The structure that gets you a permit is not always the one that gets you five years

Last updated 18 August 2026Legal review Bayraktar Attorneys2 min readThe qualifying period

Over sixty months, a work arrangement is tested for durability rather than convenience. Some structures survive that; others produce a permit today and a problem in year four.

As an employee of a Turkish company

The strongest position, for reasons that have nothing to do with law and everything to do with evidence. A real employer generates payroll records, social security registration, tax withholding and an employment file — precisely the documents that later satisfy the income condition and demonstrate intent to settle without further effort.

Its weakness is the one addressed in changing employer: the permit belongs to the job. A five-year plan built on employment should assume at least one job change and plan the sequence in advance rather than in the week of resignation.

As the owner of your own company

Founders can obtain permits through their own company, and the structure has real advantages over five years: you control the continuity, and the business itself is strong evidence of settlement. The cost is ongoing compliance. Turkish practice expects a company sponsoring a foreign work permit to meet capital thresholds and to employ Turkish nationals in a defined ratio to each foreign employee — the familiar five-to-one expectation — and to keep meeting them at every renewal.

That is a five-year obligation, not a one-off. A company that satisfied the criteria at incorporation and shrank in year three creates a permit problem exactly when the qualifying period is nearly complete. Company formation for foreigners and employer-side permit obligations set out what the structure has to sustain.

Employer of record and umbrella arrangements

Where a foreign company has no Turkish entity, an employer of record can lawfully employ the individual locally and sponsor the permit. It is a real structure with real uses. Over a five-year horizon, three cautions apply.

Read the arrangement with the archive investigation in mind. If the records show a payroll entry with no operational footprint, the file will be read the way the moral character condition requires it to be read.

The structures that fail

Registration on a payroll without real work; a company incorporated solely to hold status and never trading; permits bought through intermediaries; and social security entries created retrospectively to fill a gap. These are not aggressive planning — they are the fact patterns fictitious employment investigations exist to find, and they place the applicant in a worse position than simply having waited.

The reason to say this plainly on a page about structuring is that the failed structures are usually sold as solutions to exactly the problems this page describes. The lawful answers are slower: a real job, a real company, or an honest recount of the qualifying period from a later start date.