Latest census data unveils Budapest’s foreign population

According to the latest census data of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH), more than 98 thousand foreign citizens live in Budapest. Most are Chinese and Ukrainians, accounting for only 15.2% of the total foreign population.

Census and diversity

In the 2022 census, a questionnaire was filled out by everyone living in Hungary. This included foreigners who had been living in Hungary for at least 3 months. Those who had lived abroad for less than 12 months but had an address in Hungary also had to fill in the questionnaire.

Earlier this month, we wrote about how, according to the 2022 census data of KSH, almost one in four residents in two Budapest districts, Terézváros and Belváros-Lipótváros, are foreigners. But the local authorities could not say who these people are, or at least from which country they come. According to census data, there were 98,319 foreign citizens living in Budapest in 2022. This means that 5.8% of the 1,685,342 inhabitants of the capital are foreigners, Telex reports.

Foreign Communities

KSH data show that the largest group of foreigners living in Budapest is the Chinese. Their numbers have more than doubled in recent decades, reaching 14,953 in 2022. Despite being the two most popular diasporas, Chinese and Ukrainians still make up only 15.2 % and 14%, respectively, of all foreign residents in Budapest. These percentages demonstrate the ethnic variety of the city.

Vietnamese people are the third most populous group in Budapest. Their numbers have more than doubled since the last census, while Romanian people’s numbers have decreased by nearly a third. At the time of the 2011 census, Romanian citizens were the most populous group. However, this has since fallen to 4,874. This phenomenon may be explained by the introduction of Hungarian citizenship abroad.

The quadrupling of the Ukrainian population in Budapest is obviously due to the war in the neighborhood, with 13,791 Ukrainians living in Budapest. There are also more than a thousand Italians, Indians, Poles, Britons, South Koreans, and Turks living in Budapest, as well as Iranians, Americans, Mongolians, and Norwegians.

Geographic distribution of foreigners

But it is not only their numbers that is interesting, but also their distribution at district level: in the districts of Terézváros and Belváros-Lipótváros, for example, almost one in four residents are foreign nationals. The statistics office’s data also show that while the Chinese and Vietnamese are largely settled in Pest, Ukrainians tend to settle in Buda. Most Russians live in the 13th district and Germans in the inner districts of Pest.

However, the share of foreigners is much lower in Hungary. 218,061 of Hungary’s 9,603,634 inhabitants are foreigners, which is only 2.2 percent. This also means that almost half of the foreigners living in the country live in Budapest.

Source: Telex