TRY 50,000 of capital, a tax file, an employer file, a local accountant, and ongoing administration, against a fee that scales with every head you add. Run the crossover at three or four employees rather than discovering it at ten.