Short answer: the venue sets the setup clock, not the equipment list. Whatever sits between the hour the room is handed over and the hour doors open is where the entire technical plan has to fit. Night work is allowed in Turkey, but it is capped. Article 69 of Labour Law No. 4857 defines night as the period beginning no later than 20.00 and ending no earlier than 06.00, lasting at most eleven hours, and states that a worker's night work cannot exceed seven and a half hours. That cap can only be exceeded in tourism, private security and healthcare operations, and only with the worker's written consent. Istanbul adds a second constraint on the vehicle side. Under Annex 2 of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Road Freight Transport Directive, N2, N3, O2, O3 and O4 class freight vehicles are not allowed on city roads between 06.00 and 10.00 or between 16.00 and 22.00, while the 10.00 to 16.00 and 22.00 to 06.00 windows are open with a route permit. That is why the truck usually reaches the dock after 22.00 and the crew ends up working inside the night window. What follows: how to size the setup window, the legal limit on night work, the eleven hour rest rule between shifts, the health report obligation and a load-in site survey checklist.
How long does event setup actually take?
The answer lives in the venue contract, not the equipment list. Your setup window is the gap between the hour the room is handed to you and the hour doors open, and every technical task has to fit inside it. Build the plan backwards rather than forwards. Working back from doors: full run-through, technical rehearsal and content check, decor and branding, lighting focus, sound measurement, LED screen assembly, cabling, rigging and motors, stage and podium, and at the very bottom of the list, unloading. The order is not arbitrary. Anything that hangs goes up before the floor fills, floor work starts once rigging is done, and decor and furniture come last because dust and cable traffic ruin them. The item people skip is rehearsal. Do not let the end of setup touch the door time; if the programme has speaker transitions and video content, give rehearsal its own block. Load-out deserves the same discipline. Most venue contracts name the hour the room must be cleared, and running late turns into next-day rent or a contractual penalty.
Can setup happen at night? In Turkish law, night starts at 20.00
It can, but not for as long as you think. Under Article 69 of Labour Law No. 4857, night is the period beginning no later than 20.00 and ending no earlier than 06.00, lasting at most eleven hours, and the employer may define its own night period inside that range. The third paragraph is unambiguous: night work by a worker cannot exceed seven and a half hours. Article 7 of the Regulation on Special Procedures and Principles for Shift Work widens the definition. A shift where more than half of the working time falls inside the night period counts as night work in full, so a setup shift running from 18.00 to 02.00 is treated as night work from start to finish. The exception is narrow. Under the 2017 amendment to that article, night work beyond seven and a half hours is possible in tourism, private security and healthcare operations, and only where the worker has given written consent. On the tourism side the scope covers workers at facilities licensed by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism or by a municipality, together with workers employed there by subcontractors. Whether a production crew rigging a ballroom in a licensed hotel falls inside that scope depends on whether the relationship qualifies as subcontracting, so do not lean on the exception without written consent and legal advice. In a congress centre, fairground or factory site with no tourism licence, there is no exception at all. The cap carries a price tag too: Turkish Court of Cassation rulings treat night work beyond seven and a half hours as overtime even when the forty-five hour weekly limit has not been reached, which triggers premium pay. There is an age rule as well. Article 5 of the same regulation bans children and young workers under 18 from shifts falling between 20.00 and 06.00, a provision that gets broken often on crews staffed with students and interns.
When can the truck reach the dock? Istanbul freight vehicle hours
Venue scheduling is only half the reason setups run overnight. The other half is traffic regulation. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Road Freight Transport Directive was adopted by decision 2016/4-14 of the Transport Coordination Centre dated 14.07.2016, and its annexes were updated by decision 2017/2-11. The table in Annex 2 sets the citywide rule: N2 vehicles (maximum laden weight above 3.5 tonnes and up to 12 tonnes), N3 vehicles (above 12 tonnes), and O2, O3 and O4 trailers are not permitted to move between 06.00 and 10.00 or between 16.00 and 22.00, and are permitted between 10.00 and 16.00 and between 22.00 and 06.00 provided they hold a permit. N1 and O1 vehicles, plus N2 and O3 vehicles with a maximum laden weight of 5 tonnes or less, are allowed 24 hours a day, again with a permit. That document is the Freight Vehicle Route Use Permit issued by the Public Transport Services Directorate, and the directive makes it mandatory for freight transport. If an unavoidable move falls inside the restricted hours, the road is not fully closed: the Freight Transport Commission can set specific hours and a route and have a permit issued for a period not exceeding ten days. Annex 3 adds area-based limits, marking the districts of Sisli, Besiktas, Beyoglu, Fatih and Kadikoy as closed 24 hours a day to freight vehicles over 40 tonnes. The practical effect is easy to picture. For a gala at a city-centre hotel or a heritage venue, the truck usually arrives after 22.00, unloading runs past 23.00, and setup begins inside the night window. These decisions change, so confirm the current ruling and route status before the event date.
How many hours can a crew work back to back?
Three numbers cover most of it: 45, 11 and 270. Under Article 4 of the Regulation on Working Time, general working time is at most forty-five hours per week, and daily working time cannot exceed 11 hours under any circumstances. Event work does not spread evenly across a week, which is what the averaging mechanism is for. Article 5 allows the weekly working time to be distributed unevenly by written agreement, as long as no day exceeds eleven hours, with the intensive week offset by shorter weeks so the total does not exceed normal working time. The averaging period is two months, extendable to four months by collective agreement; in the tourism sector it is four months, extendable to six by collective agreement. Past those limits, overtime applies. Article 41 of the Labour Law prices each overtime hour at the hourly wage raised by fifty percent, and each hour of extended work that stays within the forty-five hour week at the hourly wage raised by twenty-five percent, with total overtime capped at 270 hours per year. Consent is required. Under Article 9 of the Overtime Regulation as amended in 2017, written consent is taken when the employment contract is signed or when the need arises and kept in the personnel file, and the worker can withdraw it with thirty days written notice. The detail that breaks budgets is that rest breaks do not count as working time. Article 68 requires at least fifteen minutes for shifts up to four hours, at least half an hour for shifts over four and up to seven and a half hours, and at least one hour beyond that, so an eleven hour setup shift means twelve hours on site. Who the limits apply to matters too. Article 11 of the Regulation on Working Time states that these limits attach to the individual worker rather than to the workplace or the job, so a technician who works two different jobs in the same week does not get a fresh counter.
How much rest is required between two shifts?
Eleven hours. Article 9 of the Regulation on Special Procedures and Principles for Shift Work states that at a shift change, workers cannot be put to work without a continuous rest of at least eleven hours, and the same applies to workers whose shift has been changed. Put that on a calendar. If the night setup ends at 06.00, the same crew cannot return to site before 17.00. With doors at 19.00, staffing the show day with those same people is not an option; you need a second crew. Article 8 governs rotation: shifts are arranged so that workers who have worked nights for at most one working week are moved to days the following week, and a two-week rotation may be used where the nature of the work and occupational safety allow. Article 4 requires at least three shifts in a 24 hour period for continuous operations, dropping to two in tourism, private security and healthcare. Article 11 requires a weekly rest day of no less than 24 hours, granted on a rotating basis. Article 3 covers the paperwork most agencies forget: the number of shifts, the start and end times of each, the names of the workers on them, rest breaks and weekly rest days have to be posted at the workplace where workers can easily see and read them. When you plan, avoid stacking setup, show day and load-out onto the same crew. The third shift is the one that carries the most weight and dismantles everything, which puts the heaviest work and the most tired crew in the same place.
Do you need a health report to run a night crew?
Yes. Article 69 of the Labour Law requires that a worker's fitness for night work be documented by a health report obtained before they start, and workers on night shifts must undergo a periodic health check at least once every two years, at the employer's expense. The obligation to file night shift lists with the regional directorate was repealed by Article 37 of Law No. 6331, but Article 12 of the Shift Work Regulation still requires those lists to be kept at the workplace and produced when the Ministry asks for them. The paperwork is not the real issue; the site is. A setup shift is a construction site assembled for a few hours: work at height, suspended loads, forklifts and scissor lifts, temporary power, most of it under artificial light and after dark. For a sense of scale, Social Security Institution statistics for 2024 recorded 86,736 injured workers in the construction sector, 11.8 percent of all work accidents in Turkey, with 552 fatal accidents in the sector accounting for 29.1 percent of all fatal work accidents and a mortality rate of 27.7 per hundred thousand workers. Some of what happens during an event load-in belongs to the same risk family. Before the crew goes in, check occupational safety training records, fall protection equipment and the lighting plan for the night. If an accident does happen, Law No. 6331 requires notification to the Social Security Institution within three working days.
What to check during a load-in site survey
Survey with a tape measure, not with your eyes. The questions, in order: is there a loading dock, which vehicle class does it take, and is there room for the truck to manoeuvre; what are the clear width and height of the freight door in centimetres; what are the cabin dimensions and load capacity of the goods lift in kilograms; what is the floor loading capacity and does the floor need protection; what is the ceiling height, where are the rigging points, and has the venue approved the rigging plan; can a forklift or scissor lift get onto the floor and is the operator certified; at what hour is power handed over, where is the distribution board and how much capacity does it have; does the venue impose its own setup hours, such as another meeting the same day in a hotel or a closing time in a shopping centre; is storage space allocated for empty crates and flight cases; where does waste go and when is it collected; will venue security and a technical contact be present overnight; when does load-out start and finish, and what does the contract say about running late. All of it goes on the survey form, because only those answers turn a setup plan into an hour-by-hour schedule. Add three lines to the venue contract too: the handover time for the room, a commitment on overnight access, and who carries the cost when restricted hours or the venue itself cause a delay.
How to build the setup schedule
Write the schedule on one page, hour by hour, working backwards. Start from doors, add the full run-through, the technical rehearsal and the content check, then the end of setup, lighting focus and sound measurement, LED and decor, rigging and stage, unloading, the hour the truck reaches the dock and the hour it leaves the warehouse. Page two is the crew plan: when each shift starts, whether the night shift crosses seven and a half hours, whether eleven hours sit between two shifts, when rest breaks are taken, and whether load-out has its own crew. Page three is documents: the freight vehicle route permit, health reports for anyone working at night, occupational safety training records, overtime consents and the shift schedule to be posted at the workplace. With those three pages in hand, setup night stops producing surprises. Tales Event works from Istanbul and delivers full production across Turkey with a single team, from dealer meetings and product launches to gala nights and opening ceremonies, including stage and podium, sound systems, lighting, LED screens, decor, exhibition stands and simultaneous interpretation. Send us the venue name, the event date, the door time and the hour the room is handed over, and we will come back with an hour-by-hour setup schedule, a shift plan and a line-item budget.
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