Do weekends count as annual leave in Turkey? Public holidays, half days and hourly leave

You book a week of leave from Monday 26 October to Friday 30 October. The calendar includes 29 October, Turkey’s Republic Day. HR says “we are deducting five days”; you had worked out four. On top of that, you notice that the two hours you took off last month for a doctor’s appointment also came off your balance. When weekends, public holidays, half days and hours come together, two people counting the same days get two different results. This article explains which days count as annual leave under Turkish labour law, which do not and how to put the rule in writing.

The weekly rest day is an uninterrupted rest of at least twenty-four hours given to the employee within any seven-day period (Article 46 of Turkish Labour Law No. 4857). For calculating annual leave, the rule is clear: weekly rest days, national holidays and public holidays that fall within the leave period are not counted as leave. Everything else, where the law is silent, comes down to the company’s written rule. The same debate reopens every year when public holidays coincide with leave periods; the examples are fictional and based on the 2026 calendar.

Do weekends and public holidays count as annual leave?

The Labour Law states that, when calculating annual paid leave, national holidays, weekly rest days and public holidays that fall within the leave period are not counted as part of the leave (Article 56). The Regulation on Annual Paid Leave repeats the same rule (Article 6). In addition, wages for these days are paid separately, on top of holiday pay (Article 57 of the Law, Article 21 of the Regulation). The table below brings together the situations most commonly encountered in day-to-day work.

What happens if a public holiday falls during annual leave?

Back to the opening example. A person on a five-day week booked the week of 26–30 October 2026 as leave. Thursday 29 October is a national holiday, so it is not counted as leave; four days come off the balance: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Deducting five days would show the balance one day short. The employee is also paid separately for the holiday. Following this order when entering the date range reduces errors:

1. Enter the first and last day of leave.
2. Mark the weekly rest days in this range.
3. Mark the national and public holidays in the same range.
4. Apply your company rule for Saturday.
5. Count the remaining days and deduct them from the balance; enter the return-to-work date separately.

The same order applies to leave that spans a weekend. For example, if leave is booked from Thursday 5 November to Tuesday 10 November, the range contains Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Sunday is the weekly rest day, so it does not count. Saturday either counts or does not, depending on the company’s written rule: if it does not, four days come off the balance; if it does, five. In a workplace with a six-day week, Saturday is a normal working day. When the same leave produces two different day counts, it shows the rule lives in people’s heads, not in the file.

Article 19 of the Regulation requires the leave record to show the employee’s full name, date of hire, the date on which they became entitled to leave, the number of leave days, the number of travel leave days and the start and end dates of the leave. If these records show how the day count was reached, any dispute is short-lived.

How are half-day and hourly leave handled?

Does half-day leave come off annual leave?

The Law and the Regulation set annual leave in days; in the articles we reviewed, we found no separate provision for half days. Two situations need to be kept apart. If the employer grants a half day off on its own decision, it is one of the other types of leave granted during the year and cannot be set off against annual leave (Article 56). If the employee wants to use half a day of their own annual leave, bear in mind that the law requires annual leave to be granted continuously, without splitting, and that splitting requires agreement between the parties, with one part being no shorter than ten days. For that reason, any half-day annual leave practice should be set up with written consent and the opinion of a legal adviser.

Can hourly leave be deducted from annual leave?

The same logic applies. Hourly leave granted on the employer’s own initiative cannot be deducted from annual leave. Covering hourly leave from annual leave at the employee’s own request is not a practice the law expressly regulates. If you adopt such a practice, put at least the following in writing:

• Which leave type hourly leave is recorded under (excused, administrative or annual).
• Which unit the balance is kept in: days or hours.
• How many hours count as one day, and the difference for shift workers.
• The employee’s written request and approval by the manager and HR.
• How the hours used appear in the balance, and the rounding rule.

Whichever option you adopt, employees should know which rule applies the first time they request leave. Announce the rule to employees, give it to new hires on their first day and date each version when it changes. Otherwise, two years later, the same day count will get two different answers from two different managers.

Where does counting days in Excel or on paper go wrong?

In a small team, a date formula that counts working days and a holiday list entered by hand can get by for a few years. Errors usually pile up at these points:

• If the public holiday list is not re-entered every year, the count silently drifts; the dates of religious holidays change every year.
• If the Saturday rule is not written down, two HR employees count the same leave differently.
• When half days and hours are entered as decimals, rounding differences build up in the totals.
• The calendar and the balance are kept in separate files; leave shows on the calendar but may not have been deducted from the balance.
• When the day count on the paper form contradicts the figure in the spreadsheet, nobody knows which one counts.
• Managers find out who in their team is on leave only by asking HR.

Paper forms make it even harder: because the number of days is written by hand, the form is often signed without the calculation being checked, and the error comes to light at the month-end balance reconciliation. By then the employee has long since taken the leave, and the correction emails begin.

How do requests, balances and the team calendar stay in sync in the portal?

In YazSis KurumsalPortal’s Mobile Leave Management module, employees create leave requests from their phone’s browser without installing an app. The request is checked against the remaining balance and goes first to the manager, then to HR. Approved leave is added to the team calendar and the balance is updated; because the balance is tracked from these approved records, employees, managers and HR all work with the same up-to-date information.

The rule on which days count, however, is your company’s own definition: weekly rest day, Saturday, half days and hours. In this article we do not claim that the module counts days automatically; we recommend clarifying how your rule will be reflected in the portal in a meeting before installation.

If you want to see requests, balances and the team calendar in a single record, you can explore the modules on the KurumsalPortal page.