LIST: These items have seen a huge price hike or drop in Hungary in the last 12 months

A list of the items which become more expensive or have seen their prices drop since 2022 in Hungary has been revealed. Despite a few surprising ones, the list gives a clear indication as to why inflation is still higher in Hungary than in Western European countries.

The Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH) recently reported that in March 2023, due to the high inflation, consumer prices were an average 25.2 percent higher than a year before. Now, hvg.hu obtained the full dataset, which revealed some interesting items that saw a price hike or drop.

KSH followed the price change of over 900 consumer items in the last 12 months, and from those 900 items, only 18 have seen a price drop. The 3 products with the largest price decreases are:

• home insurance for flats up to 50 square metres in old condominiums – 14.2 percent
• for apartments in old houses up to 80 square metres – 12.5 percent
• Xbox One game console – 11.8 percent

The report does not specify which generation of Xbox Console has seen a price drop, which is only odd since KSH are extremely meticulous with some other items on the list. In the last 12 months, these items also became cheaper:

• insurance for new homes
• notebook, sound projector, 32 GB memory card
• 123-139 cm smart LED TV and 76-82 cm LCD-LED TVs
• men’s perfume
• hand sanitiser – the pandemic is largely over; the current price drop compensates for the previously seen increase
• short-sleeved cotton T-shirts for children
• hearing aids
• liability insurance for the 2015 Skoda Octavia car
• the sunflower seed oil (already covered by a price cap) and peaches among the seasonal goods
• landline telephone subscription.

On the other side of the spectrum, the items that have seen the largest price hike were textbooks. Although in public education, most textbooks are free, those which remained on the market got much more expensive: their price more than doubled since March 2022, with a price hike of 138.9 percent.

Food and services are still getting increasingly more expensive

The price of yellow onions also more than doubled with a price increase of 109.8 percent. The third on the list, with a price increase of 91 percent, is powdered sugar, followed by 18 other food items with a price increase of between 71 and 87 percent.

Services have also become significantly more expensive in Hungary. Flight tickets between Budapest-Frankfurt and Budapest-Paris become more expensive by 52.7 and 48.2 percent respectively. Taxis in Hungary are 48.1 percent more expensive than this time last year. Among non-travel-related services, the biggest increase was for day spa tickets, up 45.7 percent.

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