Late Payment in Business-to-Business Contracts in Turkey: The Sixty-Day Cap and Automatic Default of Commercial Code Article 1530, the Interest Rates That Apply in 2026, the Eight-Day Invoice Rule, the Clauses That Are Void, and How a Finance Department Should Draft and Chase

Payment terms in Turkey are negotiated as if the parties were free to agree anything, and then enforced as if the law had never spoken. Both habits are wrong. Since 2012 Article 1530 of the Commercial Code has governed payment for supplies of goods and services between businesses: it puts the debtor in default on the agreed date without any notice, caps agreed terms at sixty days unless a longer term is expressly agreed and not grossly unfair, makes sixty days absolute where a small or medium enterprise supplies a large one, and voids clauses that exclude or minimise late payment interest. The interest itself moved in 2026 more than in any year I remember: the Central Bank's rate for commercial supplies is 43 per cent for the year, the general commercial default rate is 39.75 per cent, and the statutory interest rate was re-based on 31 July 2026 by Law 7589 to eighty per cent of the Central Bank's discount rate after the Constitutional Court struck part of the old provision. This page sets out the rules as they stand, the rates that apply, the general provisions of the Code of Obligations that sit underneath, and how a finance or legal function should draft, invoice and chase so that the statute works for the company rather than against it.

Sources, checked 11 September 2026. Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, Articles 8 to 10, 21 and 1530; Law No. 3095 on legal and default interest, Articles 1, 2, 3 and 4/a, as amended by Law No. 7589 (Official Gazette 33326, 31 July 2026); Presidential Decision No. 8485 (Official Gazette 32552, 21 May 2024); the Constitutional Court's decision E. 2024/24, K. 2025/164 of 22 July 2025; the Central Bank's discount and advance rate table and its communiqué of 2 January 2026 (Official Gazette 33125); Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098, Articles 88, 117 to 122, 146, 147 and 149.

Who Article 1530 covers

Article 1530(2) applies to transactions between commercial enterprises for the supply of goods and services. Both sides must be businesses, the transaction must be a supply, and the creditor must have performed its own obligation. A hotel buying furniture from a manufacturer, a developer paying a subcontractor, a retailer taking stock from a distributor and a factory paying a haulier are inside it; a loan between companies, a lease of premises, a sale to a consumer and a shareholder's current account are outside it and fall back on the general rules of the Code of Obligations described below. The article does not distinguish between Turkish and foreign-owned companies, and a foreign group's subsidiary is bound by it as debtor and protected by it as creditor.

Default without notice, and the periods that start it

Under the general rule of Article 117 of the Code of Obligations a debtor of a matured debt is put in default by the creditor's notice, unless a date was fixed. Article 1530 removes the notice for commercial supplies. Where the contract fixes a date or a period, the debtor is in default when it passes, save where it is not responsible for the delay, and the creditor earns interest from the following day even if none was agreed. Where the contract is silent or its period is unlawful, Article 1530(4) supplies four periods after which the debtor is in default without notice: thirty days from receipt of the invoice or an equivalent request for payment; thirty days from receipt of the goods or services where the date of receipt of the invoice is uncertain; thirty days from delivery where the invoice arrived before the goods; and thirty days from acceptance or inspection where the law or the contract provides one and the invoice arrived on or before it, with an inspection period longer than thirty days cut back to thirty where it is grossly unfair to the creditor. The date of receipt of the invoice is therefore the fact a supplier must be able to prove, and the electronic invoicing system described on the e-invoice page gives it a timestamp.

The sixty-day cap

Article 1530(5) allows the contract to set a payment period of at most sixty days from receipt of the invoice, the goods or the services, or from completion of an inspection procedure. A longer period is possible only where it is expressly agreed and does not create a grossly unfair situation for the creditor. Where the creditor is a small or medium enterprise or an agricultural or livestock producer, or the debtor is a large enterprise, the period may not exceed sixty days at all. Article 1530(8) applies these rules to the first instalment where payment by instalments is agreed, charges the unpaid part of each instalment with the interest of paragraph 7, and voids instalment clauses altogether where a small or medium enterprise supplies a large one. In practice this means that the ninety-day and one-hundred-and-twenty-day terms that multinational purchasing departments bring from other markets are void against a Turkish small or medium supplier and voidable against everyone else; the safe drafting is sixty days from a provable invoice date, with a price that reflects it.

The rates that apply in 2026

Three different rates can apply to a late Turkish debt, and the table separates them.

Article 1530(7) requires the Central Bank to announce each January the rate for late payments in commercial supplies where no rate is agreed or the clause is void, together with the minimum amount recoverable for collection costs, and fixes a floor: the rate must be at least eight points above the commercial default rate of Law 3095. For 2026 the communiqué published on 2 January 2026 set 43 per cent and 2,020 TL. Article 2(2) of Law 3095 gives every commercial debt, with or without a contract term, default interest at the Central Bank's short-term advance rate at the previous 31 December where that exceeds the legal rate, which for 2026 is 39.75 per cent. Article 1 of Law 3095 was rewritten by Law 7589, in force on 31 July 2026, after the Constitutional Court, in its decision of 22 July 2025 announced on 1 December 2025, annulled the old text so far as it applied to debt relationships not arising from a contract, with effect nine months after publication: the legal interest rate is now eighty per cent of the Central Bank's discount rate at the previous year end, which puts it at 31 per cent for the rest of 2026 against the 24 per cent that Presidential Decision 8485 had fixed from 1 June 2024. Under both articles the rate resets in the second half of the year if the 30 June rate differs from the year-end rate by five points or more. Under Article 3 of Law 3095 compound interest is not charged on legal or default interest, and under Article 8(2) of the Commercial Code interest on interest is allowed only in current accounts and in loans that are commercial for both parties, at intervals of at least three months. Foreign currency debts carry, under Article 4/a of Law 3095, the highest rate paid by state banks on one-year deposits in that currency unless a higher rate was agreed, a point that matters for the contracts priced in euros under the exceptions of the currency rules.

The clauses that are void

Article 1530(6) voids contract terms that provide that no late payment interest will be paid, that interest will be paid at a rate so low as to be grossly unfair, or that the debtor will not be liable or will be liable only to a limited extent for the creditor's loss from late payment; where a clause is void, paragraph 7 applies its rate in place of the clause. Article 1530(5) voids periods longer than sixty days for small and medium creditors and large debtors, and paragraph 8 voids instalment terms in the same situations. Article 120(2) of the Code of Obligations caps an agreed default rate at twice the legal rate, and Article 88(2) caps agreed contractual interest at one and a half times it, though Article 8(1) of the Commercial Code frees the rate between merchants. Article 121 provides that a debtor who is late in paying interest or an annuity owes default interest on it only from the day enforcement or an action is started, and that agreements to the contrary are treated as penalty clauses. A finance department reviewing a counterparty's template should strike these clauses rather than negotiate them; they will not survive.

The eight-day invoice rule and the other timing traps

Article 21(2) of the Commercial Code provides that a person who receives an invoice and does not object to its content within eight days is deemed to have accepted it, and paragraph 3 applies the same rule to a written confirmation of an oral or electronic contract. For the buyer this means that a wrong invoice must be objected to in writing within eight days or its content stands; for the seller it means that a clean invoice, provably received, becomes hard to dispute after the eighth day. Article 10 of the Commercial Code starts interest on a commercial debt from the end of the term or, absent a term, from the day of the notice, which Article 1530 replaces with its own periods for supplies. Article 122 of the Code of Obligations lets the creditor recover loss exceeding the default interest unless the debtor proves it was not at fault. Limitation runs under Articles 146 and 147 of the Code of Obligations: ten years for the principal in general and five years for periodic payments including interest, from maturity under Article 149, and the chase should be planned against those dates rather than against the debtor's promises.

How a finance or legal function should draft, invoice and chase

For the buyer, the drafting rule is a payment period of no more than sixty days from a defined and provable event, an inspection period of no more than thirty days where the goods justify it, an interest clause at a rate the company can defend, and no attempt to exclude interest or liability for late payment. For the supplier, the invoicing rule is to issue the electronic invoice on delivery so that the receipt date is timestamped, to state the payment date on it, and to book interest from the first day after the term at the applicable rate together with the minimum recovery cost; the chasing rule is that no notice is needed to start interest under Article 1530 but that a written demand through a notary or registered electronic mail under Article 18(3) of the Commercial Code fixes the record and prepares the enforcement file. When the debtor still does not pay, the routes are on the debt collection page, the company-specific steps on the page for claims against Turkish companies, the interim measures on the asset seizure page, and the arbitration and foreign award routes on the arbitration page. The wider legal function this page belongs to, from contract turnaround to negotiation mandates, is on the outsourced legal counsel page.

Whose side we are on, and how we are paid

The buyer's procurement template was written to lengthen the term. The supplier's accountant books the invoice and waits. The bank charges for the overdraft that the late payment causes. None of them is paid to tell you, before you sign, that your ninety-day term is void against a Turkish small enterprise, or, before you chase, that interest at 43 per cent has been running since day thirty-one without any letter from you.

We take no commission or referral fee from enforcement offices, collection agents, banks or counterparties, in any form, on any file. The fee you pay us is our only income from your matter, and it does not depend on the sum recovered or on whether a contract is signed. Because our position does not move with the outcome, telling a buyer that its clause will not survive, or a supplier that its claim is time-barred, costs us nothing to say.

One boundary, stated plainly. We are lawyers, not licensed investment advisers and not a collection agency. We do not decide whether a customer is worth keeping. What we protect is the Turkish legal position: a payment clause that is valid, an invoice record that proves the start of the period, interest calculated at the right rate, the eight-day objection made or defended in time, and the claim preserved before limitation runs.

Before the next purchase order or the next reminder

Send us the contract or purchase order, the invoices with their delivery and receipt records, any correspondence with the counterparty and the payments received. We will tell you what term applies, from which day interest runs and at which rate, what is void in the document, and what step preserves the claim. Our enforcement work is described on the enforcement and insolvency page.

What this page does not settle

Consumer credit and consumer sales, loans and current accounts, cheques and bills of exchange, the enforcement procedure in detail, insolvency set-off, public procurement payments and the currency rules for pricing are separate subjects, several covered elsewhere on this site. The Central Bank's rates and the annual communiqué change; the figures above are those in force on the date checked.