Orbán cabinet: 2025 budget to strengthen families, businesses

Next year’s “new economic policy” budget is based on a policy of economic neutrality, Finance Minister Mihály Varga said in an interview with public radio broadcast on Sunday.

Varga talks about the 2025 budget

Varga said the three “pillars” of the 2025 budget were boosting Hungarians’ purchasing power, ensuring affordable housing and scaling up SMEs with the Demján Sándor Programme.

He added that the budget would lay the foundation for a growth-based, multi-year wage agreement that would raise the monthly minimum wage to HUF 400,000 and the average wage to HUF 1 million.

The budget assumes 3.4pc GDP growth.

Varga said that the threshold for tax preferences for employers’ housing support for employees would be raised by HUF 150,000/month, while the government aimed to ensure “feasible” home lending rates for young people.

Tax allowances for families with children are set to double, while allowances for first-time marriages and PIT exemptions for all under-25s and women under 30 having children would leave around HUF 440bn with families in 2025, he added.

He said the general government deficit, relative to GDP, would narrow from 4.5pc in 2024 to 3.7pc in 2025 and to 2.9pc in 2026.

Varga said that HUF 770bn would be earmarked to finish up investments that had already been started, such as developments at the Diósgyőr castle and railway upgrades in Záhony (NE Hungary) and around Szeged (SE Hungary).

New investments with a value of HUF 480bn will be launched, including the construction of a new campus for Budapest’s Óbuda University, the establishment of a national memorial in Mohács (S Hungary) and a sewage treatment plant in Karcag (E Hungary), he added.

Varga noted that a separate fund to preserve regulated utilities prices for households would be eliminated from the budget, but the regulated prices would remain in place, funded from allocations in various ministerial chapters, he said.

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