Economy 19 September 2025, 9:09am

Hungarian pensioners fear impoverishment despite pension adjustments

Portfolio

On 17 September, the government announced an additional pension adjustment of 1.6% on top of the previous 3.2%. According to the government, Hungarian pensioners will receive an average of HUF 47,200 along with their November pension. However, according to the president of the Pensioners' Organizations Coordination Council, speaking on RTL News, despite the pension adjustment, Hungarian pensions are increasingly lagging behind salaries, putting more and more elderly people in a difficult financial situation.

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As Portfolio reported earlier, at Wednesday's government briefing, Minister of the Prime Minister's Office Gergely Gulyás announced an additional 1.6% pension adjustment on top of the previously promised 3.2%. According to the government, this means that this year, the government will have to pay an average of HUF 51,155 to pensioners, of which an average of HUF 47,200 (the increase for the first 11 months plus the 13th month pension) will be paid in a lump sum with the November pension, and the remaining one-month portion will be paid in December as part of the increased December pension.

In response to an inquiry from RTL News, the government announced last Wednesday that it was considering an additional 1.5% increase. According to Portfolio's expert,

the increase now announced will result in a further 0.1 percentage point increase, meaning that the additional increase will be roughly HUF 245 per month.

According to the Pensioners' Organizations Coordination Council (NYUSZET), despite the adjustment, pensions can only grow at slightly more than half the rate of wages this year. László Juhász, the council's founding president, told the news agency that they believed the wage increase was necessary, but as a result, pensioners' incomes will continue to lag behind those of active workers.

Elderly pensioners are becoming increasingly impoverished and find themselves in impossible situations, with more and more of them falling below the average pension level,

Juhász added.

In May, the government decided that pensioners would receive support in the form of food vouchers worth HUF 30,000 this autumn, instead of the previously announced VAT refund.

Cover photo (for illustration purposes only): Getty Images