Turkey’s General Directorate of Highways, known by its Turkish initials KGM, is working to have eight more motorway toll stations running without booths or barriers by December 2026. The eight are Çeşme, Kaynaşlı, İskenderun, Adana Doğu, Adana Batı, Mersin, Eminlik and Suruç. Once they are converted, 43 of the 106 toll collection stations KGM operates will run on the Serbest Geçiş Sistemi, or free-flow system, in which vehicles drive through at road speed and the toll is charged automatically to the driver’s HGS account. The target was set out by Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu in a ministry notice published on 24 August 2026, on the day the Akıncı station in Kahramankazan, Ankara switched over.
Who it applies to
It applies to every vehicle using one of the converted toll points on KGM motorways, whether a car, a van or a heavy goods vehicle, and whether registered in Turkey or abroad. HGS, short for Hızlı Geçiş Sistemi or fast transit system, is the electronic toll scheme on those roads: drivers hold a windscreen sticker or a card linked to a prepaid account, and the ministry notice says fees are collected from that account automatically.
It does not change anything at the other 63 KGM stations, which keep their booths until their turn comes. The 106 figure counts only the stations KGM itself operates, and the ministry notice says nothing about toll points run under separate concession arrangements.
It is easy to read a free-flow conversion as a new obligation on drivers. It is not. HGS was already the way tolls are paid on these roads, and as our August 2026 report on the Akıncı conversion set out, Turkey has moved to all-electronic tolling. What the conversion removes is the barrier that used to physically stop a vehicle whose tag did not read or whose balance had run out. At these eight sites, a bad read stops being a halt at the gate and becomes an unpaid passage to be chased afterwards.
The technology
HGS tags are passive UHF RFID, with no battery and no active transponder, as covered in our earlier reporting on the scheme. They work to the ISO/IEC 18000-6C air interface, the standard that sits behind EPC Gen2 and RAIN RFID, and they operate in Turkey’s European UHF band of 865.6 to 867.6 MHz. That band permits lower radiated power than the 902 to 928 MHz band used in North America, so the read budget at a free-flow gantry is tighter than it looks on paper.
That is the limit of what is on the record. KGM and the ministry have published nothing about the hardware at any converted station: no reader vendor, no antenna count, no gantry supplier and no tag chip model.
How it got here
The programme is run by KGM under the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, and it has been moving in steps rather than to a published station-by-station timetable. In February 2024 the minister said 20 of the 106 stations had been converted, six of them in Istanbul, and named Mahmutbey, Çamlıca, 15 Temmuz Şehitler Köprüsü, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Köprüsü, Kurtköy and Şekerpınar among them, with Gebze, Samandıra, Ispartakule, Avcılar and Hadımköy named as next. No completion year was given at that point.
By August 2026 the count stood at 35. The ministry named Adapazarı, Sultanbeyli, Gerede and Kandıra as the 2026 conversions alongside Akıncı. That is roughly fifteen stations in two and a half years, with priority given to the busiest points. Because the February 2024 account set no target year, there is no earlier published deadline for the December 2026 milestone to have slipped from. The ministry notice of 24 August 2026 remains the current statement of the target, and as of 3 November 2026 we found no later ministry or KGM notice changing it.
What to do before December 2026
For fleet operators running Turkish motorways, the practical work is unglamorous and should be done now rather than in the last fortnight of December 2026. Audit every vehicle for a valid HGS tag with a funded account, and set up automatic top-ups where the account allows it, because a zero balance at a barrier was an inconvenience and a zero balance at a gantry is a debt. Physically inspect the stickers: peeling, creased, over-painted or re-sited tags are the usual cause of misreads, and a tag mounted behind a metallised or heated windscreen element will be attenuated. That last point is general UHF practice rather than anything KGM has published, but it is the first thing to check on a vehicle that reads badly.
Check your route exposure too. The eight stations sit mainly on the Mediterranean and south-eastern corridors, with Adana Doğu, Adana Batı, Mersin and İskenderun in that cluster, plus Çeşme in the west, Kaynaşlı on the northern route, Eminlik in central Anatolia and Suruç in the south east. If your vehicles use those points regularly, assume the conversion can land at any time up to the end of December 2026, because the ministry has given a year-end target and not a date per station.
For anyone selling into this market, every conversion means more overhead gantry readers and more vehicles that need a working tag. There is no public procurement specification to design against, so treat any reader requirement you are quoted as coming from the integrator rather than from a published standard.
What is still uncertain
Several things are genuinely unknown, and we are labelling them as such rather than filling the gaps. First, enforcement. Free-flow tolling schemes elsewhere normally pair the RFID gantry with automatic number plate recognition, both as a fallback for missed reads and to charge vehicles with no valid account. Neither the ministry notice nor any KGM publication we could find says whether cameras and plate recognition are used at Turkish free-flow points, what the penalty is for an unpaid passage, or how long a driver has to settle one. Our August 2026 piece described the camera fallback as standard industry practice, and that is all it was: practice, not a statement about Turkey.
Second, the hardware, as above. Third, whether all eight stations open on time. This is a ministerial target rather than a regulation with a legal deadline attached, and the programme has run for years without a published per-station schedule, so a station arriving in early 2027 would not be a surprise.
This article is part of our tracking of rule M62 on the RFID mandates tracker, which follows Turkey’s free-flow motorway tolling programme. More on the sector is in our road tolls coverage.
