How long can a hotel claim an unpaid room bill? The five-year limitation in the Code of Obligations

In Türkiye, an unpaid accommodation charge at a hotel, motel, guesthouse or holiday village, and an unpaid food and drink charge at a restaurant or similar place, carries a five-year limitation period (zamanaşımı, the window for enforcing a claim) under Article 147 of the Code of Obligations. Article 146 sets ten years for everything else.

A guest checks out with an unpaid bill, the item goes onto the open-items list, and the file goes quiet. Two years later someone asks whether the claim is still worth pursuing, and nobody in the room can say which clock applies or when it started. After reading this explainer on the hotel unpaid bill limitation period in Türkiye, you will be able to classify your open items by charge type, know which dates to record, and run a yearly sweep so no claim lapses unnoticed.

What does the Code of Obligations say about an unpaid hotel bill?#

Two articles set the lengths. Article 146 makes ten years the default, and Article 147 lists the claims that get five years, with accommodation charges and food and drink charges on that list.

Article 146 states the general rule: unless the law provides otherwise, every claim is subject to a ten-year limitation period (Cumhurbaşkanlık Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi, 6098 sayılı Türk Borçlar Kanunu, madde 146, 14.11.2026). Article 147 then names the claim types that get five years, and two of them are hotel claims: accommodation charges at hotels, motels, guesthouses and holiday villages, and food and drink charges at restaurants and similar places (same source, madde 147).

Read the two together and the structure is clear. Ten years is the rule, five years is the exception, and the exception only applies to a claim type the list actually names. The list is a list of charge types, not of businesses: hotels appear in it because accommodation and food and drink are named, not because hotels are a category.

The wording matters more than the label on your invoice. Article 147 names a charge, so the question is always what the customer was billed for. This article quotes the two provisions as published by the Presidency's legislation information system and does not interpret them; the interpretation of a specific file is a lawyer's work.

Which hotel charges fall under five years and which under ten?#

Room charges and restaurant or bar charges are the two categories the article names. Everything else a hotel bills stays at ten years unless another law shortens it.

A room charge on a guest's bill is an accommodation charge at a hotel, so it sits in the five-year list. A restaurant or bar charge sits in the list whether it is posted to a room or paid by a walk-in, because Article 147 names food and drink charges at restaurants and similar places, not food and drink charges of hotel guests.

A minibar item, a room service order, a spa treatment, laundry or a transfer is not named in either category. Treat it as ten years by default and get a written view before you rely on five. Room damage, a lost key card or an unpaid extra that is neither accommodation nor food and drink falls outside the list, so the ten-year default applies.

A single invoice that mixes rooms, meals and extras is not one claim type. The classification has to be done line by line, and that is a legal judgment, not an accounting one. The practical stake is five extra years of exposure on every item you classify as ten, and a provisioning and write-off decision that has to be defensible when someone asks about it later. If your city ledger groups these invoices by customer, as explained in how a hotel's city ledger groups agency and company invoices, the classification question arrives with the grouping.

Do agency and company invoices fall under five years or ten?#

The article does not answer this, and neither does this explainer. Article 147 names charges, and an agency invoice is a document that can bundle several charges at once.

What the invoice contains decides the question, not the word invoice and not the name of the customer. The same agency can receive a rooms-only invoice and a rooms-plus-meals-plus-transfer invoice in the same month. A rooms-only agency invoice looks like an accommodation charge; add breakfast, a meeting room and an airport transfer and you have a mixture that no single article classifies for you.

The contract behind the invoice matters too. Who the debtor is, what the allotment terms say, and what happens on a cancellation all shape the claim, which is why receivables against tour operators carry their own payment risks beyond the limitation question, as covered in protecting a hotel's receivables from tour operator payment risk.

Do not assume the shorter period is the safe assumption. Assume five when the claim is ten and you write off a live receivable; assume ten when it is five and you lose the claim. A workable step: list your ten largest agency and company accounts, take one sample of each invoice type you actually issue, and get a single written legal view covering those samples. Keep that view with the credit policy, not in someone's inbox, so the next person who asks gets the same answer.

When does the five-year clock start?#

Articles 146 and 147 set the length of the period, not its start. The start is set elsewhere in the same Code, and this explainer does not interpret it.

The two provisions quoted here say nothing about when the period begins. Anyone who tells you it is simply five years from the invoice date is adding a rule the text does not contain.

Record the dates you do have, item by item: the checkout date, the invoice date, the payment terms, the due date, the date of the last reminder and the date of any part payment. Those dates are not the same date. An invoice issued at checkout on 30-day terms already has a due date a month later, so the two candidate starting points are a month apart before anyone argues about anything.

Do not assume that a promise to pay, a part payment or a reminder resets the clock. Whether any of these changes the position is a question for a lawyer, not a rule you can read off these two articles. For every open item, write down the date you are counting from and who decided it; an undocumented assumption is worse than no assumption, because it survives staff changes. Ask your lawyer once which date applies to each of your main claim types, and put the answer into the credit policy so it is applied the same way every year. If the item began as a deposit rather than a debt, the documentation trail in how a hotel documents an advance payment and its invoice is part of the same file.

How do you make sure no claim lapses unnoticed?#

Once a year, sweep the open-items list, tag every item by claim type, and flag anything approaching the end of its period well before the date arrives.

Export the aged open items by customer and by invoice date, not by balance, because a large balance hides an old line inside it. Tag each line as accommodation, food and drink, mixed, or other, using the table above as the starting point. Add the date you are counting from and the year in which the item reaches the end of its period.

Sort by that year, oldest first, and mark everything that falls inside the next twelve months. Send the marked list to your lawyer before the date, not after it: a question asked in March is cheap, the same question asked in December is a loss. Decide per item whether to pursue it, agree a payment plan, or write it off with a documented reason and a date, and record the decision in the file so the next sweep starts from a known position instead of a memory. The moment an item becomes doubtful on accounting grounds is a separate decision, covered in when an unpaid agency or company invoice becomes a doubtful receivable.

What the limitation period does not do#

It does not delete the debt. It limits how long the claim can be enforced, and that is a different thing from the invoice disappearing.

The invoice stays issued, the revenue stays in the period it belongs to, and the customer's balance stays on the ledger until something changes it. Accounting treatment and legal enforceability are two decisions taken on two different grounds: a time-barred item still needs an accounting decision, and a written-off item still needs a reason on file.

The period does not classify the claim for you. That work sits in the charge types and the invoice lines, and no article does it automatically. It does not cover every hotel claim: ten years remains the default for everything the list does not name, which is most of what a hotel bills outside the room and the restaurant. And it does not replace a written credit policy; the yearly sweep only works if one person owns it and the dates are recorded before anyone needs them.

What to do next#

Take your ten largest open items, tag each one by charge type, write down the date you are counting from, and put the list in front of your lawyer once, before any of the dates arrive. The two articles give you the lengths; the classification, the start date and the sweep are the parts you have to build yourself, and they only work if they are written down and repeated every year.