Excused leave in Turkey: how many days? Pay deductions, unpaid leave and insurance

On Tuesday evening an employee messages their manager: “My child has a school meeting on Wednesday. Can I take half a day of excused leave?” The manager says “fine”, but HR remembers that last month the same employee had pay deducted for two days off. One was recorded as paid leave, the other as leave with pay deducted, and both were called “excused leave”. On top of that, payroll asks how to report these days to the SGK, Turkey’s Social Security Institution. This article looks separately at where excused leave sits in Turkish labour law, how long it lasts, its effect on pay and insurance, and the conditions for unpaid leave.

Excused leave is paid leave regulated in Additional Article 2 of the Labour Law and granted in cases such as the employee’s marriage, the adoption of a child or the death of a close relative. For reasons the law does not list, the duration and the pay rule are set by the employment contract, a collective agreement or company policy; this difference is the real source of disputes over pay deductions.

How many days is excused leave?

For reasons the law does not list, such as a school meeting, dealing with a government office or short-term care of a relative, there is no general number of days. Your written rule decides whether these count as paid, whether pay is deducted and whether they are charged to annual leave. Without a rule, each manager decides for themselves, and two employees in the same situation are treated differently.

Is excused leave deducted from pay?

Statutory excused leave is paid; no pay is deducted in these cases. For excused leave the company grants on its own initiative, internal rules determine the pay status. If you apply a deduction, it is good practice to be able to show the employee the reason and the calculation in writing. The effects by type of leave can be summarised as follows:

For reasons outside the statutory list, even a single written sentence largely ends the debate. The sample policy sentence below is only meant to give you an idea; adapt it to your own circumstances and your legal adviser’s opinion.

Excused leave listed in the law is paid. For other reasons, such as school meetings and official errands, leave is granted by the hour with the manager’s approval; these hours are not deducted from pay or from annual leave. The approval is entered in the request record.

What are the conditions for unpaid leave?

The law obliges the employer to grant unpaid leave only in certain cases:

• For employees who spend their annual leave away from where they work, up to four days in total of travel leave, on request and with supporting documents (Art. 56).
• For a female employee, on request, up to six months of leave after the end of maternity leave (Art. 74).
• From the end of postnatal leave, provided the child is alive, leave of half the weekly working time: 60 days for the first birth, 120 days for the second and 180 days for subsequent births (Art. 74).
• For an employee who is a foster parent, 10 days on request after the child is placed with them (Art. 74, added by Law No. 7578).

Apart from these, we found no general article obliging the employer to grant unpaid leave whenever it is requested. In practice such leave is granted by agreement between the two parties. The agreement should be in writing and contain at least the following:

1. Start and end dates of the leave and the return-to-work date.
2. The reason for the leave.
3. That these days are unpaid.
4. How it is reflected in the SGK notification (missing days).
5. The effect on annual leave entitlement.
6. Signatures of the employee and the approving manager, and HR approval.

Are insurance premiums paid during unpaid leave?

The insurance premium amount depends on earnings: earnings subject to premiums are based on the gross total of wages earned (Article 80 of Law No. 5510). Since no earnings arise on unpaid days, no premium is recorded for those days. The SGK announcement on the monthly premium and service document also says that the number of premium days is found by subtracting the days for which no wage is earned from the number of days in the month; in its example, for an employee who takes 3 days of unpaid leave in a 28-day month, 25 premium days and 3 missing days are reported. Three points need to be distinguished:

• Retirement: the number of premium days falls by the number of unpaid days.
• Health benefits: general health insurance continues for unpaid leave periods that the employer documents and that do not exceed one month in total in a calendar year; unpaid leave under Articles 56 and 74 of Law No. 4857 and under other labour laws is left out of this calculation (Art. 67 of Law No. 5510).
• Sickness and maternity provisions: in cases of unpaid leave under the relevant laws, insured status is deemed lost starting from the tenth day after this situation ends (Art. 9 of Law No. 5510).

For agreed leave longer than one month, how health benefits will continue and who will bear the premium should be examined separately. The most important point for the employee to know is that the unpaid period will not count towards premium days for retirement; so it is good practice to inform the employee in writing before approving long leave. The SGK announcement is not recent; confirm the reporting codes and current practice with your accountant.

Recording excused, unpaid and annual leave separately

A single “leave” column in Excel is practical at first. The problem is that the three types of leave affect the balance and pay differently: excused leave cannot be charged to annual leave, and unpaid days are reflected in payroll and in the SGK notification. When an “I can’t come in tomorrow” message on WhatsApp is not recorded, at the end of the month there is a dispute over which day falls under which type. Every leave record should contain at least the following fields; when records are kept with these fields, the missing-days list for payroll, the annual leave balance and pay deductions can all be read from the same table at the end of the month:

• Leave type: annual, excused, unpaid
• Basis: law, employment contract, policy or special agreement
• Dates and number of days or hours
• Effect on pay: paid or unpaid
• Number of missing days for the SGK notification
• Effect on the annual leave balance
• Document: marriage certificate, death certificate, medical report and similar
• The people who received, approved and recorded the request

Excused and unpaid leave requests in the portal

In YazSis KurumsalPortal, the Mobile Leave Management module lets 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; the leave is not final until the approval chain is complete, every step stays on record and approved leave is entered in the team calendar. Records can be exported as XLSX reports.

The workflow described for the module is request, balance check, multi-level approval and calendar. In a meeting before setup, we suggest clarifying details such as how excused, unpaid and annual leave will be distinguished in the portal and how missing-day information for the SGK will be obtained; this article does not claim that the module separates leave types by itself.

To bring different types of leave request into one workflow, you can explore the Mobile Leave Management module.