Personal Injury Lawyer in Turkey

For a personal injury lawyer in Turkey, every claim is governed by written rules with fixed numbers: how long you have to file, whom you must write to before you sue, which court hears the case, and what an insurer must pay within how many days. A general description of "the process" is not enough to plan a claim, so this page gives the article numbers, the deadlines and the thresholds, because those are what decide whether a claim succeeds. In Turkey the same profession covers what is called a personal injury attorney in the United States and a solicitor or barrister in the United Kingdom: a Turkish lawyer (avukat) advises, negotiates with the insurer and appears in court.

The starting point is Article 49 of the Turkish Code of Obligations (Law No. 6098): a person who causes damage to another through fault is liable to compensate it. Around that principle sit the rules that matter in practice — Article 109 of the Highway Traffic Act (Law No. 2918) for road accidents, Article 5/A of the Turkish Commercial Code for the mandatory mediation step against insurers, Article 30 of the Insurance Act (Law No. 5684) for arbitration, and Articles 34, 40 and 48 of the Act on Private International and Procedural Law (Law No. 5718) for anything involving a foreign claimant.

Two points are worth stating at the outset, because they are the ones most often reported incorrectly. First, the widely repeated "two-year limitation period" is only the general rule; where the same act is also a criminal offence — which is the case in virtually every traffic accident causing injury — the longer criminal limitation period applies instead, and that is eight years for injury and fifteen years for a fatality. Second, a foreign national filing a claim in a Turkish court may be required to post security for costs under Article 48 of Law No. 5718, unless a reciprocity exemption applies. Both points change how a case should be planned, and both are easy to miss when a claim is being prepared from abroad.

What a Personal Injury Lawyer in Turkey Handles

A personal injury lawyer in Turkey deals with cases where a person suffers physical, psychological or financial harm because of another party's fault, negligence or unlawful conduct. The legal purpose is not only to identify who was responsible. It is to quantify the full extent of the damage — treatment already paid for, treatment still needed, income lost during recovery, earning capacity lost permanently, and the non-financial harm the injury caused — and to recover it from the party who must answer for it.

The statutory basis is Article 49 of the Turkish Code of Obligations: whoever causes damage to another by an unlawful act committed with fault must compensate that damage. Article 51 gives the judge discretion over the extent of compensation according to the circumstances and the degree of fault; Article 52 allows a reduction where the injured party's own conduct contributed to the harm. These three provisions decide most of what happens in a file.

In practice the work divides into four stages, and each has its own failure points:

Not every file needs all four. A straightforward soft-tissue injury with an undisputed accident report and a cooperative insurer can be resolved at stage three. A spinal injury with a disputed disability rating and a contested fault assessment will occupy all four for a considerable time.

Types of Personal Injury Claims and the Law Behind Each

Turkish law does not treat all injury claims under one regime. The category a case falls into determines the limitation period, the competent court, whether mediation is mandatory, and who can be sued. Identifying the category is therefore the first step in any assessment.

Car Accident Lawyer in Turkey and How Car Accident Claims Work

A car accident lawyer in Turkey handles the most common kind of personal injury file in the country: road traffic accidents account for the majority of injury claims, and they are the only category with a complete statutory framework of their own. If you were injured as a driver, passenger, pedestrian, cyclist or motorcyclist, the rules below apply to you directly — whether the other vehicle was a private car, a taxi, a coach, a hire car or a truck.

Every motor vehicle in Turkey must carry compulsory motor third party liability insurance (Article 91/1 of Law No. 2918). The obligation is not limited to Turkish-registered vehicles: under Article 91/6, where a foreign-plated vehicle has no insurance valid in Turkey, compulsory liability cover must be taken out at the border when it enters the country. Vehicles travelling under a Green Card are dealt with through the Motor Insurers' Bureau of Türkiye, whose payments are backed by the Guarantee Account (Article 14/2-d of Law No. 5684), and if a foreign vehicle turns out to have no valid cover at all, bodily injury is still covered by the Guarantee Account as for any uninsured vehicle. The practical consequence matters for anyone injured by a tourist's or a foreign carrier's vehicle — "the car had foreign plates" does not, by itself, leave the injured person without someone to claim against.

The injured party has more than one route, and they are not mutually exclusive:

• Against the insurer of the vehicle at fault, up to the policy limits. This is the primary route and does not require the driver to be sued.
• Against the driver, the keeper (işleten) and, where applicable, the operator, for any loss exceeding the policy limits. Under Article 85 of Law No. 2918 the keeper's liability is strict — fault does not have to be proved.
• Against the Guarantee Account (Güvence Hesabı), where the vehicle is uninsured, cannot be identified, was stolen, or the insurer has lost its licences in all branches or gone bankrupt (Article 14/2 of Law No. 5684). A hit-and-run is precisely the case this account exists for. For uninsured and unidentified vehicles the account covers bodily injury only, and only up to the compulsory insurance limits. (The account used to be regulated in Article 108 of Law No. 2918; that article was repealed in 2007 by Article 45 of Law No. 5684, and references to it on older pages are out of date.)

Two items are deliberately left out of the insurer's column. Hospital treatment given after a traffic accident — at university, state or private hospitals — is paid by the Social Security Institution regardless of whether the injured person has Turkish social security (Article 98 of Law No. 2918), and once the insurers transfer the share of premiums the law requires, their liability for those treatment costs ends. Treatment costs that the Institution does not cover, and carer costs, can still be claimed under the policy. Non-pecuniary damages — compensation for pain and suffering — fall outside compulsory motor insurance altogether (Article 92/f of Law No. 2918) and outside the Guarantee Account, so they are claimed from the driver and the keeper.

Fault is assessed by expert examination, but the accident report prepared at the scene sets the initial position and is frequently the document that decides the case. Where the report is incomplete — no sketch, no measurement, the pedestrian's position not recorded — that gap is very difficult to fill afterwards.

Pedestrian and cyclist accidents in Turkey

A pedestrian hit by a vehicle does not have to prove that the driver was at fault. The keeper's liability under Article 85/1 of Law No. 2918 is strict, so the starting point is that the pedestrian is compensated. The keeper escapes liability entirely only by proving that the accident was caused by force majeure or by the gross fault of the injured person or a third party, without fault on the driver's side (Article 86/1); ordinary fault on the pedestrian's part — crossing outside a marked crossing, for example — leads to a reduction under Article 86/2 and Article 52 of Law No. 6098, not to the loss of the claim. The list of "primary fault" situations in Article 84 is addressed to drivers only; the traffic rules for pedestrians in Article 68 carry administrative fines. Where two vehicles are involved, Article 88/1 makes everyone liable to the injured third party jointly and severally: a driver found 25 per cent at fault can be required to pay the pedestrian's whole loss and recover the rest from the other side afterwards.

Hit-and-run accidents

When the vehicle drives off and cannot be identified, the claim for bodily injury goes to the Guarantee Account (Article 14/2-a of Law No. 5684), up to the compulsory insurance limits. The account needs the police or gendarmerie record of the accident and the medical records showing the injury; the absence of a registration number is precisely what it exists to cover. Leaving the scene is also an offence in itself: since the amendment of 12 February 2026 a driver who leaves the scene of an accident causing death or injury faces imprisonment of one to three years in addition to a fine (Article 81/3 of Law No. 2918), and if the driver is later identified, the claim for anything above the account's limit, and for pain and suffering, is pursued against the driver and the keeper.

Workplace Injuries, Slip and Fall and Hotel Accidents in Turkey

Personal injury in Turkey is not only a traffic matter. Three other situations come up repeatedly, especially for foreign residents and visitors, and each follows a different set of rules.

Is there workers' compensation in Turkey?

There is no separate "workers' compensation" scheme of the American kind. Its function is shared between two systems that run side by side. The first is the work accident insurance operated by the Social Security Institution under Law No. 5510: an employee registered with the Institution receives a temporary incapacity allowance for every day of incapacity after a work accident, with no waiting days and no minimum premium period (Article 18), and a permanent incapacity income once the loss of earning capacity reaches 10 per cent (Article 19), the rate being fixed by the Institution's own health board. The second is the civil claim against the employer, who must take every measure required for occupational health and safety (Article 417 of Law No. 6098; Law No. 6331). That claim is contractual, so the limitation period is ten years; it is heard by the labour court, which may be the court of the place of the accident or of the injured worker's own domicile (Article 6/3 of Law No. 7036), and it is expressly excluded from mandatory mediation (Article 3/3). Benefits paid by the Institution that it can recover from the employer are deducted from the civil award; the rest is not.

Who is liable for a slip and fall in Turkey?

It depends on where the fall happened. In a building, the owner is strictly liable for damage caused by defective construction or inadequate maintenance (Article 69 of Law No. 6098) — fault does not have to be proved, only the defect and the causal link. On a public pavement, a road or in a park, the responsible body is usually the municipality: the claim is a full-remedy action against the administration, which starts with an application to the municipality within one year of learning of the damage and in any event within five years (Article 13 of Law No. 2577), and then goes to the administrative court. In a shop, shopping centre or other business premises, the operator is liable for its own fault and, under Article 66 of Law No. 6098, for its employees unless it proves that it took all due care. Photographs of the exact spot, the weather and lighting, and the names of witnesses are worth more in a fall case than in almost any other.

Injuries at hotels, pools and on tours

A guest injured at a hotel — a fall by the pool, a defective balcony or lift, food poisoning — usually has a contractual claim against the hotel operator in addition to any claim in tort, and the operator answers for the staff and contractors it uses to perform the contract. Where the stay was bought as a package, the tour organiser is also a party to the contract, and under Article 51/3 of Law No. 6502 an intermediary is liable as the organiser where the organiser has no representative in Turkey. A foreign guest is not required to sue only in his or her home country: Turkish courts have jurisdiction over an injury that happened in Turkey (Article 16 of Law No. 6100 and Article 40 of Law No. 5718), and the evidence — the hotel's incident report, CCTV, the on-site doctor's notes — is in Turkey and is best secured there, quickly.

Which Law Applies When a Foreigner Is Injured in Turkey?

This is the first question a foreign client asks, and the answer is given by a single provision. Under Article 34/1 of Law No. 5718 (the Act on Private International and Procedural Law), obligations arising from a tort are governed by the law of the country where the tort was committed. An accident that happened in Turkey is therefore governed by Turkish law — the nationality of the injured person, the nationality of the driver and the country where the vehicle is registered do not change that.

Three refinements of the same article matter in practice:

• Article 34/2: where the place of the act and the place where the damage occurred are in different countries, the law of the country where the damage occurred applies.
• Article 34/3: where the relationship is more closely connected with another country, that country's law may apply instead. This is the exception, and it is argued rather than assumed.
• Article 34/4: where the law applicable to the tort or to the insurance contract permits it, the injured party may bring the claim directly against the insurer. Turkish law does permit it, which is why the direct action against the insurance company described above is available.

Article 40 completes the picture for jurisdiction: the international jurisdiction of Turkish courts is determined by the domestic rules on territorial jurisdiction. In other words, if a Turkish court would have territorial jurisdiction under the Code of Civil Procedure, it also has international jurisdiction over a case with a foreign element.

One further option is rarely used but worth knowing: under Article 34/5 the parties may expressly choose the applicable law after the tort has occurred. In practice this arises only in negotiated settlements between parties from the same country; a Turkish insurer will not agree to a foreign law, and without an express choice Turkish law governs.

What Are the Legal Rights of Foreigners After a Traffic Accident in Turkey?

A foreigner injured in a traffic accident in Turkey has the same substantive rights as a Turkish citizen. Nationality affects procedure — security for costs, legal aid, documents from abroad — but not what can be claimed or from whom. The table brings together the rights that matter in the first weeks after an accident.

Two practical points follow from the table. First, nobody should pay a hospital bill after a traffic accident on the assumption that it will later be recovered from the insurer: the treatment cost belongs to the Social Security Institution's system, and the insurer's liability for it has ended. Second, the rights in the criminal file are as important as those in the civil claim, because that file produces most of the evidence — and, as the next section explains, it is also where a claim can be lost by a single signature.

What Happens in the Criminal File After an Injury Accident?

An accident that injures someone through negligence is also the offence of negligent injury under Article 89 of the Turkish Criminal Code, and a death is negligent homicide under Article 85. The police or gendarmerie take statements, the public prosecutor opens an investigation, and the criminal file and the compensation claim then run separately. The criminal court's finding on fault does not bind the civil judge (Article 74 of Law No. 6098), but the accident report, the statements and the forensic report produced in the criminal file are the backbone of the civil claim.

• Negligent injury is in principle prosecuted on complaint (Article 89/5). The complaint must be made within six months of learning of the act and the identity of the person responsible (Article 73/1). Only where the act was committed with conscious negligence and the injury goes beyond the simple level in Article 89/1 is no complaint required.
• Withdrawing the complaint can end the civil claim as well. Withdrawal ends the prosecution, but if the person withdrawing also declares that they waive their personal rights, they can no longer bring a civil action (Article 73/7). A sentence such as "I have no claims or demands" — a standard phrase in Turkish statements — has exactly that effect. A foreign victim asked to sign a statement in Turkish should not sign it without knowing what it says, and the withdrawal should expressly reserve personal rights.
• Reconciliation (uzlaştırma) must be attempted in every negligent injury file, whether or not the offence is prosecuted on complaint (Article 253/1 of Law No. 5271), and a reconciliation agreement automatically ends the right to compensation for the damage it covers, except damage that could not be identified at the time of the agreement or appears afterwards (Article 253/19 of Law No. 5271). An amount agreed in reconciliation shortly after the accident, while the disability rating is unknown, is therefore final for everything it covers.
• The language of the proceedings is Turkish, and a victim who does not understand it is entitled to an interpreter appointed by the prosecutor or the judge (Article 202 of Law No. 5271).

The same act also determines the limitation period for the compensation claim. Because negligent injury and negligent homicide are criminal offences, the longer criminal limitation period applies to the civil claim too, whether or not the prosecution goes ahead, and a withdrawn complaint does not shorten it.

How Long Do You Have to File a Personal Injury Claim in Turkey?

Many pages on this subject state that a personal injury claim in Turkey must be brought within two years. That is the general rule, and in a case involving physical injury caused by a road accident it is usually not the applicable one: the time limit for most injury claims is eight years, and fifteen years where someone died.

Article 72/1 of Law No. 6098 sets the general rule: two years from the date the injured party learns of the damage and of the person liable, and in any event ten years from the date of the act. The same paragraph then adds the sentence that changes the outcome: "However, if the compensation arises from an act requiring punishment for which the criminal laws provide a longer limitation period, that period shall apply." Article 109/2 of Law No. 2918 repeats the rule for pecuniary claims arising from traffic accidents; claims for pain and suffering reach the same result through Article 72 of Law No. 6098, to which Article 109 refers for all other matters.

So the question becomes: what is the criminal limitation period? Article 66 of the Turkish Criminal Code ties it to the maximum sentence for the offence:

Two further rules attach to the traffic accident regime and are worth knowing. Under Article 109/3 of Law No. 2918, interruption of the limitation period against the person liable also interrupts it against the insurer, and vice versa — so an action or an arbitration application against the insurer protects the position against the driver as well. The written application to the insurer required by Article 97 is a different thing: it is a condition of the action, but it is not one of the acts that interrupt limitation under Article 154 of Law No. 6098, so it does not stop the clock. And under Article 109/4, the mutual right of recourse between those liable is subject to its own two-year period, running from the day the person claiming recourse has fully performed their own obligation and learned against whom recourse lies.

Who Actually Pays the Compensation After an Accident in Turkey?

The compensation is paid by the insurer up to the policy limits, by the keeper and the driver for anything above them, and by the Guarantee Account where there is no identifiable insurer. Identifying the correct defendant is not a formality. Suing the wrong party costs time and, where the limitation period is close to expiry, can cost the claim itself.

Social security benefits are handled with more care than is usually assumed. Article 55/1 of Law No. 6098 provides that benefits which cannot be recovered from the person liable — in whole or in part — may not be taken into account when the loss is assessed and may not be deducted from the award. Where the institution does hold a right of recourse, the position is different: that benefit is set off, and the institution pursues the person liable itself. Treating every payment received from the social security institution as an automatic deduction understates the claim.

The Two Steps You Must Complete Before Filing

Turkish procedure places two conditions in front of a personal injury action, and neither is discretionary. Filing without them does not weaken the case — it ends it, because the court dismisses the action on procedural grounds without examining whether the claim was good.

Written application to the insurer (Article 97 of Law No. 2918)

Before going to court, the injured party must apply in writing to the insurance company concerned, within the limits of the compulsory motor liability policy. The insurer then has 15 days to answer in writing. If it does not answer, or answers in a way that does not meet the claim, the injured party may either bring an action or apply to insurance arbitration under Law No. 5684.

Since 1 September 2026 there is a common channel for these applications. Under Circular 2026/22 of the Insurance and Private Pension Regulation and Supervision Agency, claims under motor insurance policies — including bodily injury claims — can be lodged through the Joint Claims Notification Centre (Ortak Hasar İhbar Merkezi, OHİM) run by the Insurance Information and Monitoring Centre, or by telephone on the Alo 193 line. The channel is in addition to the insurer's own branches, not a replacement for them. Two features matter for the deadlines: an application is treated as made to the insurer at the date and time it reaches the Centre's database, and system outages or technical delays may not be counted against the applicant. Claims that belong to the Guarantee Account or, for a foreign vehicle without valid cover, to the Motor Insurers' Bureau are routed there directly. Whichever route is used, keep the reference number and proof of delivery — they show when the 15-day period started.

The corresponding obligation on the insurer is in Article 99: once the claimant has delivered the documents specified in the general conditions to the insurer's head office or one of its branches, the insurer must pay the amounts falling within the compulsory policy limits within eight working days.

Mediation where the defendant is an insurance company (Article 5/A of Law No. 6102)

A claim against an insurance company is a commercial claim. Under Article 5/A of the Turkish Commercial Code, in commercial actions for a sum of money — claims for payment, compensation, objection to enforcement, negative declaratory relief and restitution — applying to a mediator before filing is a condition of the action. The mediator must conclude the process within six weeks of appointment, extendable by a maximum of two further weeks.

When Is Insurance Arbitration the Better Route Than Court?

Insurance arbitration is usually the better route when the dispute is only with the insurer and the claim falls within the policy limits: it is faster, and a claimant who loses carries a much smaller cost risk. It is an alternative to the courts that foreign claimants are often not told about: the Insurance Arbitration Commission, established under Article 30 of Law No. 5684 within the Insurance, Reinsurance and Pension Companies Association of Türkiye.

Access does not depend on the insurer having agreed to arbitration. A person in dispute with a company that is a member of the arbitration system may use it even where the policy contains no arbitration clause, and — for disputes arising from insurance that legislation makes compulsory, which includes motor third party liability — the right exists even if the company is not a member.

The mechanics are set out in the same article and they are what make the route attractive:

• Precondition (Art. 30/13): the applicant must have applied to the insurer and be able to document that the claim was rejected in whole or in part. If the insurer does not reply in writing within 15 working days, that is itself sufficient to apply. For compulsory motor insurance the shorter special period in Article 97 of Law No. 2918 applies — 15 days — and the Commission's own guidance states the same distinction. Under a 2026 circular of the supervisory agency, however, silence is not treated as a refusal where an expert was appointed in time and the report could not be completed for reasons not attributable to the insurer.
• Speed (Art. 30/16): the arbitrator must decide within four months of appointment, failing which the dispute passes to the competent court. The period can be extended only by the express written consent of both parties.
• Cost exposure (Art. 30/17): where the claim is rejected in whole or in part, the attorney fee awarded against the applicant is one fifth of the fee in the Minimum Attorney Fee Tariff. This single provision is the reason arbitration is often the rational first move: the downside is capped at a fifth of what a court would award against a losing claimant.
• Not available (Art. 30/14): where the same dispute has already been taken to a court or to a consumer arbitration committee — "taken to", not "decided by", so a pending action also closes the route. Since the 2023 amendment of the Commission's regulation, the same applies where enforcement proceedings have been started for the same claim.

Awards below a monetary threshold are final; above it, a single objection may be made to the Commission within ten days of notification, and above a further threshold the decision may be appealed to the Court of Cassation. The thresholds are not the figures written into the text of the Law — five thousand, fifteen thousand and forty thousand Turkish lira — which Article 30/22 allows to be raised in line with the producer price index. The amounts applicable in 2026 were set by the supervisory agency's decision of 14 January 2026, in force from 22 January 2026:

Since March 2026 the threshold is determined by reference to the date of the application, not the date of the award, so a long-running file is no longer pushed across a threshold by the passage of time. There is no upper limit on the amount that can be claimed in arbitration; the thresholds only decide the composition of the tribunal and the routes of challenge. The amounts are revised, so the figure in force on the date of application should always be checked.

What Compensation Can Be Claimed and How It Is Calculated

Turkish law divides the claim into pecuniary and non-pecuniary damages, and it lists the heads of each. This is not a matter of practice or convention — the heads are written into the Code.

Article 55 governs how these are calculated: loss of support and bodily damage are assessed according to the Code and the principles of liability law, and the resulting figure may not be increased or decreased on grounds of equity once calculated. That constraint is what makes the calculation method decisive.

Two technical points that change the figure substantially

The mortality table and the discount rate. The remaining-life expectation used in Turkish actuarial calculations is taken from the TRH 2010 table. For the future period, the established approach applies a progressive annuity — a ten per cent uplift and a ten per cent discount — without applying the 1.8 per cent technical interest rate that older reports use. The basis for that technical rate fell away when the Constitutional Court annulled the reference to the general conditions in Article 90 of Law No. 2918 (decision of 17 July 2020, published on 9 October 2020), because the rate derived from tables annexed to those conditions. Reports still built on a 1.8 per cent technical rate produce materially lower figures over a long active period, and the presence of that rate in an expert report is in itself a ground for objection — the Court of Cassation's 4th Civil Chamber has reversed awards for exactly that reason (E.2022/7085 K.2024/4433, 8 May 2024). The position was settled further on 1 July 2026, when the annexes to the General Conditions of compulsory motor insurance that prescribed the TRH 2010 table and the 1.8 per cent rate were repealed (Official Gazette of 12 June 2026). The conditions now refer the calculation of disability and loss of support directly to the tort rules of Law No. 6098, so no insurance regulation prescribes a table or a discount rate any longer. Because the general conditions apply as at the date of the accident, files concerning earlier accidents will still meet the old annexes in argument for some time. The age used is the claimant's age on the date of the accident, not on the date of the report.

Claiming when the final figure is not yet known. This is the practical problem in every serious injury case: the permanent disability rating is not established until treatment stabilises, so the claim cannot be quantified when the limitation period is running. The procedural answer changed very recently. Article 107 of Law No. 6100, which allowed an action for an indeterminate claim, was repealed on 31 July 2026 by Article 19 of Law No. 7589. In its place, Article 20 of the same Law added a fourth paragraph to Article 109: in a partial action, the claim may be increased once, free of the prohibition on extending the claim, at any time until the conclusion of the investigation phase — and the limitation period is deemed interrupted from the date of the action for the increased part as well.

What the interest amendment says is worth knowing for accidents from 31 July 2026 onwards. For loss of earning capacity and loss of support, statutory interest on the part of the award relating to the period for which the claimant's earnings are known runs from the date of the accident, while interest on the part relating to the future period, for which earnings are not known, runs from the date of the judgment. Payments made by way of performance before the investigation phase begins are set off proportionally, according to the date on which they were made. Neither rule applies to pain and suffering, where interest continues to run from the date of the accident.

How much is pain and suffering compensation in Turkey?

There is no scale or table for pain and suffering in Turkish law. Article 56 of Law No. 6098 leaves the amount to the judge, who considers the seriousness of the injury, its lasting effects, the degree of fault on each side, the age and circumstances of the injured person and the economic conditions at the time of the judgment. In cases of serious bodily harm or death, close relatives — spouse, children, parents, and in some cases siblings — have a claim of their own. Two features often surprise claimants from common law countries. First, Turkish law does not award punitive damages: the award compensates, it does not punish, and it is not meant to enrich. Second, compulsory motor insurance does not cover it (Article 92/f of Law No. 2918), so the claim for pain and suffering is brought against the driver and the keeper even where everything else is paid by the insurer. Psychological injury — post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression after an accident — can be part of both claims: as non-pecuniary harm, and, where a psychiatric board assesses a lasting loss of function, as part of the disability rating.

How Liability and Injury Are Proven

Article 50 of Law No. 6098 places the burden on the injured party to prove both the damage and the fault of the person who caused it. The same article then adds an important qualification: where the precise amount of the loss cannot be proved, the judge determines it fairly, having regard to the ordinary course of events and the measures taken by the injured party. The burden is therefore real, but it is not a requirement of arithmetical certainty.

Two categories reverse or soften that burden and are worth identifying early:

• Strict liability of the vehicle keeper (Art. 85 of Law No. 2918) — fault does not have to be proved; the keeper answers for the damage caused by the vehicle's operation.
• Liability of the building owner (Art. 69 of Law No. 6098) — the owner is liable for damage caused by defective construction or inadequate maintenance, again without proof of fault.
• Liability for animals (Art. 67) and liability of the employer for employees (Art. 66) — the defendant escapes liability only by proving that all due care was taken. The burden is on the defendant, not on the injured person.

In road traffic cases the assessment of fault is carried out by expert examination and forms the backbone of the file. In workplace cases it centres on safety measures, supervision, training and equipment. In medical cases it turns on whether the treatment followed accepted standards, whether informed consent was properly obtained, and whether the harm was avoidable.

Medical Reports and the Disability Rating

In an injury claim the medical evidence does two separate jobs, and they are often confused. One is to establish the causal link between the event and the condition. The other is to fix a permanent disability percentage, which is the multiplier in the actuarial calculation.

Two distinctions are worth stating plainly, because they are the source of most misunderstanding:

• The forensic "degree" of an injury is a criminal law concept, not a compensation multiplier. The classification used in criminal proceedings to grade the severity of an injury has no direct arithmetical relationship to the compensation figure. What drives the civil calculation is the permanent disability percentage.
• Which report applies depends on the kind of accident. After a traffic accident or any other injury that is not a work accident, the rating is fixed under the Regulation on Disability Assessment for Adults (Official Gazette of 20 February 2019): a "medical board report on condition related to terror, accident and injury" states the disability percentage, combining several impairments by the Balthazard method. Such a report is requested by an institution — in practice the court, the arbitrator or the insurer — by official letter, not by the injured person on a petition. In court, the Court of Cassation expects the rating to come from the Council of Forensic Medicine or a university forensic medicine department, after the claimant has been examined in person, and contradictory reports must be reconciled before judgment. After a work accident, the regime is different: under the Regulation on Health Reports published on 19 May 2026, the hospital report issued for the Social Security Institution does not state a rate at all, and the loss of earning capacity is decided by the Institution's health board.

Where the injury has not stabilised, fixing the rate too early works against the injured person. A report issued while treatment is still continuing is a time-limited one; the rate that matters for the actuarial calculation is the permanent one. This is precisely the situation the partial action described above is designed for.

Should You Accept the Insurer's Settlement Offer?

An insurer's settlement offer should not be accepted until the permanent disability rating is known and the offer has been compared with a calculation of the full loss. Early offers are usually built on the treatment period alone, and the release (ibraname) signed in return is drafted to close the file for good.

Turkish law gives some protection. Agreements that remove or limit the liability provided for by Law No. 2918 are void (Article 111/1), and an agreement or settlement on the amount of compensation that is clearly inadequate may be annulled within two years of the date it was made (Article 111/2). That two-year period is short, it runs from the signature rather than from the accident, and the Court of Cassation has held that a claimant who signed a release cannot rely on the longer criminal limitation period to escape it. The protection is therefore a safety net, not a strategy.

• Know the rating first. Loss of earning capacity is usually the largest head of damage, and it cannot be valued until the permanent rating is fixed.
• Read what is being released. A release that covers "all claims arising from the accident" also covers heads of damage that were never discussed.
• Payments are credited, not lost. An amount received from the insurer is deducted from the final award — for accidents from 31 July 2026, proportionally by date of payment — so accepting a payment on account does not require signing a full release.
• Only you or your lawyer can collect it. Under Additional Article 6 of Law No. 5684, a claim against an insurer or the Guarantee Account may be pursued only by the claimant personally, their legal representative, a lawyer they have instructed, or certain close relatives holding their power of attorney; it is paid only to the claimant or their lawyer, and it cannot be assigned to anyone. Offers from "claims companies" to buy or take over an injury claim conflict with that rule.

Which Court Hears the Case, and Where

Two questions arise: which type of court, and in which city. The first depends on the defendant, and is set out in the table under "The Two Steps You Must Complete Before Filing". The second is governed by Article 16 of Law No. 6100:

"In actions arising from tort, the court of the place where the tort was committed, or where the damage occurred or is likely to occur, or of the domicile of the injured party, also has jurisdiction."

The phrase that matters to a foreign claimant is the last one. In addition to the defendant's domicile (the general rule in Article 6), an injured person may sue where the accident happened, where the damage occurred, or at their own place of domicile. For a foreign national resident in Turkey, that last option is often the most practical.

For a case with a foreign element, Article 40 of Law No. 5718 completes the analysis: the international jurisdiction of Turkish courts is determined by the domestic rules on territorial jurisdiction. If Article 16 gives a Turkish court territorial jurisdiction, that court also has international jurisdiction.

Traffic accidents have one more rule of their own. Under Article 110/2 of Law No. 2918, an action for liability arising from a motor accident may be brought at the place where the insurer has a branch or where the agency that issued the policy is located, as well as at the place of the accident. For a tourist injured in Antalya or Muğla who lives abroad, this — together with the insurer's head office under Article 6 — often makes it possible to file in a large city where the insurer is established, rather than only where the accident happened. For a workplace accident, Article 6/3 of Law No. 7036 adds the worker's own domicile; a claim against a private hospital goes to the consumer court.

Finding a Personal Injury Lawyer Near You in Turkey

For an injury claim in Turkey, the lawyer does not have to be in the city where the accident happened. A Turkish lawyer registered with any bar may act before courts throughout the country, statements of claim and petitions are filed electronically through the national judicial network (UYAP), and steps that must be taken in another city — a hearing, the hearing of a witness, a site inspection — can be carried out there or through the court of that city. When choosing a personal injury lawyer in Turkey, what matters is knowledge of the rules on this page and the speed with which evidence is secured, not the address.

This office is in Çankaya, Ankara, and handles personal injury claims arising anywhere in Türkiye — including accidents in Istanbul, Antalya and the other tourist regions, where many foreign visitors are injured. For an Istanbul or Antalya personal injury claim, the questions that decide the choice of court are the ones set out above: where the accident happened, where the defendant or the insurer's branch is, and, for residents, where the injured person lives. Clients who live abroad are advised and represented on the basis of a power of attorney, without having to travel; first contact can be made by telephone or WhatsApp using the details at the end of this page.

Security for Costs for Foreign Claimants in Turkey

A foreign claimant who sues in Turkey may be ordered to provide security for the costs of the proceedings, unless an exemption based on reciprocity applies. This is the provision that most often surprises a foreign client.

Article 48/1 of Law No. 5718 provides that foreign natural and legal persons who bring an action, intervene in an action, or initiate enforcement proceedings before a Turkish court must provide security, in an amount determined by the court, to cover the costs of the proceedings and the other party's loss.

Article 48/2 provides the way out: the court exempts the claimant, intervener or enforcement applicant from security on the basis of reciprocity. Reciprocity may arise from an international convention to which both states are party or from the practice between the two states. Whether an exemption is available in a given case therefore depends on the claimant's nationality, and it is one of the first things to establish — before filing, not after an order for security has been made.

A parallel rule governs legal aid. Article 334/1 of Law No. 6100 allows a person who cannot meet the costs of proceedings without seriously affecting the livelihood of themselves and their family to apply for legal aid, provided the claim is not manifestly unfounded. Article 334/3 adds that foreigners may benefit from legal aid subject to the further condition of reciprocity. The two rules meet in Article 335/1-b: a legal aid order exempts its beneficiary from the obligation to provide security for costs, as well as giving temporary exemption from court fees and having the costs advanced by the state.

Running the Case From Abroad With a Power of Attorney and Apostille

A foreign client does not need to remain in Turkey while the case proceeds. What is needed is a valid power of attorney authorising a lawyer to act, and there are two ways to obtain one:

• At a Turkish consulate in your country of residence. The consulate issues the instrument in Turkish and no further authentication is required.
• Before a notary in your own country, with a Turkish translation and an apostille under the 1961 Hague Convention. Türkiye is a party to that Convention, so an apostille removes the need for consular legalisation for documents from other contracting states. For a document from a state that is not a party, consular legalisation is still required.

A power of attorney for litigation should expressly cover the acts that carry a separate authority requirement — settlement, waiver, acknowledgement, submission to arbitration, receipt of money, and the mediation process. A general instrument that omits these creates avoidable delay at exactly the point where a decision must be taken quickly.

What can be done before the power of attorney is in place is worth noting: securing the medical records, obtaining the accident report, preserving photographs and witness details, and having the file assessed. None of these requires the injured person to be in Turkey, and all of them are easier to do soon after the event than months later.

What to Keep After an Accident

Cases are decided on documents, and the documents that matter are generated in the first days. The list below is what a file should contain by the time it is assessed:

One practical point about time: camera recordings — municipal, commercial and residential — are overwritten within a period measured in days or weeks. A written request to preserve the footage, made early, is often the difference between a disputed fault assessment and a settled one.

How Are a Personal Injury Lawyer's Fees Set in Turkey?

A personal injury lawyer's fees in Turkey are regulated, and the regulation sets both a floor and a ceiling.

The floor is the Minimum Attorney Fee Tariff issued annually. A fee below the tariff cannot validly be agreed for the work it covers.

The ceiling is in Article 164 of the Attorneyship Act (Law No. 1136): where the fee is agreed as a percentage of what is recovered, it may not exceed twenty-five per cent of the value of the dispute. An arrangement expressed as a share of the outcome is therefore permissible in Turkey, but only within that limit. It is worth stating this clearly, because clients arriving from jurisdictions with unrestricted contingency arrangements often assume either that no such agreement is possible or that any percentage may be agreed. Neither is correct.

Separately, the fee awarded against the losing party under the tariff belongs to the winning party's lawyer. In insurance arbitration that exposure is reduced to one fifth of the tariff figure where the claim is rejected, as set out above — which is the main reason the arbitration route carries a materially lower cost risk than a court action.

The Mistakes That Weaken an Otherwise Valid Claim

• Assuming the two-year period has expired. In an accident that also constitutes a criminal offence, the applicable period is eight years for injury and fifteen for a fatality. A claim written off years ago may still be live.
• Signing a release for an early payment. A settlement signed while the medical position is still developing is very difficult to reopen — the two-year window in Article 111/2 of Law No. 2918 is narrow — and the sum offered at that stage rarely reflects loss of earning capacity.
• Signing a police statement that waives personal rights. Withdrawing a criminal complaint with the words "I have no claims" ends the civil claim too (Article 73/7 of the Criminal Code); a reconciliation agreement ends it for the damage it covers.
• Claiming pain and suffering from the insurer. Compulsory motor insurance does not cover non-pecuniary damages; that part of the claim must be directed at the driver and the keeper.
• Paying hospital bills after a traffic accident without asking how they are billed. Treatment is paid by the Social Security Institution; the insurer will not reimburse costs that fall within that system.
• Filing without the mandatory step. No written application to the insurer, or no mediation where the defendant is an insurance company, means dismissal on procedural grounds.
• Building the claim on receipts alone. Treatment costs are usually the smallest head of damage. Loss of earning capacity and damage to economic future are where the substance of a serious claim lies.
• Accepting an expert report without reading its assumptions. A calculation built on a 1.8 per cent technical rate, or on an outdated mortality table, produces a figure that is materially too low.
• Leaving the security for costs question until after filing. The reciprocity position should be established before the claim is issued, not in response to an order.
• Inconsistent accounts of the event. A description in the emergency department record that differs from the accident report is the first thing the opposing side will use.

Frequently Asked Questions

What decides an injury file in Turkey? The date, the defendant and the route

The date determines which limitation period applies, and it is rarely the two years most people are told. The defendant determines whether a written application or mediation must come first, which court hears the case, and whether the claim can be brought against an insurer directly. The route — court or insurance arbitration — determines how long it takes and what the cost exposure is if the claim fails. Those three questions can be answered from the accident report, the medical records and any correspondence with the insurer. If you are outside Turkey, none of this requires you to travel.

Call: +90 530 084 71 41 Message on WhatsApp

Av. Arb. Handan SAYAN ÖZGÜL Attorney at Law & Mediator · Ankara Bar Association Reg. No: 26867 Kızılırmak Mah. 1450. Sk. No:16/5 Hayat Plaza Kat: 2, Çankaya / Ankara

Legal notice: This page is provided for general information about Turkish law and does not constitute legal advice or create a lawyer-client relationship. Every injury claim depends on the facts of the event, the medical evidence and the documents in the file, and must be assessed individually. Legislation and the amounts fixed under it change; the position stated here reflects the law as at the date of last update shown above. For advice on a specific case, please contact the office.