What Does Being 'On Payroll' (Bordrolu) Mean in Turkey?

Turkish working life draws a hard line around the payroll. A bordrolu employee has an employment contract, is declared to SGK before starting work, accrues pension and health coverage through monthly contributions, and receives an itemized payslip each month — the record that severance, notice pay, unemployment insurance and maternity benefits are all built on. Informal work (kayıt dışı, 'off the books') strips all of that away, and paying part of the wage in cash beside a low declared salary is treated as underreporting, sanctioned under both social security and tax law.

The other boundary is the contractor. A freelancer who invoices for services is not bordrolu: no employer social contributions, no severance accrual, no notice protection — but also none of an employee's subordination. For a foreign company, the practical reading is that hiring someone bordrolu in Turkey means running (or buying) a Turkish payroll: registering the employment with SGK, withholding taxes at source and issuing compliant payslips. A contractor arrangement that functions like employment risks being reclassified as one, with the payroll obligations applied retroactively.

A Turkish payslip starts from gross salary and works down. Two social contributions come first: the employee's SGK premium at 14% and unemployment insurance at 1% (Law No. 5510, Art. 81 and Law No. 4447, Art. 49). Income tax follows, calculated on a cumulative year-to-date base at progressive rates, and stamp tax at 0.759% — with the portion of every wage corresponding to the minimum wage exempt from both taxes under the regime introduced by Law No. 7349. What remains after all lines is the net amount paid to the bank.

Employees under 45 usually carry one more line: automatic enrolment into the private pension system (BES), a 3% deduction from the social-security base (Law No. 4632, Additional Art. 2), with a two-month opt-out right. Below the statutory block sit the employee-specific items deducted from net pay — salary advances being recovered, court-ordered wage garnishments and alimony. Every addition and deduction must appear as its own line on the pay statement the employer is obliged to issue (Labor Law No. 4857, Art. 37).

'Special deductions' (özel kesinti) are the lines with an employee-specific legal basis rather than a statutory rate. The main cap: no more than one quarter of the wage can be garnished for ordinary debts (Labor Law No. 4857, Art. 35 and Enforcement and Bankruptcy Law, Art. 83), and multiple garnishment orders queue rather than stack. Alimony is the exception — current monthly alimony is deducted in full, with priority, outside the one-quarter cap, while accumulated alimony arrears fall back under the cap in settled case law.

Two guardrails matter for employers. A garnishment order served on the employer must be implemented — an employer who ignores it can be held liable for the amounts it failed to withhold. And deductions cannot be improvised: beyond the statutory lines, an employer may only deduct what has a legal or documented contractual basis, and wage-penalty deductions are confined to the causes named in the contract within statutory limits (Labor Law No. 4857, Art. 38). Arbitrary offsets against net pay are the fastest route to a wage claim.