A relative died in an accident in Türkiye: who pays, what the family can claim, and the letter that has to be written first.

In short: when someone is killed in an accident in Türkiye, their family can claim in Türkiye whatever their nationality and wherever they live. Article 53 of the Code of Obligations (Law No. 6098) sets out the losses a death gives rise to, in particular the funeral expenses, the treatment costs and lost earnings where death was not immediate, and the losses of the people deprived of the deceased's support (destekten yoksun kalma); Article 56/2 lets the court award non-pecuniary compensation to the relatives on top. Loss of support belongs personally to each dependant, not to the estate, so a spouse, children and, on the facts, parents each claim in their own name. In a road accident the family must put a written application to the compulsory insurer before suing, and may go to court or to the Insurance Arbitration Commission if no written answer comes within 15 days (Highway Traffic Law, Law No. 2918, art. 97). The limitation period is two years from learning of both the loss and the party liable and ten years from the accident, longer where the accident is also a criminal offence (art. 109). Since 16 July 2026 (Law No. 7589) interest on the part of the award calculated for the period in which the deceased's earnings are known runs from the date of the accident, and an insurer's early payment is set off proportionally as at the date it was made (art. 55).

1. Who Is Liable When Someone Dies: Road, Work and Holiday Accidents

Turkish law does not have a single wrongful-death statute. The claim of a bereaved family is a tort claim under the Code of Obligations (Türk Borçlar Kanunu, TBK No. 6098), and the identity of the defendant depends on how the death occurred. In a road accident, Article 85 of the Highway Traffic Law (Karayolları Trafik Kanunu, KTK No. 2918) makes the operator of the motor vehicle liable for a death caused by its operation, and, where the vehicle was operated under the name of an enterprise or with its ticket, makes the enterprise jointly and severally liable with the operator; both answer for the driver's fault as for their own. Behind the operator stands the compulsory motor liability insurer, which is the practical defendant in most files. Article 90 of the same Law provides that compensation under the compulsory insurance follows the procedures in the Law, and that the Code of Obligations' tort rules apply to everything the Law does not regulate, including non-pecuniary damages.

In a work accident the employer answers under the employment contract and the duty to protect the worker, and the social security institution's death benefits to the survivors run alongside. In a hotel, resort or excursion accident the operator answers for its own fault and, under Article 66 of the Code of Obligations, for the acts of the people it employs; that route is described on our hotel and excursion accidents page. The rest of this guide uses the road accident as the working example, because it is the most common fatal accident involving foreign nationals in Türkiye and because it has the most developed procedure, but the heads of damage in sections 2 to 5 are the same in every case.

2. What a Death Gives Rise To: TBK Article 53

Article 53 of the Code of Obligations lists the losses that a death gives rise to. They are, in the Article's words: the funeral expenses; where death did not occur immediately, the treatment expenses and the losses arising from the reduction or loss of working capacity between the accident and the death; and the losses suffered by the persons deprived of the deceased's support. The first two heads belong to the estate, which means to the heirs under Turkish succession rules or, where the deceased was a foreign national, under the law that governs the succession; the third head belongs personally to each dependant, whether or not they are heirs.

Funeral expenses include the costs that the family actually incurred and that were reasonable in the circumstances, and for a foreign family that ordinarily includes the repatriation of the body; invoices in a foreign language are used in translation. Treatment expenses are those incurred between the accident and the death, in Türkiye or abroad. The loss-of-support head is where the money is, and it is examined next.

3. Loss of Support: Who Counts as a Dependant and How the Figure Is Built

Loss of support, destekten yoksun kalma, compensates the people whom the deceased was supporting, or would in all probability have supported, for the support they have lost. The test is factual, not a fixed list: a spouse, minor children and, depending on the circumstances, parents, adult children in education and a partner who was in fact supported may qualify. Article 55 of the Code of Obligations provides that loss-of-support damages and bodily damages are calculated according to the provisions of the Code and the principles of the law of liability, and that the figure, once calculated, may not be increased or reduced on grounds of equity by reference to its amount.

The calculation itself is an expert exercise. It starts from the deceased's net income, which for a foreign national means income earned abroad, evidenced by payslips, tax returns and employer statements; it projects that income over the deceased's probable working life and the period during which each dependant would have been supported; it deducts the share the deceased would have spent on himself or herself; it apportions the remainder among the dependants; and it discounts the future amounts to a present value. Where the deceased had no income, for instance a spouse who ran the household, the value of the services lost is estimated. Each of those steps is contestable, and the two variables that move the figure most, the income base and the apportionment, are the ones a foreign family must document before the file reaches the expert.

Two deductions do not apply. Article 55 provides that social security payments that cannot be recouped in whole or in part from the person liable, and payments that were not made in performance of the obligation, are not taken into account in determining the loss and are not deducted from the damages or the compensation. A pension paid abroad to the widow, or a life insurance payout, is therefore not subtracted; what is subtracted is a payment made by the insurer or the person liable towards this very compensation, and since July 2026 the manner of that subtraction is regulated by the amendment described below.

4. The July 2026 Amendment: Interest, Advance Payments and What Cannot Be Deducted (TBK 55)

Law No. 7589 of 16 July 2026 added two paragraphs to Article 55 that change how a loss-of-support award is computed and paid. The first concerns interest. For losses arising from the reduction or loss of working capacity and for loss of support, statutory interest on the part of the compensation calculated for the period in which the deceased's or the injured person's earnings are known runs from the date of the accident; interest on the part calculated for the period in which the earnings cannot be known runs from the date of the judgment. In practice the expert's report now has to separate the known-income period from the projected period, and the interest on the first part runs from the day of the death, which in a long case is a substantial sum.

The second concerns advance payments. Amounts paid in performance of the obligation for these heads of damage before the investigation began are set off proportionally against the compensation determined as at the date of payment. That replaces the former practice of deducting a nominal payment from an award calculated years later; the set-off is now proportional, so that an insurer's early payment counts for what it was worth on the day it was made, no more and no less. For a family deciding whether to accept an early part-payment from an insurer, the amendment removes the risk that the payment would later be treated as a much larger part of the claim than it really was.

Article 55 also provides, in its second paragraph, that its rules apply to claims arising from administrative acts and from other causes for which the administration is responsible, so that a death caused by a defective road or a public vehicle is calculated on the same basis before the administrative courts.

5. Non-Pecuniary Compensation for the Family: TBK Article 56

Article 56 of the Code of Obligations allows the judge, in the case of a serious bodily injury or a death, to award an appropriate sum as non-pecuniary compensation, manevi tazminat, to the relatives of the injured or deceased person. The Article sets no tariff and no list of relatives; the court fixes a sum that it considers appropriate to the circumstances of the case, taking into account the closeness of the relationship, the manner of the death and the position of the parties. The claim is personal to each relative and is brought in each relative's name; a spouse, each child and each parent claims separately, and the sums are ordinarily awarded separately.

Non-pecuniary compensation is outside the compulsory motor insurance. Article 90 of the Highway Traffic Law directs that the Code of Obligations governs non-pecuniary damages, and the compulsory policy covers pecuniary damage within its limits; the manevi tazminat claim therefore runs against the operator, the enterprise and the driver, not against the insurer, unless an optional liability policy extends to it. In a work accident it runs against the employer; in a hotel accident against the operator. This is the reason a family should not treat the insurer's settlement as the end of the file: the claim against the person responsible for the grief is a separate claim with a separate defendant.

6. The Insurer: The Written Application, Fifteen Days and Eight Working Days (KTK 97, 99)

In a road accident the compulsory insurer must be approached before any action is started. Article 97 of the Highway Traffic Law requires the injured party, within the limits of the compulsory motor liability insurance, to apply in writing to the insurer before going to court. If the insurer does not answer in writing within fifteen days of the application, or if there is a dispute about whether the answer meets the claim, the injured party may sue or may apply to arbitration under the Insurance Law No. 5684. Article 99 then fixes the payment duty: the insurer must pay the amounts within the compulsory insurance limits within eight working days of the date on which the claimant delivered to the insurer the documents specified in the general conditions of the compulsory insurance.

For a family abroad the application is the pivot of the whole claim. It identifies the dependants, attaches the death certificate, the accident report, proof of the relationship and proof of the deceased's income, and states the heads claimed. A complete application starts the eight-working-day clock; an incomplete one lets the insurer ask for documents and restart it. The application also fixes the date from which the insurer's delay can be measured, and it is the document on which the Insurance Arbitration Commission's file is built if the family chooses arbitration rather than the civil courts. The Commission is the faster forum for the part of the claim within the policy limits; the civil court is the forum for the excess over the limits and for the non-pecuniary claim against the operator and the driver.

7. Deadlines, Settlements and a Comparison Table (KTK 109, 111)

Article 109 of the Highway Traffic Law provides that claims for pecuniary damage arising from a motor vehicle accident are time-barred two years from the date on which the injured party learned of the damage and of the person liable, and in any event ten years from the day of the accident. Where the claim arises from an act that is also a criminal offence and the criminal law provides a longer limitation period, that longer period applies to the pecuniary claim as well; a fatal accident is almost always also a prosecution for causing death by negligence, so the longer period is the usual one. Interrupting the limitation period against the person liable interrupts it against the insurer, and vice versa. Outside road accidents, Article 72 of the Code of Obligations sets the same two-year and ten-year structure with the same criminal-law extension.

Settlements are protected. Article 111 of the Highway Traffic Law makes agreements that remove or narrow the liability created by the Law invalid, and allows agreements or settlements on the amount of compensation that are clearly inadequate or clearly excessive to be annulled within two years of the date they were made. A release signed by a grieving family for a sum that turns out to be a fraction of the loss-of-support figure is therefore not the end of the matter, provided the two-year period is watched.

Evidence. The accident report and, where there is one, the criminal file, the death certificate, the family register or the foreign equivalent proving each relationship, the deceased's payslips, tax returns and employer's statement for the income base, the funeral and repatriation invoices, and the treatment invoices where death was not immediate. A foreign family collects most of these at home; the accident report and the criminal file are obtained in Türkiye through a lawyer with a power of attorney, which is the one document the family should sign first.

A fatal accident claim in Türkiye is not a lottery and not a formality. The heads of damage are fixed by statute, the calculation is an expert exercise built on documents the family already holds, the insurer's duties are measured in days, and the July 2026 amendment has settled the two questions, interest and advance payments, that used to erode the award. What the family controls is the file: the power of attorney, the income evidence, the application under Article 97, and the decision not to sign a release before the loss-of-support figure has been calculated.

Scope. This page describes the Turkish rules as in force in September 2026, including the amendments to Article 55 of the Code of Obligations made by Law No. 7589 of 16 July 2026. It is general information, not advice on a particular file; the figures in a loss-of-support claim depend on the evidence of income and dependency in each case.