Short answer: what decides it is not the fact that the event falls on a weekend, but whether attendance is mandatory. If employees attend on the employer's instruction, article 66 of Turkish Labour Law No. 4857 counts those hours as working time, and anything above 45 hours in the week becomes overtime. If attendance is genuinely voluntary, meaning nothing changes for the person who stays home, no working time arises. The line between the two is drawn by practice rather than by the wording of the invitation: is attendance registered, does the programme contain work content, what happens to the people who skip it. There is a second distinction, and this is where most companies get caught. An event can fall outside working time and still produce a work accident, because the two definitions sit in different statutes and run on different tests. Below: the attendance test, the weekend and public holiday calculation, travel hours on out-of-town meetings, accident liability and how to design the programme cleanly from the start.
Does a company event count as working time?
Everything turns on one distinction. Article 66 of the Labour Law lists, item by item, which periods count towards an employee's daily working time. Item (b) covers time spent travelling when the employer sends workers to work somewhere other than the workplace. Item (d) is broader: time an employee spends without doing their actual job because the employer sent them elsewhere or kept them occupied at any place connected with the employer also counts. A mandatory dealer meeting in a hotel ballroom sits squarely inside that definition. The final paragraph of the same article draws the other edge, stating that time spent in vehicles during transport provided purely as a social benefit, rather than arising from the nature of the work, does not count as working time. The statute separates the social from the occupational. Court of Cassation rulings follow a similar axis. There are decisions holding that time spent in training aimed at improving the employee's own knowledge and performance is not overtime, while meetings held on the employer's instruction and for the employer's benefit are treated as working time. One provision is explicit: article 17 of Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331 says time spent in health and safety training counts as working time, and where it exceeds weekly working hours it is assessed as overtime.
Mandatory or voluntary? Four questions settle it
Practice decides this, not the heading on the invitation. The first question is the wording. There is a difference between we expect you to attend and attendance is optional, though wording alone will not carry the point. The second is the register. If a QR code is scanned at the door, an attendance list is kept and that list goes to a manager, you have an obligation that is being monitored. The third is the content of the programme. Year-end targets, product training, a sales presentation or a department meeting make those hours work; an awards ceremony, dinner and music make a social programme. Most corporate events put both on the same day, which is where the confusion starts. The fourth is what happens to non-attendees. If a leave day is deducted, if it shows up in a performance review, or if staying away requires an explanation, attendance is mandatory in substance. The fix is simple. Write the run of show with clock times and mark the mandatory block separately. Say the dealer meeting runs Saturday from 10.00 to 13.00 and the rest of the day is free. Three hours enter the working time calculation, the evening gala does not. Drawing that line after the event is hard. Drawing it on the day the invitation goes out is easy.
What has to be paid for a weekend or public holiday event?
The threshold is weekly. Article 63 of the Labour Law sets general working time at a maximum of 45 hours a week. Article 41 defines overtime as work exceeding 45 hours a week and requires each hour to be paid at the normal hourly rate raised by fifty per cent. Where the contract sets weekly hours below 45, work above that contractual figure and up to 45 hours counts as extra hours and carries a twenty five per cent uplift. An employee who prefers it can take free time instead of the premium: one hour thirty minutes for each overtime hour, one hour fifteen minutes for each extra hour. Two further limits apply. Overtime requires the employee's consent, and total overtime cannot exceed 270 hours in a year. The numbers are not abstract. According to Turkish Statistical Institute labour force data, average actual weekly working time in Turkey was 42.3 hours in the second quarter of 2026, so a four hour mandatory Saturday programme pushes a typical week past the 45 hour threshold. Weekly rest is a separate heading: article 46 requires at least twenty four uninterrupted hours of rest within each seven day period. For public holidays article 44 applies, leaving it to the contract whether work takes place on national and public holidays and, where the contract is silent, requiring the employee's consent. If they do work, article 47 adds one further day's pay on top of the pay for that day.
What about travel and hotel hours at an out-of-town meeting?
A three day meeting is not three days of working time. What counts is the programme. Item (b) of article 66 counts travel time when the employer sends an employee to work somewhere else, so the flight and transfer hours of a sales team sent to Antalya on duty fall inside it. Not every hour at the hotel counts. Dinner, free time and the overnight stay are rest as a rule, while scheduled hours such as the meeting itself, training, rehearsals and stand duty are work. There is a daily ceiling too. Article 63 states that where weekly hours are distributed unevenly across days under an averaging arrangement, eleven hours a day cannot be exceeded, and a run of show that starts at nine in the morning and runs past midnight strains that limit. One more distinction gets muddled at dealer meetings. Most of the people in the room are not your employees. A dealer, agency or business partner is an independent trader, and the Labour Law does not govern that relationship. The working time calculation applies only to your own staff: the team working the stage, the product manager on the stand, the office employee at the registration desk. Keep those two groups apart when you write the schedule.
If someone is injured at the event, is it a work accident?
This is where companies get it wrong most often, because the definition of a work accident is not the definition of working time. Article 13 of Social Security Law No. 5510 ties work accidents to five situations: events occurring while the insured person is at the workplace, events caused by the work being carried out by the employer, events during periods when an employee sent on duty to a place outside the workplace is not performing their actual job, events during nursing breaks for insured mothers, and events during travel to and from the place of work in a vehicle provided by the employer. Item (c) is the decisive one for events, because it covers the hours you are not doing your actual job at the place you were sent to. So is item (e): if the employer provided the shuttle, an accident on the road is a work accident. The notion of workplace is not narrow either. Article 2 of the Labour Law and article 3 of Law No. 6331 both treat annexes such as rest areas, canteens, physical training areas and yards as part of the workplace. A Court of Cassation file reported in the Turkish press in September 2026 made the picture concrete. An employee who suffered a heart attack during a futsal tournament organised for company staff died after roughly three months of treatment; the Social Security Institution recorded the death as a work accident and the first instance court awarded more than 400,000 lira in pecuniary and non-pecuniary damages. The Court of Cassation reversed over the allocation of fault, so the dispute was about how the damages were calculated, not about whether the event counted as a work accident. The reporting window is short. The same article 13 requires notification to the police immediately and to the Institution within three working days of the accident.
How far does the employer's safety duty stretch at an event?
Article 4 of Law No. 6331 makes the employer responsible for employees' occupational health and safety, including preventing occupational risks, taking every necessary measure, organising the work and carrying out or commissioning a risk assessment. The second paragraph of the same article is routinely skipped: buying services from outside experts and organisations does not remove the employer's responsibilities. Hiring an agency does not transfer the duty, it only decides who does the work. The scale is not small either. Social Security Institution statistics recorded 733,646 work accidents in Turkey in 2024. On alcohol there is a clear rule, and most people still look for it in the Labour Law. Article 84 of Law No. 4857 was repealed in 2012 and the rule moved to article 28 of Law No. 6331: arriving at the workplace intoxicated and consuming alcohol at the workplace are prohibited, but the employer has the power to decide in which cases, at what times and on what conditions alcohol may be consumed in areas counted as workplace annexes. If you are serving alcohol at a year-end party, exercise that power through a written policy covering service hours, last call, transport home and the person responsible. Plan the medical side on the same logic: enough certified first aiders, a medical team sized to the headcount and an automated external defibrillator within reach.
How to design the programme cleanly from the start
An eight line list settles most of these arguments. First, the invitation: state plainly whether attendance is mandatory or optional, two sentences will do. Second, the run of show: separate the mandatory block from the social block with clock times and send it with the invitation. Third, the register: record attendance only for the mandatory block. Fourth, consent and records: where overtime arises, take the employee's consent in advance, enter the hours into the timesheet and track the 270 hour annual limit. Fifth, the trade-off: ask the employee whether they want the premium or the free time, and record the answer in writing. Sixth, transport: if you provide the shuttle, know that your exposure widens and file the vehicle, driver and schedule details. Seventh, medical cover: write the number of first aiders, the medical team and the distance to the nearest hospital into the event file. Eighth, insurance: confirm the scope and limit of the third party liability policy before the event date. Tales Event is based in Istanbul and runs sound, lighting, LED screen, stage and decor production with its own crew across Turkey for dealer meetings, launches, openings, concept gala nights, graduation ceremonies and year-end parties. Send us your date, your headcount and a draft programme, and we will build a run of show with the mandatory and social blocks separated, together with the technical setup and on-site safety plan in the same file.
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