Work permits for the team you bring with you

Founders sort out their own position first. A tax number, a bank account, a residence permit, and the company exists. We covered that sequence in tax number, bank account, residence permit.

Bringing other people is a different process with conditions that catch companies at exactly the wrong moment, usually after an offer has been made.

The employer applies

A work permit in Türkiye belongs to a job, not to a person. The employer submits the application, the permit names the company and the role, and it ends when that employment ends. Someone leaving your company does not take their permission to work with them.

That structure has one immediate consequence for hiring. You cannot make an offer conditional on the candidate sorting out their own paperwork, because the paperwork is yours to do.

A residence permit does not help here. It governs where someone may live, not whether they may be employed.

Three conditions that decide the answer

The Ministry of Labour and Social Security publishes evaluation criteria, and three of them do most of the work.

Five Turkish citizens per foreign worker. The workplace must employ at least five Turkish citizens for each foreign employee. For a second foreign hire, the requirement can be applied again.

A financial test on the company. An operating business needs at least 500,000 TL of paid-in capital, or at least 8,000,000 TL of net sales, or at least 150,000 US dollars of exports. A newly established company is assessed on paid-in capital.

A salary floor set by occupation. The declared monthly salary cannot fall below a multiple of the minimum wage that varies with the role.

On the 2026 gross minimum wage of 33,030 TL, those floors work out as follows.

Those are floors for permit purposes. They are not market rates, and for a senior engineer the market rate may well sit above the floor anyway.

Why the ratio is the real obstacle

Read the three together and the difficulty becomes obvious for the companies most likely to be reading this.

A two-founder studio that has just incorporated has no Turkish employees. The ratio asks for five before the first foreign hire is approved. The financial test asks for half a million lira of paid-in capital, which is well above the minimum a company needs to exist.

So the sequence that works is usually the reverse of the one founders plan. Build the local team first, reach the thresholds, then bring specific people over. Companies that try to relocate an entire existing team on day one run into the ratio immediately.

The exemption that most early hires use

There is an important carve-out, and it changes the picture for a particular kind of candidate.

Where a foreign national has already been legally resident in Türkiye for a long period, the employment and financial criteria can be lifted. Related exemptions cover people with a Turkish spouse, parent or child, holders of humanitarian residence permits, people of Turkish origin, and citizens of Northern Cyprus.

In practice this is why a company's first foreign hires are so often people already living in Istanbul. Someone who has been in the country for years on another basis is a materially easier hire than someone being relocated from abroad, and that has nothing to do with their skills.

Teknoparks do not remove the permit

Companies inside a technology development zone employ foreign personnel with the permission of the zone's management company, and with a work permit obtained under the ordinary labour rules. Foreign managers and R&D or design staff holding at least a bachelor's degree can be employed within the scope of projects.

Being in a zone changes several things about your tax and premium position, which the teknopark article covers. It does not turn the work permit into a formality, and the specific position for your company is worth confirming with the zone before you plan around it.

What this means for planning a move

None of this is a reason not to come. It is a reason to sequence the move deliberately.

If the plan involves relocating engineers, the local hiring has to happen first, and the capital position has to be set up rather than left at the statutory minimum. If the plan is to hire locally and keep the founders remote, most of this section does not apply to you, and whether you have to live in Türkiye is the more relevant question.

The payroll arithmetic once someone is employed is the same regardless of nationality, and what a developer costs an employer works through it.