Hungary Golden Visa Cost 2026: Every Official Fee

Key takeaways

Hungary's golden visa has exactly two prices in 2026, and both are fixed by statute. Section 16(3) of Act XC of 2023 recognises the acquisition of at least EUR 250,000 of investment certificates issued by a real estate fund registered with the Hungarian National Bank, or a donation of at least EUR 1,000,000 to a higher education institution maintained by a public-interest asset management foundation. There is no third route.

The EUR 500,000 property purchase never opened for business. The current wording of section 16(3) was put in place by section 135(2) of Act LXXXIV of 2024, a law on the resilience of critical entities, with effect from 30 December 2024 — two days before the purchase route was due to become usable.

Government charges are small, published and almost never quoted. The guest investor visa costs EUR 110 at a Hungarian mission. The residence permit costs HUF 26,000 through the Enter Hungary platform or HUF 39,000 in person, which at the European Central Bank reference rate of 14 September 2026, EUR 1 to HUF 365.33, is roughly EUR 71 and EUR 107.

The authority that grants the permit will not tell you which funds qualify. Government Decree 35/2024 (II. 29.) instructs the Directorate-General to publish the qualifying fund managers on its website. The Directorate-General's own FAQ says it keeps no records relating to real estate funds or fund managers and is not in a position to give clients information about them.

The absence of a minimum stay is real, and it has a limit. The permit runs up to ten years with no presence requirement and can be extended once for another ten, but on the fund route only if you still hold the investment when you apply. Permanent residence needs three years of genuine residence with no more than 270 days spent abroad across them; naturalisation needs eight years plus a Hungarian-language exam.

On this page

This guide moves from the two statutory prices to the fees, then to the parts of the deal that are not priced anywhere. The renderer on this site does not emit heading anchors, so the list below is a map rather than a set of jump links.

• Hungary golden visa cost in 2026: two prices, and only two
• The property route that was deleted before it opened
• Government fees: what the Directorate actually charges
• The fund is the expensive part, and nobody will name the funds
• Ten years, no minimum stay, five days to report a change
• Where "no minimum stay" stops: permanent residence and citizenship
• Hungary against the golden visas that are still open
• What to get in writing before you wire anything
• Related guides on Domicila

Hungary golden visa cost in 2026: two prices, and only two

The Hungary golden visa cost question has a cleaner answer than most, because the qualifying investments are listed in a single subsection of a single act and nowhere else. Section 16(3) of Act XC of 2023 on the general rules for the entry and residence of third-country nationals defines what counts as the national economic interest that the guest investor visa and the guest investor residence permit are built on.

Read the second row carefully, because the two numbers are not comparable. The EUR 250,000 is an investment you may get back; the EUR 1,000,000 is money that leaves and does not return. Almost everyone takes the fund route, and the rest of this page assumes you are doing the same unless a line says otherwise.

Both routes run through the same two documents. You apply at a Hungarian consulate for a guest investor visa, which is valid for six months and entitles you to stay beyond ninety days in any one hundred and eighty and to enter more than once. You then apply inside Hungary for the guest investor residence permit, which is the ten-year card everybody actually means when they say golden visa. Nationals of countries listed in Annex II to Regulation (EU) 2018/1806, who can enter the Schengen area without a visa, may skip the visa and apply for the permit during a lawful stay.

The property route that was deleted before it opened

If you have read that Hungary grants residence for buying a EUR 500,000 flat, you have read a page that was never corrected. The purchase option sat in the act, was postponed so that only acquisitions made from 1 January 2025 could count, and was then struck out before that date arrived.

The vehicle is worth noticing. Act LXXXIV of 2024 is a statute on the resilience of critical entities; its chapter 56, sections 135 and 136, amends the immigration act. A change to a residence-by-investment programme carried inside a critical-infrastructure law is not something a comparison page picks up from a press release, which is part of why so many of them are still wrong two years later.

The consolidated text of Act XC of 2023 now contains no figure of EUR 500,000 and no reference to acquiring ownership of residential property. There is no transitional provision preserving the route for anyone, because nobody could ever have used it. If an adviser offers to file a Hungarian application based on a property purchase, they are describing a procedure no Hungarian authority can complete. Spain's investor route went the same way in 2025, and our Spain golden visa cost page tracks that repeal in the same detail.

Government fees: what the Directorate actually charges

This is the part every competing page skips, and it is published in full. The National Directorate-General for Aliens Policing puts its whole fee schedule on one factsheet, split by where the application is made. Euro amounts are charged at diplomatic missions; forint amounts are charged inside Hungary.

Forint conversions use the European Central Bank euro reference rate for 14 September 2026, EUR 1 to HUF 365.33, and will move with the rate rather than with any decision by the authority. The fee must be paid by card as part of the electronic application; the Directorate treats an Enter Hungary application as received only once the fee is paid and the photograph, fingerprints and signature are recorded within fifteen days.

Family members do not get a guest investor permit of their own. They apply for a residence permit for the purpose of family reunification, which sits under the general residence permit fees in the same table, so each person is another HUF 26,000 through the platform. That produces two very different totals depending on your passport.

Either way the government's cut is a rounding error against the investment, which is the honest headline: Hungary is not expensive to apply to, it is expensive to qualify for. The costs that decide whether this is worth doing are the fund's, and those are not published by anyone.

The fund is the expensive part, and nobody will name the funds

A EUR 250,000 fund subscription is not a bank transfer. The act and its implementing decree wrap it in conditions that narrow the field of eligible funds to a handful, and then leave you to find them.

Now the awkward part. Section 7(4)(a) of Decree 35/2024 (II. 29.) tells the Directorate-General to publish on its website the names of the fund managers, and the funds they manage, that satisfy those conditions. Question 9 of the Directorate-General's own guest investor FAQ answers the question "from which real estate fund managers can investment fund shares be purchased" with this: "The aliens policing authority does not keep records that contain data related to real estate funds or real estate fund managers. Therefore, we are currently not in a position to provide our clients with information in this regard."

So the decree requires a list, and the authority says it has no records to build one from. In practice that leaves the fund managers themselves, and the agents who sell their units, as the only people telling you which fund qualifies — which is exactly the position a published register exists to prevent. Ask for the fund manager's own confirmation that it sits on the qualified market operators register, in writing, before any money moves.

The fund's charges are the other unpriced item. Subscription fees, management fees and custody charges are set by the fund manager and appear in no official schedule, so any five-figure "administration fee" you see quoted on a comparison page is an agent's number, not a government one. Treat it as a quote to be checked against the fund documents, the way our golden visa cost comparison treats every non-government figure.

Ten years, no minimum stay, five days to report a change

The mechanics of the permit are where Hungary genuinely beats the field, and also where the deadlines bite. The sequence is short and unforgiving at the front end, then almost hands-off for a decade.

Two of those rows deserve more attention than they get. The statute gives you the visa's full six months to prove the investment, while the Directorate's FAQ states three months from issue — plan to the shorter figure, because the FAQ is the authority describing how it will treat your file, and question 7 confirms it will move to revoke the visa if the investment is not made within three months of issue.

The permit also does more than let you sit in Hungary. It entitles the holder, and family members on the related reunification permit, to work without restriction and to act as an executive officer of a company, with no need to switch to a different permit type first. That is unusually generous for a residence-by-investment permit, and it is the reason the permit is worth something even to someone who never intends to spend a winter in Budapest.

The five-day reporting duty is the trap. If anything behind your investment certificate changes during the permit's validity, you have five days to report it through the electronic platform. Redemptions, transfers, a fund restructuring and a change of custodian all plausibly count, so agree with your fund manager at the outset who will tell you when something has changed.

Where "no minimum stay" stops: permanent residence and citizenship

This is where the marketing and the statute part company. "Ten-year residence, no minimum stay, permanent residence after three years, citizenship after eight" is a sentence you will read on a dozen sites, and each half of it is true about a different thing.

So the permit asks nothing of you and the upgrades ask a great deal. Two hundred and seventy days across three years is an average of ninety days abroad a year, which is a real relocation, not a tax-planning arrangement. It is also a stricter rule than the "183 days a year" some sites quote, and it is measured across the whole three-year window rather than year by year.

The extension test is the one that catches fund investors. The five-year holding period in section 22(9) is a floor, not a plan: section 22(13) allows the ten-year extension only if you still hold the fund investment when you apply. Sell at year five and the permit runs to year ten and stops. The donation route has no such condition, which is one of the few things the EUR 1,000,000 buys that the EUR 250,000 does not.

A residence permit is not a tax residence and not a passport. Hungary's own naturalisation conditions include a language-based exam, and nothing in the guest investor programme waives it. If the passport rather than the permit is what you are buying, citizenship by investment vs golden visa sets out what each one actually delivers.

Hungary against the golden visas that are still open

Hungary's pitch is a cheap entry with an unusually long permit and no presence test. The comparison that matters is with the other EU programmes still selling, using each authority's own published figures.

On government fees Hungary is the cheapest of the three by an order of magnitude, because Portugal charges its grant fee per person and repeats it at every renewal. Hungary's ten-year term, extendable once by another ten, is also the longest on the table. On the investment itself Hungary and Greece both start at EUR 250,000, but Greece's cheapest band applies only to conversions and restorations, and Greece lets you hold a building you chose while Hungary hands you units in a fund somebody else runs.

The deciding question is usually what happens at the end. Portugal's route is the one people take when naturalisation is the point; Hungary's eight-year residence-based path with a Hungarian-language exam is a far longer road than a fund subscription suggests. For the full field rather than three countries, golden visa countries lists what is open, and cheapest golden visa explains why the lowest advertised threshold is rarely the lowest real cost.

What to get in writing before you wire anything

Four documents turn this from a brochure into a file you can defend. Ask for each of them before the subscription, not after.

First, the fund manager's written confirmation that it appears on the register of qualified market operators under Act XXX of 2016, and that the fund's net asset value meets the 40 per cent Hungarian residential threshold on the day you subscribe. The Directorate-General has told its own clients it cannot verify this for you, so the confirmation has to come from the manager.

Second, the custody arrangement in writing: that the units will sit in a securities sub-account blocked for five years, and that you will sign the waiver of securities secrecy the blocking procedure requires. Third, the fund's full charging schedule — subscription, management, custody and redemption — separated from anything your adviser is charging, so you can see which euro is going where.

Fourth, a schedule of the deadlines in your own case: the date the visa is issued, the three-month investment deadline that runs from it, the 30-day window after first entry to file the permit application, and who is responsible for the five-day reporting duty once the permit is granted. Any document in a language other than English will need a certified Hungarian translation from the national translation office, so build that into the timetable rather than discovering it at the counter.

Related guides on Domicila

• Golden visa cost comparison — Portugal, Greece and the UAE with the full published fee tables
• Golden visa countries — which residency-by-investment programmes are still open
• Cheapest golden visa — why the lowest advertised threshold is rarely the lowest real cost
• Spain golden visa cost — the other European investor route deleted by statute
• Portugal golden visa funds — what a fund-subscription route involves in practice
• Citizenship by investment processing time — how long these files really take