The thing most groups get wrong first
A work permit in Türkiye is applied for by the employer, not by the individual. Your Turkish entity is the applicant, and it has to qualify — on headcount, on financial standing, and on the salary it undertakes to pay. A group that sends a senior manager and expects them to sort out their own paperwork has already lost several weeks.
The second thing: the salary declared on the application is not a formality. It has to meet a statutory minimum for the occupation, and it becomes the figure your payroll must actually pay.
Salary criteria
Minimum gross salaries are set as multiples of the gross minimum wage in force on the application date, under the assessment criteria applied since 1 October 2024:
| Occupation | Minimum |
|---|---|
| Senior managers and pilots | 5× minimum wage |
| Engineers and architects | 4× |
| Other managers | 3× |
| Roles requiring expertise or a skilled trade | 2× |
| Domestic service and other occupations | 1× |
Employment and financial criteria
The general rule is five Turkish employees for each foreign worker at the workplace. The entity must also meet one of: paid-in capital of at least TRY 500,000, net sales of at least TRY 8 million, or exports of at least USD 150,000.
There are meaningful exemptions — among them employers with annual net sales of TRY 50 million or more (up to five foreign workers), IT specialists, certain health and education professionals, tourism-certified establishments, and foreigners with eight or more years of lawful residence.
Two 2026 changes are worth knowing: since 3 August 2026, foreigners who have held a Turkish work permit or been lawfully resident for at least a year within the last three are not assessed against the employment and financial criteria, and manufacturing sector applications are exempt from the headcount criterion until 31 December 2027.
Fees
Applicable from 1 January 2026, per permit:
| Duration | Fee (TRY) |
|---|---|
| Up to 1 year | 12,574.90 |
| 1–2 years | 25,149.80 |
| 2–3 years | 37,724.70 |
| 3–4 years | 50,299.60 |
| 4–5 years | 62,874.50 |
| Indefinite | 125,802.20 |
Plus a card fee of TRY 964.00. The same schedule applies to work permit exemption certificates.
Expatriate payroll
Once the permit is granted the person is on a Turkish payroll, and the questions change: whether Turkish social security is due at all, how a split contract or a home-country payroll interacts with it, and how the assignment is taxed.
Where your employee stays covered by a home country with a social security agreement with Türkiye, they can be exempt from Turkish contributions — but only with a certificate of coverage on file at the local social security office. Without it, full Turkish premiums are imposed and recovering them afterwards is slow.
We run the permit application, the payroll that follows, and the certificate of coverage filing as one piece of work, because splitting them across three providers is how the gaps appear.