Are meal allowances cut during annual leave in Turkey?

Turkish law answers the calculation question directly: pay for annual-leave days is computed on the employee's base ("bare") gross wage alone — overtime pay, premiums, bonuses and social benefits such as meal and transport allowances stay out of the calculation (Labor Law No. 4857, art. 57).

The employer must pay this leave pay in advance, before the leave begins, or provide it as an advance payment (art. 57). For monthly-salaried employees — the standard arrangement in Turkey — the practical effect is simple: the salary arrives in full during the leave month, and the real question shifts to fringe benefits like the meal card.

Keep two questions apart. How leave pay is calculated is fixed by statute: social benefits are excluded. Whether a meal card keeps loading on leave days is not answered by article 57 at all — it turns on the nature of the benefit and on what the employment contract, collective agreement or established practice says.

If the meal benefit compensates actual attendance — lunch served at the workplace, or a card loaded per day worked — the employer may lawfully skip leave days. The Court of Cassation's settled position is that such attendance-based social benefits are owed for days actually worked, and that leave pay itself remains limited to the bare wage.

If the meal money is a fixed cash amount paid with the monthly salary, it is treated as a component of the wage: it continues in full during leave and cannot be cut. A contract or collective-agreement clause promising payment during leave settles the matter outright.

A third path is established workplace practice: an employer that has loaded the card without interruption for years, leave days included, may have turned the benefit into a working condition. A material change to working conditions against the employee's interest binds the employee only with their written acceptance within six working days (art. 22) — a unilateral cut of such an acquired benefit can be invalid.

Turkey's social-security exemption for meal money is itself attendance-based: Turkey's social-security exemption for meal money is itself attendance-based: meal payments up to TRY 300 per day (the 2026 figure, indexed annually to the revaluation rate) are excluded from the SSI premium base only for days actually worked (Social Insurance Transactions Regulation art. 97, as amended 17 April 2026, and SSI Circular 2026/12).. A leave day is not a worked day, so amounts paid for leave days fall outside the exemption.

The income-tax exemption for daily meal allowances is likewise limited to meal costs for days worked (Income Tax Law No. 193, art. 23/8). This is why many Turkish employers load meal cards per worked day — pausing during leave is usually exemption logic, not bad faith. An employer that pays through leave anyway simply runs those days through the premium and tax base. If you hire in Turkey via an employer of record, expect the meal budget to track worked days by default.