Overtime under Turkish labour law is work beyond 45 hours a week, and each overtime hour is paid at the hourly rate plus 50% under Labour Law No. 4857. Where a contract sets a shorter week, the hours between that limit and 45 are "work at increased hours", paid at plus 25%. Both depend on accurate timesheets.
Key takeaways
- Every hour beyond 45 a week is overtime, paid at 1.5 times the hourly rate (Labour Law Article 41).
- If the contract sets fewer than 45 hours, the hours between that limit and 45 are paid at 1.25 times.
- Overtime is capped at 270 hours a year, needs the employee's consent, and may be taken as time off instead of pay.
- Under averaging, longer weeks are not overtime if the two-month weekly average stays within 45 hours; no day may exceed 11 hours.
- For monthly-paid staff the hourly rate is usually gross pay divided by 225; reliable results need timesheets built from door reads.
Correct overtime depends on a reliable 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 feeding a time and attendance system (PDKS), see our article on biometric attendance and data protection. A fingerprint terminal that fails at the gate is a common source of hand-corrected timesheet lines; see fingerprint reader not recognising fingerprints.
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 with three examples, common timesheet errors and how to make attendance data trustworthy; related topics are gathered in our access control and attendance hub. It is a general overview, not legal advice: collective agreements and employment contracts may contain terms more favourable to the employee.
What is overtime? The core rules of Turkish Labour Law
Overtime appears in Turkish Labour Law as fazla çalışma and means work beyond 45 hours a week. The rules below summarise Articles 41, 47, 63, 68 and 69 of Labour Law No. 4857 (official Turkish text) as in force in 2026:
| 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 |
What do inaccurate timesheets cost?
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:
In a joint estimate published in 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) found 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)
The 270-hour annual overtime cap and the 11-hour daily cap are therefore occupational health limits, not just payroll rules. Only an up-to-date timesheet shows who is getting close to them. To carry overtime figures into payroll without errors at month end, follow the steps in time and attendance payroll integration. A timesheet shows how many hours someone worked; to see which project those hours went to, you need project time tracking.
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's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, with low engagement estimated to cost the world economy around $10 trillion, or 9% of global GDP (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
Overtime is calculated in eight steps; the order matters, because the threshold can only be applied once net working time and any averaging arrangement are known.
- 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. The most reliable source for these times is the door read in a card access control system: the card read at the gate is the raw data of the timesheet.
- 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 averaging, however, you must be able to show from the timesheet that no day exceeded 11 hours and that the period was properly defined.
What are the most common timesheet mistakes?
Most overtime disputes stem not from the formula but from the following data errors in the timesheet, which surface even later when it is kept by hand (Excel timesheet limits):
- 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). How rotating shifts feed into timesheets is covered separately in shift attendance tracking.
- 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.
- Not filtering double reads: a card tapped twice at the turnstile, or an employee set up under two payroll numbers, produces phantom hours. We trace the causes in data quality and duplicate records.
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.
In construction, the timesheet does not end with payroll: the labour hours a subcontractor spends on site also underpin the quantities and invoices checked in progress payment tracking. Hours verified by gate records take much of the heat out of progress payment disputes.
How does Digital Bridge set up timesheet processes?
Correct overtime depends on correct data before any formula is applied, so at Digital Bridge we start timesheet projects at the source:
- Map the current process. We review your shift plan, break pattern, averaging arrangements, leave and sick-leave flow, and payroll software. If you are still selecting software, the questions in choosing time and attendance software will help.
- 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 Personal Data Protection Law; we define retention and access through data protection compliance consultancy.
How does SmartPass turn overtime into timesheets?
SmartPass, developed by Digital Bridge as part of the Smart360 product family, is software that combines card access control, time and attendance, visitor management and canteen management in one panel. For overtime, what sets SmartPass apart is that the timesheet comes from the card read at the door rather than a separate device.
When an employee taps their card at the gatehouse in the morning, the server decides on access, the turnstile opens and the same read becomes the attendance record; the same happens on the way out. SmartPass turns these reads into timesheets against the employee's shift plan; a night shift carries over to the next day and is calculated as one shift. The closed month is locked, and a monthly per-person summary is taken from the locked timesheet as CSV or JSON for transfer to the ERP.
The same card is read in the canteen at lunch, and a consumption record is created where the employee has a meal entitlement. Shift-based entitlements, such as giving a night-shift group both an evening and a night meal, are covered in canteen meal counting automation. 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 to overtime and timesheet processes:
- One read, three jobs: door, attendance record and canteen, on the same card and in the same panel.
- Rule-based timesheets: fixed and flexible shifts, rotations; separate tolerances for late arrival and early leaving, breaks, an overtime threshold and rounding; a warning threshold at 45 hours a week.
- Double and missing read checks: double reads within 3 seconds are filtered out; a missing read is never guessed — the day is flagged "missing read" and awaits a correction with a stated reason.
- Leave handled separately: annual, sick, compassionate, unpaid and administrative leave are not counted as absence.
- Audit trail and period lock: a correction never deletes the original read and is kept as a separate record with its reason; no corrections can be written to a closed month, and unlocking it is itself logged.
- Data-minimising design: card numbers are not stored but converted on the device into a one-way hash with an organisation-specific key; once the retention period ends, fields linking records to a person are deleted automatically.
- Contractors and multi-site organisations: when a contractor's agreement ends, their cards are refused at the first read; each site can run as a separate SmartPass organisation, and authorised users switch between sites without re-entering a password.
Because SmartPass is installed together with hardware, pricing is quoted according to the number of access points, number of people and hardware needed. To buy SmartPass, request a quote; product details are on SmartPass.com.tr (in Turkish).
Next step: test your timesheets against the last three months
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.