Hungary Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

What a payroll engine gets wrong in Hungary, in order of how much money it costs: 1. THE EMPLOYER PAYS NO SOCIAL CONTRIBUTION AT ALL — IT PAYS A TAX. This is the structural fact about Hungary and it has to be stated plainly rather than smoothed over. The employer's 13 % is the szociális hozzájárulási adó, imposed by the 2018. évi LII. törvény, which is a tax statute; it is administered by NAV as a tax, it buys no insurance entitlement for anybody, and it is not allocated to any insurance branch by rate. There is therefore NO employer pension rate, NO employer health rate, NO employer unemployment rate and NO employer work-injury rate in Hungary — not because they are zero by accident, but because the employer side of the system was converted into general taxation. Any comparison table that puts Hungary's employer cost into per-branch columns is inventing a structure the law does not have. For coordination, totalisation and posted-worker purposes the 13 % is not a contribution, and that changes the analysis. 2. THE EMPLOYEE'S 18,5 % IS ONE CONTRIBUTION, NOT FOUR. From 1 July 2020 the Tbj. merged the old 10 % pension, 4 % health-in-kind, 3 % health-cash and 1,5 % labour-market contributions into a single társadalombiztosítási járulék of 18,5 %. Those four figures now exist only inside 26. § Tbj. as rounded FUND ALLOCATION shares of the yield (54 % / 37,9 % / 8,1 %). Reconstructing four payroll lines from them produces the same money but breaks every relief, exemption and floor, all of which attach to the merged contribution. 3. THERE IS NO CEILING ON EMPLOYMENT INCOME, ON EITHER SIDE. Hungary abolished the employee pension-contribution ceiling from 2013 and has not brought one back. Both the 18,5 % and the 13 % run on every forint at every income level. The 24×-minimum-wage cap that does appear in 2. § of the szocho act attaches only to the capital-income types listed in 1. § (5) a)–e) and never to wages. Reading that cap across to employment income stops the employer tax at 7 747 200 Ft of annual pay and is one of the largest single errors available in Hungarian payroll. 4. THERE IS A FLOOR, AND IT BITES PART-TIMERS. 27. § (2) Tbj. sets a járulékfizetési alsó határ of 30 % of the minimum wage in force on the first day of the month — 96 840 Ft for 2026 — below which contributions are nonetheless computed on that figure, prorated at one thirtieth per calendar day for partial months. A part-time employee earning 60 000 Ft therefore has contributions assessed on 96 840 Ft. Do not confuse this with the entrepreneurs' minimum base, which is 100 % of the minimum wage (or of the guaranteed wage minimum for qualification-linked activity) and which FELL from 112,5 % to 100 % on 1 January 2026. 5. THE 1,5 % TRAINING LEVY NO LONGER EXISTS. Szakképzési hozzájárulás was abolished from 1 July 2022 and folded into the szocho rate cut from 15,5 % to 13,0 %. Adding it as a separate line double-charges the employer. 6. THE HEADLINE 13 % OVERSTATES COST WHEREVER RELIEFS APPLY. The szocho act carries a large catalogue of employer tax reliefs keyed to defined employee groups — new labour-market entrants, mothers of three or more children, persons with reduced working capacity, researchers and doctoral candidates, employment in disadvantaged districts — each cutting the tax to a lower effective rate on a capped slice of the base for a defined period. These are employee-attribute-driven, claimed by the employer, and are the reason two employees on identical gross pay can carry different employer costs at the same firm. 7. THE RATES ARE STABLE; THE BASES ARE NOT. Neither 18,5 % nor 13 % moved for 2026. What moves every January is the minimum wage — 322 800 Ft for 2026, up 11 % — and with it the 96 840 Ft contribution floor, the entrepreneurs' minimum base and the 2 905 200 Ft rehabilitation charge per missing head. An engine that refreshes rates but not the minimum wage will be wrong on all three. 8. HUNGARY HAS NO SEPARATE WORK-INJURY BRANCH AND NO WORK-INJURY PERCENTAGE. Occupational accident and occupational disease benefits (baleseti ellátások) are provided out of the health-insurance branch and are financed from the merged contribution and from the szocho; there is no risk-rated employer premium of the kind found in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia or Slovenia, and no industry dimension to Hungarian employer cost. A comparison model that leaves a work-injury column blank for Hungary is right to do so. 9. PENSIONERS IN WORK PAY NOTHING ON THE EMPLOYEE SIDE. An employee who is a saját jogú nyugdíjas is outside the insured circle under the Tbj. and pays no társadalombiztosítási járulék; the employer's szocho position for such an employee must be taken from the szocho act separately and not assumed to mirror it. 10. NATIONALITY IS IRRELEVANT; APPLICABLE-LAW RULES ARE NOT. Liability attaches to employment performed in Hungary. What displaces it is EU coordination under Regulation (EC) No 883/2004, evidenced by an A1 certificate, or a bilateral social-security agreement — and note that because the employer's 13 % is a tax rather than a contribution, its treatment under those instruments is not automatically the mirror image of the employee's 18,5 %. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: none in the rates. Hungary has no county- or municipality-level payroll levy and no regional variation in the 18,5 % or the 13 %. The only geographic dimension anywhere in the system is a szocho RELIEF available for employment in statutorily designated disadvantaged districts, which reduces the employer's tax rather than varying it upward, and which is claimed per employee. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: 1. NO PER-BRANCH EMPLOYER RATES. Deliberate. The employer pays a single undifferentiated 13 % tax and the law allocates no part of it to a named insurance branch by rate. Splitting it would be fabrication. 2. THE 10 / 7 / 1,5 SUB-BRANCH FIGURES ARE NOT SERVED AS RATES. They are reported in the notes as the arithmetic of the 26. § Tbj. fund allocation, which is where they now live, and the statute's own allocation percentages are rounded. The single 18,5 % is the operative rate. 3. THE REHABILITATION CONTRIBUTION IS NOT PRICED AS A PERCENTAGE — rate_total and rate_employer are null. It is a flat annual amount per person short of the disability quota, conditioned on employer headcount, and cannot be expressed as a rate on an individual employee's pay. 4. SZOCHO RELIEFS ARE DESCRIBED BUT NOT ENUMERATED WITH THEIR INDIVIDUAL CAPS AND DURATIONS. There are many, they are amended frequently, and each has its own qualifying conditions and base cap; serving a partial list as if it were complete would be worse than describing the mechanism and pointing at the statute. 5. tax_deductible is null for the two employer-borne items: the question as framed concerns income-tax relief for an EMPLOYEE contribution, and there is none to attach to. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE / RE-VERIFY POINTS: 1. MINIMUM WAGE FOR 2027 — set by government decree in December, normally under a multi-year wage agreement with the social partners, and it drives the 30 % contribution floor, the entrepreneurs' minimum base and the rehabilitation charge simultaneously. The 2026 figures come from 426/2025. (XII. 23.) Korm. rendelet. RE-VERIFY FROM 2026-12-01. 2. SZOCHO BASE CHANGE ALREADY IN FORCE — the entrepreneurs' minimum tax base fell from 112,5 % to 100 % of the minimum wage on 1 January 2026, and the filing frequency for egyéni vállalkozók taxed on business income moved from monthly to quarterly on the same date. Neither affects employees, but both appear in Hungarian 2026 change summaries and are routinely misapplied to employment. 3. SZOCHO RELIEFS are the most frequently amended part of the system and are typically changed in the autumn tax package with effect from 1 January. RE-VERIFY FROM 2026-11-15. No enacted change to either headline rate (18,5 % employee, 13 % employer) is on the statute book. SOURCING CAVEATS: The 18,5 % rate, the fund allocation and the base and floor rules are taken from the consolidated text of the Tbj. in the Hatályos Jogszabályok Gyűjteménye (net.jogtar.hu), the operative words of 25. § (1) being 'A biztosított által fizetendő társadalombiztosítási járulék mértéke 18,5 százalék.' The 13 % rate, the liability rule and the confinement of the 24×-minimum-wage ceiling to the 1. § (5) a)–e) income types are taken from the consolidated text of the 2018. évi LII. törvény, the operative words of 1. § being 'Az adó fizetésére kötelezett az a személy, aki az Szja tv. szerint nem önálló tevékenységből származó jövedelmet juttat'. The 2026 minimum wage and guaranteed wage minimum are from 426/2025. (XII. 23.) Korm. rendelet. The 2026 rehabilitation amount and the 2026 szocho base change are from NAV's own published information leaflets and news items. RESIDUAL LIMITS, STATED PLAINLY: NAV's 2026 information leaflet on the szociális hozzájárulási adó is published as a compressed PDF whose text layer could not be extracted, so its content is corroborated from NAV's own HTML news item and the statute rather than read end to end. The 96 840 Ft floor is computed arithmetic (30 % × 322 800 Ft) confirmed against Hungarian professional reporting of the same figure; the statute states the percentage, not the amount. The 26. § Tbj. allocation percentages (54 / 37,9 / 8,1) are as retrieved; note they are rounded and do not reproduce 10 / 7 / 1,5 exactly. The catalogue of szocho reliefs was not enumerated. Reported branches are those applying to an ordinary private-sector employee in an employment relationship (munkaviszony). Not covered: egyéni vállalkozó and társas vállalkozó minimum-base rules, the KATA regime, the egyszerűsített foglalkoztatás (simplified seasonal and casual employment) flat daily charges, and the separate rules for saját jogú nyugdíjas workers. Employee and employer shares are stated separately: the employee figure is what leaves the payslip, the employer figure is cost of employment and is not a deduction.

Get it programmatically

curl https://euroref.dev/v1/hu/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://euroref.dev/v1/hu/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://euroref.dev/provenance/hu/social-contributions

Other Hungary series: MNB central bank base rate (jegybanki alapkamat) · ÁFA standard rate (általános forgalmi adó, általános adómérték) · VAT registration threshold · Minimum wage (kötelező legkisebb munkabér / minimálbér), monthly gross · Public holidays (munkaszüneti napok) · CPI inflation (fogyasztóiár-index, year-on-year) · Corporate income tax rate (társasági adó) · Withholding tax rates · Personal income tax rate (személyi jövedelemadó), flat · Statutory default interest (késedelmi kamat) · MNB official exchange rates

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