Road Traffic Accident Compensation in Turkey for Foreigners

What you can claim, and who pays

If you were hurt in a road accident in Türkiye, Turkish law gives you a compensation claim against the driver and against the vehicle's keeper (işleten) — and a direct claim against their compulsory traffic insurer, which you can bring without suing anyone first. You do not have to be in Türkiye to pursue any of it.

Two separate things happen after an accident here, and it helps to keep them apart. There is a criminal side — police and a prosecutor examining whether the driver committed an offence — and a civil side, which is your claim for money. The criminal file matters to your claim, because it generates evidence and can lengthen your deadline. But it is not your claim. No prosecutor will bring your compensation case for you, and the criminal file closing does not pay you anything.

On the civil side you normally have two targets at the same time:

• The people liable — the driver, and the vehicle's keeper, broadly the person who runs the vehicle on their own account. Where a vehicle is operated under a business's name, that business is in the frame alongside the keeper.
• The compulsory traffic insurer (ZMSS) — under the Highway Traffic Law No. 2918 (KTK) every keeper must carry compulsory motor third-party liability insurance, and the injured party may claim against that insurer directly, up to the policy limits.

Most road-accident money in Türkiye moves through the second route, because it is quicker and the insurer can actually pay. But that cover has limits and defined exclusions, and part of what you may be owed — non-pecuniary damages above all — sits outside it entirely. A claim aimed only at the insurer can quietly leave a chunk of your loss unclaimed. Both routes need to be assessed together, at the start.

This page is written for foreigners: tourists, foreign residents, professional drivers passing through, and families of someone killed or seriously injured here. If your harm came from the medical treatment after the accident rather than the collision itself, that is a different claim — see medical malpractice.

The deadline: KTK Art. 109, and why it is the first thing to check

This is the most urgent thing on this page, so it comes before the interesting parts. Under KTK Art. 109, claims for compensation of the pecuniary damage caused by a motor vehicle accident are time-barred:

• Two years from the day the injured party learned both the damage and who is liable for it; and
• Ten years from the day of the accident, as an outer longstop, regardless of what you knew or when.

There is a critical exception. Where the damage arises from an act that is a criminal offence and the criminal law lays down a longer limitation period for that offence, that longer period applies to the pecuniary compensation claim instead. Careless injury and careless killing on the road are prosecutable offences in Türkiye, so accidents involving real injury or death frequently attract a limitation period considerably longer than two years. This is why people who assume their claim died at the two-year mark are sometimes wrong — and it is why the criminal file is worth locating even if nobody was ever convicted.

A scope point that is easy to miss. Art. 109 is written for pecuniary claims: the article speaks of compensation for material damage, and the criminal-limitation extension in its second paragraph is worded the same way. Your claim for non-pecuniary damages is not governed by it. That claim runs on the tort limitation in the Code of Obligations, which is likewise two years from learning of the damage and the liable party and ten years from the act, and which carries its own extension where the act is an offence for which the criminal law sets a longer period. The practical answer usually lands in the same place — but they are two rules, not one, and a file in which the two heads are assumed to share a single deadline is a file in which something has been assumed rather than checked.

Two further points that catch foreign claimants out:

• Writing to the insurer is not the same as stopping the clock. The application described below is a step you must take before you can sue the insurer. Treat it as something to be done inside your deadline, not as something that resets it.
• Interruption runs both ways. Under Art. 109, where limitation is interrupted against the person liable it is also interrupted against the insurer, and interruption against the insurer counts against the person liable. That can matter a great deal in an older file.

If your accident was months or years ago, have the position checked before you assume the claim is gone — and equally, before you assume there is time. Send us the date and the basic facts and we will tell you where you stand on the clock before anything else is discussed.

Who is liable: strict liability under KTK 2918

Foreign clients most often misunderstand this point, usually to their own cost. Turkish road-accident liability is not built on you proving that the driver was careless.

Under KTK Art. 85, if the operation of a motor vehicle causes a person's death or injury, or damage to property, the vehicle's keeper is liable for the damage that results. Where the vehicle is operated under a business's trade name or business name, or on a ticket issued by that business, the keeper and the business owner are liable jointly and severally. The keeper also answers for the fault of the driver and of anyone helping to operate the vehicle as if it were the keeper's own fault. This is a hazard-based (strict) liability: it attaches to the operation of the vehicle, not to a finding of carelessness.

The keeper escapes only through the narrow door in KTK Art. 86, and it is genuinely narrow. To be relieved of liability the keeper must prove all of the following:

• that there was no fault on the part of the keeper or of the people the keeper answers for;
• that no defect in the vehicle contributed to the accident; and
• that the accident resulted from force majeure, or from the gross fault of the injured party or of a third party.

If the keeper cannot get through that door but does prove that you were at fault in the accident, the judge may reduce the compensation according to the circumstances — reduce, not extinguish. Partial fault is a discount, not a defence.

Two related rules are worth knowing. Where the vehicle was not in operation at the time, the burden flips and the injured party must prove fault or that a defect in the vehicle caused the accident. And under KTK Art. 111, any agreement that removes or narrows the liability this law imposes is invalid — a term in a rental contract or a tour booking cannot sign your rights away.

Alongside the keeper's strict liability, the driver remains personally liable in tort under the Code of Obligations No. 6098 (TBKTBKTurkish Code of Obligations No. 6098The statute behind almost every private agreement in Türkiye — contracts, liability for harm, lease, employment, agency and unjust enrichment.Glossary →), and an employer may be liable for a driver acting in the course of employment.

Your direct claim against the ZMSS traffic insurer

KTK Art. 91 obliges keepers to take out compulsory financial liability insurance — the ZMSS, universally called trafik sigortası — to cover the liability that Art. 85 imposes. The point of it, from your side, is that you are not left chasing an individual: you can claim directly against the insurance company, within the limits set out in the policy, and the terms of the cover are standardised by the General Conditions for Compulsory Motor Third-Party Liability Insurance rather than negotiated case by case.

There is something buried in that last sentence that is worth more to you than it looks. For years the General Conditions were treated as governing not merely the terms of the cover but how much you get — the calculation method itself. That scheme no longer stands. The Constitutional Court, in 2020, annulled the words in KTK Art. 90 that made the General Conditions determinative of the amount of compensation, and a further decision in 2022 struck down the paragraph that had since been added to the same article. As Art. 90 stands today, compensation under compulsory insurance is worked out according to the procedures laid down in the KTK itself, and on matters the KTK does not regulate — non-pecuniary damages among them — the tort provisions of the Code of Obligations apply. Put plainly: the General Conditions still standardise what the policy covers, but an insurer cannot hold them up to tell you what your loss is worth. Quantum is a question of law, not of the policy booklet.

What the direct claim gives you in practice:

• A solvent counterparty. Whether the driver has assets, has left the country, or has vanished into an address nobody can serve, does not determine whether you are paid.
• An identifiable one. The insurer is traceable from the vehicle's plate through the central insurance records, using the police accident report. You do not need the driver's cooperation to find out who insured the vehicle.
• Defined limits. Cover is capped per person and per accident by the policy in force at the date of the accident. Where your loss exceeds the cap, the balance is pursued against the keeper and driver personally — which is one reason the two routes are run together.

The cover also has express statutory exclusions. Under KTK Art. 92, the ones that most often matter to an injured foreigner are:

• Non-pecuniary damages are outside ZMSS cover (Art. 92(f)). Pain, suffering and grief are claimed from the person liable — the driver, the keeper — and not from the compulsory insurer. Some vehicles carry an optional extended liability policy (İhtiyari Mali Mesuliyet, İMM) on top of the compulsory one; whether any particular İMM policy reaches non-pecuniary damages depends on that policy's own terms, so it is something to be read and checked, never assumed.
• Your own fault share is outside it (Art. 92(g)). The compulsory insurer's exposure tracks the insured's share of fault, not the whole of your loss.
• In fatal claims, the share matching the deceased's own fault is excluded (Art. 92(j)) as against the insurer.

Read those carefully, because they do not all mean the same thing, and the difference shapes how the claim is built. Non-pecuniary damages are not lost — they are simply claimed from someone else, since the driver and the keeper answer for them personally even though the compulsory insurer does not. Your own fault share is a different animal entirely. It is not a head of loss you redirect to another defendant; it is a reduction. Under KTK Art. 86, and the general rule in TBK Art. 52, the court cuts the award to reflect your own contribution to the accident, and that portion is recoverable from nobody: not the insurer, not the keeper, not the driver, not anyone. That is why the fault report, discussed further down, moves more money than any other document in the file — and why the question of where each part of your claim is aimed belongs at the outset, not after an offer arrives.

You must apply to the insurer before you sue it: KTK Art. 97

This is a procedural trap, and it is easy to fall into if you are used to another legal system. Under KTK Art. 97, before going to court, the injured party must make a written application to the insurance company within the limits provided in the compulsory liability insurance.

The mechanism then runs as follows. If the insurer does not answer the application in writing within at most 15 days from the date of application, or if there is a dispute that the answer given does not meet the claim, the injured party may file suit or go to arbitration under Law No. 5684. Until one of those two things happens, the door to the insurer is not open.

What this means for you in practice:

• The application has to be a real one. An application that arrives without the supporting documents the General Conditions call for invites an insurer to treat the 15 days as never having started. The documents are the point, not the letter.
• The 15 days is a response window, not a payment window. A reply that rejects your claim, or offers a fraction of it, opens the route to arbitration or court just as effectively as silence does. That is often the fastest way through.
• It applies to the insurer, not to everyone. The requirement governs the claim against the insurance company. It is not a precondition to a claim against the driver or keeper personally.

If you have already sued without applying, do not assume the case is lost. Settled case-law treats the Art. 97 application as a procedural condition that can be completed rather than an instant killer of the claim. That is a repair, though, not a plan — and it costs time you may not have under Art. 109.

Insurance Arbitration Commission or court?

Once the Art. 97 route is open, there are two forums, and they are not alternatives to be picked by mood. They reach different defendants.

The Insurance Arbitration Commission (Sigorta Tahkim Komisyonu), established under Law No. 5684, decides insurance disputes and is generally a faster route than the civil courts. On one question that clients often arrive worried about, the position is settled and there is nothing to check: under Art. 30 of Law No. 5684, where the dispute arises from an insurance that legislation makes compulsory, the claimant may use the arbitration procedure even if the insurer concerned is not a member of the insurance arbitration system. Compulsory traffic insurance is exactly such an insurance, and KTK Art. 97 names the arbitration route expressly. Membership is not a hurdle you have to clear.

What does limit the Commission is its reach: it stops at the insurer. It resolves what the insurance company owes, within the policy limits and subject to the Art. 92 exclusions.

The civil courts reach everyone: insurer, keeper, driver, employer. They are where non-pecuniary damages are decided, and where any excess over the policy limits is recovered. On venue, KTK Art. 110 provides that liability actions arising from motor vehicle accidents may be brought in the court of the place where the insurer's branch or the agency that made the insurance contract is located, or in the court of the place where the accident occurred. Art. 110 also confirms these actions are heard in the civil courts, including where the vehicle's keeper or owner is the State or another public body.

The honest summary: where the claim is squarely a pecuniary claim against the insurer inside the limits, arbitration is usually the sensible forum. Where there is meaningful non-pecuniary damage, a fatality, a disputed disability figure or a loss that overtops the cover, the court claim is doing work that arbitration structurally cannot do. Plenty of files justify both. We advise on forum once the medical and fault evidence exists — not before, because until then nobody can say which forum fits.

What you can claim: the heads of damage

Where the KTK does not regulate a point, and for non-pecuniary damages, the tort provisions of the Code of Obligations No. 6098 (TBK) apply. The heads of damage break down as follows.

Where you were injured (TBK Art. 54):

• Treatment costs — medical and hospital expenditure.
• Loss of earnings — income lost while you could not work.
• Losses from reduced or lost working capacity — the permanent disability head, and usually the largest single component in a serious file.
• Losses from the impairment of economic future — where the injury damages your earning prospects beyond measurable lost income, for instance visible scarring or a limitation that closes off your trade.

Where someone was killed (TBK Art. 53): funeral expenses; and, where death was not instantaneous, treatment costs together with losses from reduced or lost working capacity; and loss of financial support (destekten yoksun kalma), addressed in its own section below.

Notice the shape of that middle item, because it is routinely misread. The condition — death not instantaneous — governs both limbs: the treatment costs and the working-capacity losses alike. And Art. 53 contains no free-standing loss-of-earnings head. Loss of earnings lives in Art. 54, which is the bodily-injury article, not the death article. A fatal claim that is pleaded as though Art. 53 carried a loss-of-earnings head is pleaded on a provision that does not say that.

Non-pecuniary damages (TBK Art. 56): the judge may award an appropriate sum where bodily integrity is violated, taking account of the particular circumstances; in cases of serious bodily injury or death, an appropriate sum may also be awarded to the relatives. Remember that this head is excluded from compulsory traffic insurance cover by KTK Art. 92(f) — it is claimed from the person liable.

One Türkiye-specific point on treatment costs. Under KTK Art. 98, the cost of health services provided by hospitals for traffic-accident casualties is met by the Social Security Institution (SGK) under the applicable reimbursement rules, regardless of whether the casualty has social security cover. For an uninsured tourist this is significant, and it also shapes the claim: where the SGK has borne the treatment, treatment costs may not remain a live head against the insurer. Keep every receipt regardless — what was and was not covered is a question of evidence.

Our traffic accident compensation calculator lets you model the shape of a claim. Treat its output as an illustration of the method, not a valuation of your case: the real number is driven by the fault and disability reports, which do not exist yet when you are reading this.

How fault (kusur) and disability (maluliyet) are decided

Two expert findings decide most of the money in a Turkish road-accident claim. Almost everything else is procedure around them.

Fault apportionment (kusur oranı). A court- or commission-appointed expert reconstructs the accident and expresses each party's fault as a percentage. The raw material is the police accident report (kaza tespit tutanağı), the scene sketch, the statements taken at the time, the damage pattern on the vehicles, and any camera or dashcam footage. Your compensation is reduced by your own share — and, as against the compulsory insurer, KTK Art. 92(g) puts your own fault share outside the cover altogether. Be clear about what that reduction is: it is money that leaves the claim, not money that moves to a different defendant. A fault report is nevertheless a piece of expert opinion, not a fact of nature. It can be objected to, and where it is built on a thin accident report it often should be.

Permanent disability (maluliyet). A medical board expresses your lasting impairment as a percentage, assessed under the disability regulation applicable to your accident, on the basis of your medical records and an examination. That percentage then feeds an actuarial calculation that projects the loss across your working life, using your earnings and recognised life tables.

Three practical consequences follow, and they are why files are won or lost early:

• The medical report is the biggest single lever on quantum. A disability percentage assessed too low, or assessed before your condition stabilised, permanently depresses the claim. It is worth contesting when it is wrong.
• Timing matters. Assessment carried out before treatment has run its course measures a moving target and tends to measure it generously to the insurer.
• Your records from home are evidence. Continuing treatment, physiotherapy and specialist opinions in your own country document the ongoing harm. Foreign claimants routinely discard exactly the documents that would have proved the largest head of their claim.

If your injury left lasting impairment, our disability compensation calculator shows how the percentage and your earnings interact to drive the figure.

Fatal accidents: loss of financial support

If someone in your family was killed in a road accident in Türkiye, the central claim is destekten yoksun kalma — loss of financial support — under TBK Art. 53. It is worth understanding what kind of claim it is, because the structure is not obvious from outside.

It is not an inherited claim. It does not pass through the estate, and it is not divided like an inheritance. It belongs, in their own right, to the people the deceased actually supported, or would in the ordinary course have gone on to support. That principle is settled in Turkish case-law and it has real consequences:

• Dependency is factual, not formal. The circle is not restricted to legal heirs. A spouse, children and parents are the usual claimants, but the test is real support, present or reasonably expected — not a line on a certificate.
• Each claimant's award is their own. It is assessed on that person's own dependency: what they received, and for how long they would have gone on receiving it.
• Close relatives may also claim non-pecuniary damages under TBK Art. 56 in their own names — remembering that this head lies outside compulsory traffic insurance cover and is pursued against the person liable.

Alongside the support claim, TBK Art. 53 carries funeral expenses and — where death was not instantaneous — treatment costs together with the losses from reduced or lost working capacity. Both of those turn on the same condition, so whether death was immediate is not a detail: it decides whether that middle head exists at all. As against the compulsory insurer, note KTK Art. 92(j): the portion of the claim corresponding to the deceased's own fault falls outside the insurer's cover.

For a family living abroad, the calculation is built on the deceased's actual earnings and circumstances, and on the support that genuinely flowed to you. Living in another country and having been supported in another currency does not defeat the claim, but it does make the evidence of support — transfers, receipts, the household's real arrangements — central rather than incidental. Gather it early; it becomes very hard to reconstruct years later.

Uninsured, hit-and-run, or an insurer that has failed: the Güvence Hesabı

The question we are asked most often by tourists is a version of this: the car drove off and nobody got the plate, so there is nothing to be done — correct? Not necessarily.

The Güvence Hesabı (Guarantee Account), established under Art. 14 of the Insurance Law No. 5684, exists precisely for the cases where the compulsory insurance system fails to deliver. Broadly, it covers situations where:

• the vehicle that caused the damage cannot be identified — the hit-and-run case;
• the vehicle was not insured, in breach of the obligation in KTK Art. 91;
• the insurer has become insolvent and cannot meet the claim;
• and certain further situations defined in Art. 14.

Two honest qualifications. The Account responds within the compulsory insurance limits — it is a substitute for the missing ZMSS, not a better version of it, so the Art. 92 exclusions logic applies to what you can expect from it. And it has its own application procedure and its own document requirements, which are not identical to an insurer's. Applications fail on paperwork more often than on merit.

The practical message for a foreigner: a hit-and-run, or a driver who turns out to have been uninsured, is the moment to check the position rather than the moment to give up on it. The police accident report and a criminal complaint made at the time are what keep this route open, which is why the evidence section below matters most in exactly the cases that feel most hopeless.

Evidence: what to preserve now

Road-accident claims are won on documents generated in the first hours and lost on documents nobody collected. If you are reading this soon after an accident, this is the section to act on.

• The police accident report (kaza tespit tutanağı). This is the spine of the file — it feeds the fault report, and it identifies the vehicles and their insurance. Obtain a copy. If the police attended, it exists; if it was handled between drivers on a mutual report form, keep that form.
• Photographs, before anything moves. Vehicle positions, plates, damage to each vehicle, skid marks, road surface, signage, lighting and weather. Photograph the other driver's documents and policy if you can.
• Identities. The other vehicle's plate, the driver's name, and the insurance details. Witnesses' names and phone numbers — witnesses scatter within minutes and are effectively unrecoverable afterwards.
• Everything medical. Emergency admission records, imaging, the discharge summary (epikriz), prescriptions and receipts. Then keep the same records from your own country: continuing treatment at home is what proves the harm did not stop when you boarded the plane.
• The criminal file. If a prosecutor opened an investigation, that file will contain expert work and statements you would otherwise pay to reproduce. If you were the injured party, make sure a complaint was actually recorded.
• If you were a passenger in a taxi, bus, minibus or coach, note the operator. A carrier has its own liability and its own insurance, which is a route beyond the driver.

Do not sign anything you cannot read. Not at the roadside, not at the hospital, not in an insurer's office. If a document is put in front of you in Turkish and someone is explaining what it says, the explanation is not the document.

If you have already flown home: how you instruct us

Most of the people who contact us about a road accident are no longer in Türkiye. That is normal, and it does not weaken the claim.

Under MÖHUKMÖHUKTurkish Private International Law Act No. 5718The Turkish statute that decides which country's law applies to a cross-border matter, and how foreign judgments are recognised and enforced here.Glossary → No. 5718, Art. 34, obligations arising from tort are governed by the law of the country where the tortious act was committed; where the act and the damage occurred in different countries, the law of the country where the damage occurred applies. An accident on a Turkish road is a Turkish-law claim before the Turkish courts — and, decisively for you, it is a claim your lawyer conducts. Attendance is not what the system requires; representation is.

The power of attorney. You sign a power of attorney where you live — notarised and apostilled, with a sworn Turkish translation — or execute it at a Turkish consulate. That single document lets us obtain the accident report, identify and approach the insurer, access the criminal file, run the Art. 97 application, and conduct the arbitration or the litigation. You need not return.

Security for costs. Be aware of this one before it surprises you: under MÖHUK Art. 48, a foreign claimant who brings an action, joins one, or pursues enforcement in Türkiye may be ordered to provide security. Art. 48(2) provides for exemption where there is reciprocity — and for many nationalities the exemption applies, whether through a treaty or established reciprocity. It is a question with a definite answer for your nationality, and we check it before filing rather than after an order lands.

Where you win and the liable party will not pay voluntarily, collection is its own exercise: see debt collection and enforcement.

Careful with early offers and releases: KTK Art. 111

There is a pattern worth naming, because foreign claimants meet it constantly. An offer arrives early — while you are still in pain, still out of pocket, dealing with it in a language you do not read, and long before any disability assessment exists. It is presented as a settlement. It comes with a release (ibraname) to sign.

The difficulty is not that the offer is necessarily bad. It is that nobody can tell whether it is bad yet, including the person offering it. Until the disability percentage and the fault apportionment exist, the claim has no measurable value, so the offer cannot be measured against anything. Agreeing to a figure at that stage is not negotiation; it is a guess made by the side with less information.

Turkish law recognises the problem. Under KTK Art. 111:

• agreements that remove or narrow the liability this law imposes are invalid; and
• agreements or settlements concerning compensation amounts that are clearly insufficient or clearly excessive may be annulled within two years from the date they were made.

Read that second rule carefully, because it cuts both ways. If you have already signed something that looks obviously inadequate against what you turned out to have lost, it is not automatically the end — but the window is two years from the date of the agreement, and it is a separate, shorter clock running alongside the Art. 109 one. It is not a safety net to rely on. It is a narrow door that closes.

Our own practice is simple: we do not advise you on whether to accept an offer before the medical evidence exists, because before that any advice would be a guess dressed up as an opinion. If you have received an offer or already signed a release, tell us what happened and when — the date on the document is the first thing that matters.

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