At this time you should add term in little bit another way (in compare with [this][1] answer) First of all in your file begin you should write > use Drupal\taxonomy\Entity\Term; Because Term class listed in Drupal\taxonomy\Entity. And you don't need to pass taxonomy_term parametr to this method, because only one parametr is needed (array with values) (below listed code for this method in taxonomy module) public function create(array $values = array()) { // Save new terms with no parents by default. if (empty($values['parent'])) { $values['parent'] = array(0); } $entity = parent::create($values); return $entity; } [1]: http://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/108868/programmatically-create-term-in-drupal-8#answer-108874