Abdullah Güler, floor leader of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the Turkish Parliament, announced Tuesday (July 16) a long-debated hike to the lowest pensioners’ checks. The announcement follows months of debate amidst efforts to rein in inflation.
The base monthly 12,500 Turkish Lira ($378 USD) figure for retirees announced by Güler represents a 2,500 TL increase from the previous rate of 10,000 TL, set at the beginning of 2024.
In the announcement, Güler said: “Of the 16.18 million retirees in our country, this increase will affect approximately 3 million retirees currently collecting the smallest checks. We expect the cost of this hike to be 33.2 billion TL.”
A previous announcement from July 3 raised pensioner checks for some retirees, such as former civil servants, while leaving the 10,000 TL figure for the lowest-earning retirees unchanged. Following the announcement, Turkey’s main opposition leader Özgür Özel called for early elections.
On July 8, AKP spokesman Ömer Çelik announced that efforts were underway to institute a hike to checks for lowest-earning retirees, suggesting that the 10,000 TL figure would soon be adjusted.
A potential hike to pensioners checks had been debated since the spring. In an statement several weeks prior to the March 31 local elections, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that a hike would not be possible even with other budget cuts. Erdoğan’s refusal to deliver a hike to retirees is believed to have been a contributing factor to his party’s poor results in the polls, where the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) made historic gains.
Despite the hike to pensioners checks, Turkey’s 17,000 TL monthly minimum wage remains unchanged since the start of the year. Amidst persistent inflation, today’s minimum wage is equivalent to only about 13,000 TL in January, when the figure was introduced.
Although previous years have seen mid-year minimum wage hikes, President Erdoğan and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek have promised not to raise the figure this summer in a bid to fight inflation.
