Economy 30 October 2025, 2:49pm

Hungarian gov't set to double limit for free cash withrawals

Portfolio

On Thursday, the Hungarian Parliament's Economic Committee voted on a proposed amendment to the law that could increase the current limit on free cash withdrawals from HUF 150,000 to HUF 300,000. If approved, banks could be faced with a bill running into billions of forints once again. Similar topics will be discussed at Portfolio's Banking Technology conference on 4 November. There's still time to register.

We put it on the agenda of the Parliamentary Economic Committee, and today we voted on the proposed amendment to the law which would allow people to withdraw 300,000 forints in two transactions a month free of charge,

wrote Mihály Witzmann, an MP from the ruling Fidesz party, in a Facebook post.

The MP also announced that the National Assembly would soon be deciding on the proposed amendment.

The proposal applies to card-based cash withdrawals, the vast majority of which currently take place at ATMs. It also covers cashback requests at store checkouts up to HUF 40,000, although this method is currently only available in a negligible number of stores and with a limited number of cards. However, this may change in the future.

In April of this year, a bill was passed stipulating that every municipality must install an ATM; otherwise, banks could face fines of up to HUF 200 million. We have taken a close look at the number of ATMs and cash withdrawal habits (see link below).

In previous years, the banking sector began to rationalise and reduce its ATM network due to the decline in the importance of cash and cost-cutting measures, which the regulator wanted to prevent.

However, the sector disputes the justification for the regulation. Until now, decisions on where to install ATMs were based on market factors and transaction data. Now, however, ATMs have had to be installed or relocated to many locations where they often remain unused. Overall, banks can only meet the regulator's expectations by installing new ATMs. This is one of the reasons why the domestic ATM network has begun to expand.

If the Parliament votes in favour of the increase, the banking sector will once again foot the bill. Although cash withdrawals are currently subject to a 0.9% transaction fee, this only applies to withdrawals of up to HUF 150,000 per month in a maximum of two transactions. This is likely to remain the case even if the ceiling is raised to HUF 300,000.

Banks pay a transaction fee of HUF 1,350 per account at a rate of 0.9% after a maximum monthly cash withdrawal of HUF 150,000 free of charge.

This fee can double to HUF 2,700 with the HUF 300,000 limit.

Although we are withdrawing less cash and spending more with cards, we still withdrew HUF 9,172 billion in cash in the year up to the end of June this year. On average, we withdrew approximately HUF 102,000 from ATMs per transaction.

We do not have statistics on how many of these transactions fell into the category of free cash withdrawals, for which banks cannot charge fees. However, it is certain that

this is a burden of several billion for the banking sector, which may now increase further.

The idea of raising the limit on free cash withdrawals is not without precedent. Several opposition proposals to this end have been made in the past, but these have so far come to nothing. However, there is now a greater chance that the National Assembly will support the increase, given the government's backing.