Overtime calculation under Turkish labour law follows Labour Law No. 4857: work beyond 45 hours a week is overtime, paid at the hourly rate plus 50%. Where a contract sets a shorter working week, the hours between that limit and 45 are "work at increased hours", paid at the hourly rate plus 25%.
Total overtime may not exceed 270 hours a year, the employee's consent is required, and the employee may choose time off instead of premium pay. None of this can be calculated reliably without an accurate timesheet: without real clock-in and clock-out times, the shift plan and leave records, overtime becomes guesswork. How you capture those times matters too: for fingerprint clocks, see our article on biometric attendance and data protection.
This guide is written for HR and finance teams — including those at international companies operating in Türkiye — and covers the legal rules, the calculation step by step, common timesheet errors and how to make attendance data trustworthy. It is a general overview, not legal advice: collective agreements and employment contracts may contain terms more favourable to the employee.
What the law says: the core rules
The rules below summarise Articles 41, 47, 63, 68 and 69 of Labour Law No. 4857 (official Turkish text):
| Topic | Rule | Article |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly working time | Generally no more than 45 hours | 63 |
| Daily cap | Where hours are distributed unevenly, no more than 11 hours a day | 63 |
| Overtime (fazla çalışma) | Work beyond 45 hours a week; paid at hourly rate + 50% | 41 |
| Work at increased hours (fazla sürelerle çalışma) | Work beyond a contractual week shorter than 45 hours, up to 45; paid at hourly rate + 25% | 41 |
| Annual cap | Total overtime may not exceed 270 hours a year | 41 |
| Consent | The employee's consent is required | 41 |
| Time off in lieu | Instead of premium pay, 1 hour 30 minutes per overtime hour, 1 hour 15 minutes per increased hour; to be taken within six months | 41 |
| Averaging (denkleştirme) | If the weekly average over a two-month period does not exceed 45 hours, longer weeks are not overtime; extendable to four months by collective agreement | 41, 63 |
| Breaks | 15 minutes for work up to 4 hours, 30 minutes for 4–7.5 hours, 1 hour beyond 7.5 hours; breaks do not count as working time | 68 |
| Night work | Night work may not exceed 7.5 hours; no overtime may be worked on night shifts | 41, 69 |
| Public holidays | Employees who work receive an additional full day's pay for each day worked | 47 |
The cost of inaccurate timesheets
Overtime errors cost money in both directions. Underpayment leads to disputes and back-pay; overpayment leaks out of the budget every month unnoticed. More important still is the effect of long hours on people:
WHO and the ILO jointly estimate that working 55 hours or more a week led to 745,000 deaths from stroke and ischaemic heart disease in 2016, a 29% increase since 2000. (WHO/ILO — Long working hours increasing deaths from heart disease and stroke)
That is what the 270-hour annual cap and the 11-hour daily cap are for: they are occupational health limits, not just payroll rules. Only an up-to-date timesheet shows who is getting close to them.
Leave and sick-leave days are another critical input. According to Türkiye's Social Security Institution (SGK), workers who had work accidents in 2025 accumulated 4,639,930 days of temporary incapacity (SGK Statistical Yearbook 2025). If medical-report days show up as "absent" on the timesheet, both pay and social security filings will be wrong.
Measurement matters for productivity too. Gallup reports that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, with low engagement estimated to cost the world economy around $10 trillion (Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2026). A team that only keeps up through constant overtime is usually showing a planning problem, and an accurate timesheet is how you see it.
How to calculate overtime under Turkish labour law, step by step
- Find actual working time. Subtract breaks from the time between clock-in and clock-out. Someone working 08:00–18:30 with a one-hour break has worked 9.5 hours that day.
- Add up the week. Total the net hours from Monday to Saturday. Flag work on the weekly rest day and on public holidays separately.
- Check whether averaging applies. If it does, calculate against the period average rather than week by week.
- Apply the threshold. Hours beyond 45 a week are overtime. If the contract sets fewer than 45 hours, the hours between the contractual limit and 45 are increased hours.
- Work out the hourly rate. For monthly-paid staff, common practice in Türkiye is to divide gross monthly pay by 225 hours (30 days × 7.5 hours).
- Apply the premium. Overtime hours × hourly rate × 1.5; increased hours × hourly rate × 1.25.
- Record any time off in lieu. If the employee chooses time off, credit 1.5 hours per overtime hour and 1.25 hours per increased hour.
- Update the annual counter. Compare the employee's year-to-date overtime with the 270-hour cap.
Example 1: a standard week
An employee on a 45-hour week works 50 hours after breaks. That is 50 − 45 = 5 hours of overtime, paid at 1.5 times the hourly rate. If the employee prefers time off, they earn 5 × 1.5 = 7.5 hours of time off in lieu, to be granted within six months.
Example 2: a 40-hour contract
An employee whose contract specifies 40 hours a week works 47 hours. The 5 hours between 40 and 45 are increased hours, paid at 1.25 times the rate; the 2 hours beyond 45 are overtime, paid at 1.5 times.
Example 3: averaging
At a workplace using two-month averaging, an employee works 50 hours a week for the first four weeks and 40 hours a week for the next four. The period average is (4 × 50 + 4 × 40) / 8 = 45 hours. Because the average does not exceed 45, the 50-hour weeks do not count as overtime. To rely on this, however, you must be able to show from the timesheet that no day exceeded 11 hours and that the period was properly defined.
Common timesheet mistakes
- Ignoring breaks, or deducting the same fixed amount every day regardless of hours worked.
- Splitting night shifts incorrectly: a 22:00–06:00 shift spans two calendar days and should be assessed as one shift. The mistake is especially common where 24-hour duties are worked (hospital staff access control).
- Confusing public holiday work with overtime: the law provides a separate extra day's pay for each public holiday worked.
- Recording leave and sick days late: the record says "absent" when the truth is "on medical leave".
- Discovering the 270-hour cap at year end: unless the counter is updated monthly, the limit is only noticed after it has been exceeded.
- Not documenting consent: overtime requires the employee's consent, and that should be on record.
We explain how to set up the attendance data behind the timesheet in our time and attendance system guide, and cover dispersed sites in our article on construction site access and attendance.
How we set up timesheet processes at Digital Bridge
Correct overtime depends on correct data before any formula is applied, so we start at the source:
- Map the current process. We review your shift plan, break pattern, averaging arrangements, leave and sick-leave flow, and payroll software.
- Record attendance at the source. Attendance is captured by the same read as the card access control at the door, so no times are typed in by hand.
- Define the rules in the system. Tolerances, shift start and end times, night shifts and holidays become timesheet rules.
- Connect to payroll. We feed timesheet output into your HR, payroll and personnel management processes and link different software through system integration. Where payroll runs inside an ERP, we bring the ERP side into scope too.
- Set the data protection framework. Attendance records are personal data under KVKK, Türkiye's data protection law; we define retention and access through data protection compliance consultancy.
SmartPass for timesheets: from the door to payroll
SmartPass, our own product, combines access control, time and attendance and canteen meal counting in one system. For overtime, that means:
When an employee taps their card at the gatehouse in the morning, the turnstile opens and an attendance record is created; the same happens on the way out. No separate attendance device is needed. Timesheets are produced against the employee's shift plan and reports can be exported to payroll. The same card is read in the canteen at lunch, and a meal is deducted where the employee is entitled to one. At month end HR works from records created at the source instead of merging sign-in sheets and spreadsheets it has outgrown.
What SmartPass contributes:
- One read, three jobs: door, attendance record and canteen.
- Timesheets based on the shift plan, with reports that can be exported to payroll.
- Audit trail: when a record is changed, the old and new values are kept; the auditor role is read-only.
- Data protection by design: card numbers are not stored in plain text, and records past their retention period are anonymised.
- Time-limited QR codes for contractors and visitors, read on the same terminal and governed by the same rules as staff cards.
- Multi-site support: separate records per site, consolidated reports at group level.
Next step
Put the last three months of timesheets, your shift plan and your current overtime method side by side — the source of discrepancies is often obvious straight away. Contact us and we will review the process with you and show how SmartPass produces timesheets for your shift structure.