Hungary's Otthon Start Scheme Signed 56,000 Subsidised Loans in Its First Year
Hungary's 3% capped mortgage scheme reached 56,000 contracts worth HUF 2,000 billion in twelve months, and enquiry volumes are already down 18% year on year.
Hungary's Otthon Start programme passed its first anniversary in the last days of August 2026 with 56,000 subsidised loan contracts signed, worth roughly HUF 2,000 billion in total. The figures, drawn from Magyar Nemzeti Bank data and published on 31 August, make it the largest single intervention in the Hungarian housing market in years — and the reporting that accompanied the milestone was notably less celebratory than the launch, because demand has already turned.
What a 3% rate did to the mortgage market
The scheme's mechanism is simple: a capped interest rate of 3% on qualifying purchases, at a time when unsubsidised mortgages cost substantially more. The effect on the composition of new lending was immediate and extreme. Balogh László, chief economist at ingatlan.com, put it in one comparison: after the September 2025 start, around 80% of new mortgage contracts were subsidised, against roughly 20% before.
That is not a programme operating at the margin of a market. It is a programme that briefly became the market, which is why its wind-down or tightening now carries consequences well beyond the households it directly serves.
The demand spike, and the fall that followed
Enquiry data shows how sharp the initial reaction was. In August 2025, as the scheme was announced, phone enquiries on ingatlan.com jumped 50.6% year on year nationally — about 64% in county seats, 49% in Budapest and roughly 40% in villages.
The first eight months of 2026 tell the opposite story: enquiries are down 18% against the same period a year earlier. The pool of buyers who qualified, wanted to move and could act has been substantially drawn forward, and what remains is a thinner market operating at prices the subsidy itself helped lift.
Price growth halved, but the level did not fall
The clearest measurable outcome is in the rate of increase rather than the direction. National price growth ran close to 20% year on year during 2025; by summer 2026 it had slowed to 11–12%, and in Budapest to 8–9%.
The spread across the country remains wide. ingatlan.com's August figures put Budapest at HUF 1.41 million per square metre, Debrecen at HUF 1.04 million, Szeged near HUF 980,000 and Salgótarján at HUF 312,000 — a factor of four and a half between the most and least expensive of those four. Glopra's own 31 August snapshot is consistent with the deceleration, showing Hungary at $2,150 per square metre nationally with annual growth of 12.3%, and Budapest at $4,376 per square metre growing 8.3%, on a gross rental yield of 4.63%.
The tightening question
Several Hungarian outlets covering the anniversary raised the same point: with enquiries falling and price growth still in double digits nationally, the debate has shifted to whether the eligibility rules should be narrowed. Hungarian commentary has begun describing the market as having developed a dependence on subsidised credit — a fair characterisation when four in five new mortgages carried the subsidy at the peak.
For a foreign buyer, the practical reading is that Hungary's headline price growth over the past year was substantially policy-driven, and that the policy is now in its second, quieter phase. Nothing in these figures constitutes advice on whether to buy; they describe what the subsidy did, not what happens next.
Sources: Telex, 31 Aug 2026 https://telex.hu/gazdasag/2026/08/31/otthon-start-program-hitel-lakasvasarlas-ingatlanpiac; ingatlan.com first-year analysis, 31 Aug 2026 https://kanizsamediahaz.hu/hir/202608/ingatlancom-jelentos-hatassal-volt-az-otthon-start-program-a-lakaspiacra-az-elso-evben; Népszava, 31 Aug 2026 https://nepszava.hu/3331965_otthon-start-program-elso-ev-hitelszerzodesek-kamattamogatas