Driving in Turkey

Briefing

Turkey's road network rewrites itself on a yearly cadence, and 2026 was an outsized year. On 27 February 2026 Law No. 7574 was published in the Resmî Gazete (issue 33181) and replaced the old percentage-of-MTV speeding tariff with a tiered, km/h-based table: in urban areas a 6–10 km/h overspeed is now ₺2,000, scaling to ₺30,000 plus a 90-day licence suspension for 66+ km/h over; outside built-up areas the equivalent ceiling kicks in at 71+ km/h.

The same amendment lifted the alcohol-at-the-wheel fine from a token ₺700 to ₺25,000 for a first offence, ₺50,000 for a second and ₺150,000 for a third, and pushed the refusal-to-test penalty to ₺150,000 plus a five-year licence suspension. Handheld phone use is ₺5,000 first time, ₺10,000 on the second offence within twelve months (plus a 30-day suspension).

The BAC ceiling remains 0.50‰ for private cars and 0.20‰ for commercial drivers and aday sürücüler (novices, two-year probation period under KTK Art. 48/8).

Tolls are HGS-only since OGS was decommissioned on 31 March 2022; there is no cash lane left anywhere on the motorway or bridge network. The 1 January 2026 tariff round (49% annual revaluation) put a single car crossing of the 15 Temmuz Şehitler and Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridges over the Bosphorus at ₺59 each way, Yavuz Sultan Selim at ₺95, the Avrasya Tüneli at ₺280 daytime, and the two long-span PPP bridges — Osmangazi over İzmit Bay and 1915 Çanakkale over the Dardanelles — at ₺995 a crossing.

End-to-end Istanbul–Ankara on the O-4 Anadolu Otoyolu is around ₺338 for a car. Foreign-registered cars need an HGS sticker from a PTT branch or Şekerbank counter (rental cars come pre-equipped, but daily HGS fees are typically billed separately).

The KGM directive of 2 June 2022 raised car limits to 130 km/h on KGM-operated otoyols and 140 km/h on Build-Operate-Transfer concessions (Kuzey Marmara, Gebze–İzmir, Malkara–Çanakkale, Ankara–Niğde); 120 km/h still applies on older sections without explicit signage. Two warning triangles (one fore, one aft) and a 1 kg dry-powder fire extinguisher are mandated by the Karayolları Trafik Yönetmeliği equipment annex.

The Hatay/Kahramanmaraş/Adıyaman corridor is still a construction zone three years after the 6 February 2023 quake sequence — the Iskenderun–Antakya motorway and the Dörtyol–Hassa tunnel are mid-build, lane closures and detours on the O-53 and D-825 remain routine, and rural Anatolian roads stay dark at night with stray livestock.