What is puantaj?
Puantaj is the statutory attendance record Turkish employers keep for every employee: days worked, clock-in and clock-out times, overtime, leave, and absences. Monthly payroll (bordro) and social security filings are calculated from it, and Turkish labor law obliges employers to document working time and keep the records available for inspection.
What a puantaj records
A puantaj cetveli — roughly, a tally sheet — is a day-by-day log of each employee's working time over a calendar month: days worked, clock-in and clock-out times, overtime hours, annual and sick leave, unexcused absences, plus weekly rest days and public holidays. Every calendar day gets an entry.
Month-end totals drive two things: the payroll calculation and the monthly social security filing. The number of premium days reported to Turkey's Social Security Institution (SGK) — and the coded reasons for any missing days — are derived from the puantaj.
Why it matters when hiring in Turkey
Turkish Labor Law No. 4857 caps the standard workweek at 45 hours (art. 63). Hours beyond that are overtime, paid at a 50% premium and limited to 270 hours per year (art. 41). Compliance with these limits can only be demonstrated through working-time records, which employers must keep under the Working Time Regulation issued under the Labor Law (art. 9).
In overtime disputes, Turkish courts lean on the employer's own records. Where none exist, established Court of Cassation (Yargıtay) case law allows overtime to be proven through witness testimony, which tends to favor the employee's account. Records must also be retained for 10 years under Social Insurance Law No. 5510 (art. 86) — so whoever runs your Turkish payroll, in-house or through an employer-of-record, needs a reliable monthly attendance feed.
Paper, Excel, digital
Many Turkish SMEs still keep puantaj on signed paper sheets or in Excel and retype the totals into payroll each month. Digital attendance systems pull entries from card readers — locally called PDKS devices — reconcile them against approved leave, and hand payroll-ready totals to the bordro run, which also makes producing records in an inspection straightforward.
| Standard workweek | 45 hours (Labor Law No. 4857, art. 63) |
| Overtime premium | +50% of the hourly wage (art. 41) |
| Annual overtime cap | 270 hours (art. 41) |
| Record retention | 10 years (Social Insurance Law No. 5510, art. 86) |
| Wage claim limitation period | 5 years (Labor Law No. 4857, art. 32) |
Frequently asked
Turkish employers are legally required to document employees' working time. The Working Time Regulation issued under Labor Law No. 4857 states this explicitly (art. 9). No specific format is mandated — a signed timesheet, card-reader log, or shift roster all qualify — but the records must be producible in a labor inspection or a court dispute.
Puantaj is the attendance record, and bordro is the payslip calculated from it. The puantaj shows days worked, overtime hours, and leave taken. The bordro converts those into gross pay, overtime premiums, social security contributions, and tax withholding. Errors in the attendance record flow directly into payroll and statutory filings.
Workplace records, attendance sheets included, must be retained for 10 years under Social Insurance Law No. 5510 (art. 86). Wage claims are subject to a 5-year limitation period under Labor Law No. 4857 (art. 32), during which the employer's own records are its main evidence in overtime disputes.
In Turkish labor courts the employer effectively bears the burden of documenting working hours. Where no records exist, courts may establish overtime through witness testimony, which tends to favor the employee's account — so missing puantaj records translate into real overtime liability, plus exposure in social security inspections.
A monthly sheet lists employees in rows and the days of the month in columns, and each cell records the day's status — regular hours worked, overtime, weekly rest, annual leave, sick report or unpaid leave. At month-end the day and hour totals are what payroll consumes. The sheet can live on paper or in a spreadsheet template. Digital systems generate the same table automatically from clock-in data and keep the archive.
A monthly puantaj sheet has three parts. The header identifies the workplace, the month, and the employee by name and registration number. The body gives every calendar day a column marked with a code — day worked, weekly rest, public holiday, annual leave, sick report, unpaid leave, absence — plus that day's overtime hours. A totals row sums days worked, overtime and any missing-day reason, and those totals feed the payroll run and the premium days reported to SGK. A signature block completes the record.