Kidney donor surgical mortality is 2.2 per 10,000; 40% of liver donors have a complication. What every living donor should know before consenting.
10.09.2026
This page is written for the donor, not for the patient. If someone in your family needs a kidney or part of a liver and you are considering giving it, you are being asked to undergo major surgery from which you will get no medical benefit at all. That is a legitimate thing to do and many people do it. It is also a decision that deserves the actual figures rather than reassurance. Below are the published risks for kidney and liver donation, the recovery timelines, who is eligible, why you cannot be paid, how to withdraw if you want to, and the reasons a person should not donate.
Living donation is an operation performed on a healthy person for someone else’s benefit. Every other operation you will ever have is intended to make you better. This one is not. That inversion is why transplant centres assess donors separately from recipients, why an independent assessment of your consent exists, and why the word voluntary is treated as a medical requirement and not a formality.
Three things follow from it and they are worth holding on to as you read. First, the risk is yours alone and it is not zero. Second, the benefit is someone else’s, which means gratitude is not a reason and neither is guilt. Third, you may stop, and stopping is not a failure of duty.
Kidney donation is the more studied of the two and the figures are reasonably firm:
Read the second point carefully, because it is the one that is usually glossed over. Your risk of kidney failure does not become high; it becomes higher. You start from a screened, healthy baseline, and the increase is measurable but small in absolute terms. It also lasts for the rest of your life, which is why donors are expected to keep up annual blood-pressure and kidney-function checks and why anyone with hypertension, diabetes, obesity or a family history of kidney disease is looked at very carefully before being accepted.
Liver donation is a larger operation and the published risk is correspondingly larger. In a series of 740 completed living liver donor operations:
Two of those lines deserve emphasis. A 40% complication rate sounds alarming and most of what it contains is minor and temporary, but grade 2 — possibly life-threatening — is the largest single category, and it is not a paperwork classification. And the fact that 95% of complications resolved within a year means 5% did not.
You give a portion of the liver, typically one lobe, and less if the recipient is a child. The liver regenerates: yours returns to full size within two to three months. Recovery runs about a week in hospital, self-care at home from the second week, driving again after two to three weeks, the incision healing over two to six weeks, and regular activities at six to eight weeks. The psychological figure above is worth noting too: less than half of psychological complications resolved in the first year, and donors are rarely warned about this in advance.
| Kidney donor | Liver donor | |
|---|---|---|
| What is given | One whole kidney | A portion of the liver, usually one lobe |
| Hospital stay | 1–2 days after laparoscopic surgery | About 1 week |
| Back to work or regular activity | 2–6 weeks depending on occupation | 6–8 weeks |
| Does the organ regrow | No — the remaining kidney takes over the work | Yes — full size within 2–3 months |
| Mortality in published data | 2.2 per 10,000 operations | 3 of 740 donors, about 0.4% |
| Main long-term finding | Lifetime risk of kidney failure rises by 76 per 10,000, about 1 in 132; life expectancy does not appear shortened | 40% had a complication; 95% of complications resolved within a year |
These two sets of figures come from different bodies of research and are not measured in exactly the same way, so treat the table as an orientation rather than a like-for-like scoreboard. The direction it shows, though, is real: liver donation is the bigger operation with the higher published risk and the longer recovery. If you are weighing a specific procedure, our pages on kidney transplant cost and donor rules in Turkey and living-donor liver transplantation in Turkey set out the recipient side.
For liver donation the criteria are explicit: aged 18 to 60, good physical and psychological health, no history of substance use, a healthy liver on screening, and no financial compensation of any kind. Kidney donation screening follows the same logic — an adult in good health, with kidney function, blood pressure and metabolic status all within normal limits, and no condition that would make one kidney a bad long-term bet.
The workup is thorough and it is meant to be. Expect blood typing and tissue cross-matching, full blood chemistry and kidney or liver function panels, virology screening, imaging of the organ and its blood vessels, cardiac and respiratory assessment, and a psychological or psychiatric evaluation that exists specifically to establish that you are deciding freely. In Turkey a legal layer sits on top of the medical one: a physician confirms your written consent, given before two witnesses, and a competency report is prepared.
The workup will sometimes find something in you that nobody was looking for. This happens, it can be unwelcome news, and it is one more reason to be certain you want to begin.
No payment of any kind is permitted for donating an organ. Not a fee, not a gift, not a debt written off, not a job. Buying, selling or brokering an organ is a criminal offence in Turkey, and this is not a technicality that applies only to intermediaries — a donor or a recipient who takes part in it is not a bystander.
The rule reads like a restriction on you. It is closer to a protection. Once money can be exchanged, the person under most pressure to donate is always the person who needs money most, and consent stops meaning anything. That is exactly what the Turkish ethics commission is built to detect: it reads identity documents, the donor competency report, the written consent, medical suitability forms, documentation of the relationship, notification of the donor’s spouse where the donor is married, and — the telling item — declarations of income and debt from both parties. Medical suitability is assessed separately by the transplant centre; the commission is looking for payment and coercion. The process is described in detail in our guide to the ethics commission in Turkey.
A note for foreign families in particular: under Turkish law, ethics-commission review is required for foreign nationals regardless of how closely donor and recipient are related. A Turkish citizen donating to his brother needs no commission; a foreign donor giving to his brother still faces one. The legal frame is set out in our legal guide for foreign patients.
A donor may withdraw at any stage, up to the point of anaesthesia, for any reason or for no stated reason at all. You do not owe anyone an explanation, and consent that cannot be withdrawn was never consent.
In practice the obstacle is rarely the hospital. It is the family. Saying no to a sibling who is on dialysis, in front of parents who are waiting for an answer, is close to impossible for many people, and everybody involved in transplant medicine knows it. This is why a properly run transplant centre gives you a way out that does not expose you:
If you want that, ask for it, in those words, to a member of the transplant team when you are alone with them. If a centre refuses, or insists on discussing your decision in front of your relatives, that tells you something important about the centre.
Will donating a kidney shorten my life?
The published data does not show a shortened life expectancy in donors. It does show that your lifetime risk of kidney failure rises by 76 per 10,000, roughly 1 in 132, compared with healthy non-donors, and surgical mortality is 2.2 per 10,000 operations.
How long before I can work again?
After a laparoscopic kidney donation, discharge is usually one to two days and return to work two to six weeks depending on how physical the job is. After liver donation, about a week in hospital, driving at two to three weeks, and regular activities at six to eight weeks.
Can I change my mind after I have agreed?
Yes, at any stage, without giving a reason. Ask the transplant team, on your own, to record you as unsuitable if you do not want your family to know the decision was yours — a well-run centre will do that.
Can I be paid, or at least have my costs covered?
No financial compensation of any kind is permitted, and buying, selling or brokering an organ is a criminal offence. The ethics commission reviews declarations of income and debt from both parties precisely to detect payment.
Is liver donation more dangerous than kidney donation?
On the published figures, yes. Liver donor mortality was about 0.4% in a series of 740 operations, with 40% of donors having at least one complication, against 2.2 per 10,000 for kidney donation. Recovery is also longer.
Will my liver grow back?
Yes. The liver regenerates and returns to full size within two to three months. A donated kidney does not; the remaining kidney takes over the work instead.
Prices referenced across this site are approximate 2026 market data and change with exchange rates and clinic policy. This page is general information, not medical or legal advice. Donor eligibility, surgical technique and outcome are determined individually by a licensed physician.
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