Turkey's labor minister promises January pension package, denies fund losses as committee passes budget

Turkey's labor minister told parliament on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026, that the government is preparing an extra increase for pensioners to take effect in January 2027. He also denied that any money in the state's unemployment insurance fund was caught in the investment fund scandal. The statements came as the Plan and Budget Committee of the Grand National Assembly approved the 2027 budget of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security after a session of about ten hours.

Minister Vedat Işıkhan gave no figure for the pension package and no date beyond January. He said it was being worked out under Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz with Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek. Opposition lawmakers used the session to press for larger increases to the lowest pension and the minimum wage. They also asked whether the unemployment fund had any exposure to the troubled markets. Every opposition amendment put to a vote was rejected.

This account draws mainly on the committee's unreviewed official transcript, which the parliament published the same day and marks as not yet checked by its record service. Quotations are 567politics translations from Turkish.

A pension package for January, without a number

Işıkhan opened his presentation at about 11 a.m. with the government's record on pensions. The lowest pension was 16,881 lira a month in the second half of 2025, he said. It rose to 20,000 lira in January 2026 and to 23,552 lira in July. He said the government had paid 483.4 billion lira in holiday bonuses to pensioners since 2018. "Of course we know that these are not enough," he added.

He then described the new work. "We are carrying out a study, targeted to take effect from January 2027, that includes the existing legal increases as well as additional improvements," he said. He said the approach would take account of "income differences among our pensioners" and would be based on "justice and fairness," on the president's instructions. He said the government would share the result with the public when it was finished and submit it to parliament.

Under current law, pensions in Turkey rise twice a year in line with inflation. The minister's wording suggests the January step would combine that automatic increase with something extra. He did not say who would qualify, how much it would cost or how it would be paid for. The lowest pension is a floor that the Treasury tops up for people whose earned pension falls below it. A rise in that floor therefore reaches a different group from a general increase for all pensioners.

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H2 202516,881

Jan 202620,000

Jul 202623,552

H2 2025Jan 2026Jul 2026

Source: TBMM Plan and Budget Committee transcript, Nov. 3, 2026

Show the numbers

Period	Lowest pension
H2 2025	16,881
Jan 2026	20,000
Jul 2026	23,552

The chart shows a rise of about 40% in one year in nominal terms. Over a similar period, consumer prices rose by roughly 30%, according to the statistics office's figures for October covered in our report on the latest inflation data. The two numbers are not a precise comparison of purchasing power, because the pension steps came on fixed dates while prices rose month by month.

How the opposition framed the same numbers

Opposition speakers answered the minister with poverty measures. Gamze Taşcıer spoke for YENİ Parti, the party formed this summer by lawmakers who left the Republican People's Party (CHP). She said the net minimum wage of 28,075 lira compared with a hunger line of 37,801 lira for a family of four. Hunger lines of this kind are published monthly by the labor confederation Türk-İş; other speakers cited its October figure of about 38,000 lira. "There is a gap of more than 9,700 lira before the salary even reaches the account," she said, according to the transcript and an Anka news agency report.

Taşcıer compared two lines of the central government's 2027 budget. She said 2.887 trillion lira was set aside for social security and 3.975 trillion lira for interest payments. "So 100 lira for the pensioner, 138 lira for interest," she said. She said social security's share of every 100 lira of spending would rise from 9.87 lira this year to 10.59 lira in 2027, an increase of 72 kuruş.

She also raised press reports that the government was weighing different increases for pensioners by age. "Instead of calculating the pensioner's age, calculate their rights," she told the minister. She asked how such a plan would treat people who had paid high premiums for many years, or who had retired early on disability grounds.

Several speakers cited the same structural point. Yüksel Selçuk Türkoğlu of the İYİ Party said the lowest pension had once been 30% above the minimum wage, according to a Haberler.com account of the session. He said minimum-wage earners had been 12% of all employees and were now more than half. 567politics could not find an official series that confirms the share of workers paid the minimum wage, and the statistics office does not publish one monthly.

Mustafa Kalaycı of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the governing party's ally, also asked for changes. Kalaycı, a deputy chair of the MHP, said more than 17 million people live on a pension and 5.1 million receive the lowest one, according to the transcript and an Ekonomim report. He said the differences between pensions should be removed with a gradual adjustment, known in Turkish as intibak, based on the number of premium days and the premiums paid. He said the net minimum wage should be raised above the hunger line. He also asked for a lower premium-day threshold of 7,200 days for the self-employed, extra pay for top-grade civil servants and premium support so homemakers can earn a pension.

Kalaycı told the committee that the president had announced "the good news" that a regulation improving pensions would be made by the end of the year. The minister did not use those words, and no draft law had been sent to parliament by the end of the session.

Resul Kurt, a lawmaker from the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), defended the government's social security record. He said the number of active insured people had risen by 115% to about 26 million. "We know and value the expectations of our pensioners," he said, adding that he expected funds to be set aside in 2027 for an improvement.

The minimum wage commission meets in December

Işıkhan said the commission that sets the minimum wage, made up of government, worker and employer representatives, would meet in December to decide the 2027 rate. He said the minimum wage had risen 207% in real terms since 2002. He did not say which price index or base month that figure used, and several opposition lawmakers challenged it during the session.

He said the government raised its monthly support to employers for each minimum-wage worker to 1,270 lira in 2026, and that the support totaled 48.4 billion lira for about 1.5 million workplaces.

The opposition offered competing formulas for the new rate:

Sources: TBMM transcript; DEM Party campaign leaflet; Ekonomim.

Sümeyye Boz of the pro-Kurdish DEM Party said this year's 20% increase had come after inflation of 30.89% the year before. She said her party wants a minimum wage of at least 65,000 lira, which it describes as half the poverty line, under its "budget for bread, peace and justice" campaign. The party's campaign leaflet also calls for the lowest pension to be raised to the level of the minimum wage. Boz also argued against a regional minimum wage, an idea that employer groups have promoted. She said it would push down pay further in low-wage regions.

Erhan Usta of the İYİ Party proposed linking the minimum wage to an objective formula. He said the statistics office publishes third-quarter gross domestic product on Dec. 1 in both real and current prices. The annual rise in nominal output over the last four quarters, he said, should be the basis for the increase. His party also filed an amendment to add 120 billion lira to the employer support so the January increase could be larger.

A denial on the unemployment fund

The second issue of the day was the fund scandal. Prosecutors are investigating suspected manipulation in investment funds. Regulators have ordered funds liquidated, and the case has led to the arrest of the former head of the Istanbul stock exchange, as covered in our report on the latest detentions. Erhan Usta of the İYİ Party told the committee that the general manager of Takasbank, the exchange's clearing bank, had been removed and was under house arrest.

Opposition lawmakers asked whether the Unemployment Insurance Fund, which is financed by worker, employer and state premiums, had lost money. The fund lends part of its cash through Takasbank's money market.

Işıkhan answered at the end of the session. He said the fund "has nothing to do with the liquidated funds." He said it is invested under the public treasury management regulation, in government debt securities, public deposit and participation banks and Takasbank. It cannot legally or technically be used for speculation, he said. The authority to lend through Takasbank came from a regulation change on Jan. 19, 2022, he said. Each day the fund compares Takasbank rates with deposit rates and lends there only when the rate is better. Halk Yatırım, a state-owned brokerage, acts as the intermediary.

"It was asked openly: did the unemployment insurance fund get stuck in the funds?" he said. "I am answering openly: we do not have a single kuruş stuck in any fund."

Erhan Usta said the 2022 regulation change had opened a path for the fund into the market at the center of the case. He asked how much money was placed through Takasbank. Samet Güneş, director general of İŞKUR, the public employment agency, said the exposure was 0.4% of the total. "What is there now is 2.9 billion," he said. He said 1.9 billion lira would mature in November and the rest by February, and that 600 million lira had come back in October. He said there had been no noticeable increase in the placements.

Earlier in the exchange, Cevdet Akay, a lawmaker from Karabük, said he believed the minister's statement. He argued, however, that Takasbank had placed money in funds named in the case and lost it, which he called a public loss. "There is no such thing," the minister replied. The transcript does not show any official document on the exposure, and 567politics could not verify the figures independently. The investigation itself has not alleged wrongdoing by the unemployment fund.

Aylin Yaman, a YENİ Parti lawmaker from Ankara, raised a separate point about the same fund. She said its assets of 883 billion lira were 11 times what it paid in unemployment benefits in 2025, while only 17% of the unemployed received benefits in June 2026. The minister put the fund's assets at more than 900 billion lira.

Women and the labor market

Gender gaps ran through the session. The minister said women's labor force participation had risen from 21.3% in 2005 to 35.2% in September 2026, and the female employment rate from 19.4% to 31.2%. He said women's unemployment was 11.3%. Those September figures match the statistics office's labor force release for September, as reported by Anka. The same release put the overall seasonally adjusted unemployment rate at 8.4%, up 0.5 points from August, and youth unemployment for women aged 15 to 24 at 23.3%.

Işıkhan described a program called İş Pozitif, under which he said more than 2.7 million women had entered registered jobs since 2024. A positive-discrimination project pays employers up to 32,500 lira a month for three months for women they hire, he said, and 10,000 lira a month for six months in childcare support for mothers of children under 5.5. He said 13,733 women had benefited by September.

Opposition speakers pointed to broader measures. Kalaycı said the labor slack rate, which counts the unemployed, the underemployed and people available but not looking, was 31.2% in September, and 40.4% for women. Taşcıer said 2.5 million people had given up looking for work and that 57% of them were women. She said the number of women who had lost hope of finding a job had risen from 810,000 in 2021 to nearly 1.5 million.

Halide Türkoğlu of the DEM Party opened her remarks by naming seven workers who died in a fire at a cosmetics workshop in Dilovası, an industrial district near Istanbul, on Nov. 8, 2025. She said the ministry had not created a single mechanism where women could report harassment and rights violations in the homes and workplaces where they work.

The budget and what was rejected

The minister put the ministry's total 2027 budget proposal at about 2.396 trillion lira. Almost all of it is transfers: 2.266 trillion lira would go to the Social Security Institution and 121.9 billion lira to İŞKUR. Türkoğlu of the İYİ Party said the budget had risen from about 447 billion lira, a comparison that does not adjust for inflation.

Opposition lawmakers filed a series of amendments to the social security line. One, signed by five lawmakers including Cavit Arı of Antalya, sought 2 trillion lira to raise the lowest pension and the two religious holiday bonuses to the level of the minimum wage. DEM lawmakers filed two. One sought 800 billion lira to lift the lowest pension to the minimum wage. The other sought 1.25 trillion lira for a law that would phase in retirement ages for people first insured after September 1999. Akay and a colleague proposed 1 trillion lira. The committee rejected all of them by show of hands. The transcript does not record vote counts.

The committee approved the ministry's 2027 budget and its 2025 final accounts. The full budget goes to the floor of parliament after the committee finishes.

The budget fight is running alongside other disputes in parliament this week. The DEM Party said the 2027 budget raises military spending by about 60%, a figure its co-chair has cited in the party's budget campaign and which 567politics has not checked. Lawmakers are also weighing a defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The fund case continues to produce new arrests after prosecutors sought the detention of the former stock exchange chief.

What remains unknown

• The size of the pension increase. The minister gave no figure, no cost and no list of who would qualify. The MHP's call for an adjustment based on premiums and YENİ Parti's objection to age-based rates point to different designs.
• The minimum wage. The commission meets in December. The government has not said what inflation figure it will use.
• The fund exposure. İŞKUR's figure of 2.9 billion lira placed through Takasbank was given orally. No written breakdown by maturity was published with it.
• The transcript. The record is marked unreviewed and may be corrected before final publication.

Differing perspectives

How should Turkey raise pensions and the minimum wage for 2027?

Each position is summarized as its supporters make it, with equal weight and in alphabetical order. A summary is not an endorsement; the evidence for each is weighed in the story above.

• A 65,000-lira minimum wage and a pension at that level

  Who holds it: DEM Party

  The DEM Party's budget campaign calls for a minimum wage of at least 65,000 lira, which it describes as half the poverty line, and for the lowest pension to be raised to the level of the minimum wage. It also wants the state budget to pay pension premiums for women who work in the home, a wealth tax, and resources moved to labor rather than to military spending.

  In their words: DEM Party campaign leaflet ↗

• A targeted pension package within budget limits

  Who holds it: Labor Minister Vedat Işıkhan and the AKP government

  The government says the lowest pension has already risen from 16,881 lira to 23,552 lira in a year, while accepting that this is not enough. It is preparing extra increases for January 2027, on the president's instructions, that take account of income differences among pensioners and aim at justice and fairness. The minimum wage will be set by the tripartite commission in December, and the state already supports employers for each minimum-wage worker.

  In their words: TBMM Plan and Budget Committee transcript (minister's statement) ↗

• Close pension gaps by premiums paid; lift wages above the hunger line

  Who holds it: MHP deputy chair Mustafa Kalaycı

  The MHP says 5.1 million people live on the lowest pension and many cannot reach the end of the month. It wants a gradual adjustment that removes differences between pensions based on premium days and the premiums paid, with replacement rates and update coefficients reviewed. It says the net minimum wage should be above the hunger line, with rent and transport support in large cities and premium support so homemakers can earn a pension.

  In their words: Ekonomim, report on Kalaycı's committee speech ↗

• Shift budget money from interest to pensioners

  Who holds it: YENİ Parti (Gamze Taşcıer)

  YENİ Parti says the 2027 budget sets aside 3.975 trillion lira for interest against 2.887 trillion for social security, or 138 lira for interest for every 100 lira for pensioners. It says the net minimum wage of 28,075 lira is about 9,700 lira below the hunger line. It opposes increases that vary by age, saying the government should calculate pensioners' rights rather than their age.

  In their words: Anka news agency, report on Taşcıer's committee speech ↗