Property price data sources in Hungary: MNB, KSH, Eurostat and portals

Two transaction-based statistics, and a registry that keeps prices out of reach

Hungarian residential price data has one deep root and two public branches. The root is the tax authority: every sale contract by a private individual passes through the Nemzeti Adó- és Vámhivatal (NAV) for transfer duty, and the anonymized contract data is what both official producers work from. The Központi Statisztikai Hivatal (KSH) has taken housing market information from the duty offices since 1997 and turns it into the quarterly publication "Lakáspiaci árak, lakásárindex", issued since 2010, and into the Ingatlanadattár, a free database of average prices per square meter and transaction counts down to street level in cities. The Magyar Nemzeti Bank (MNB) builds its own house price index on the same transactions and publishes a Housing Market Report every May and November.

The numbers are recent and large. KSH reports nominal prices up 8.6 percent year on year in Q1 2026, 6.7 percent in real terms, after a 2025 in which prices rose about 20 percent; the MNB puts 2025 growth at 23.5 percent nominal and 19.0 percent real, the strongest real appreciation in 25 years, and estimates that prices stood 22.5 percent above the level justified by fundamentals in Q4 2025. Eurostat, which republishes the KSH index, shows 11.2 percent for Q1 2026 on a provisional basis. The two official series therefore agree on the direction and differ on the pace, for reasons of method that the sections below explain.

What the country does not have is any public record of individual prices. The land registry, reachable since 2025 through the new electronic system E-ING and still partly through Földhivatal Online and the TAKARNET professional network, sells title sheets and map extracts per copy behind a government login and never shows a purchase price; the NAV contract data reach KSH anonymized and stay that way. Anyone who needs a level below the KSH street averages therefore works from portal asking prices, from the transaction-based barometers of the large agency networks, or from a model that combines the two.

Source inventory

Every public source of Hungarian residential price information, with what it actually holds. Only the KSH Ingatlanadattár gives a transaction-based level below county level; the indices give changes; the registry gives no prices at all.

Publisher pages as fetched in September 2026; see the sources list at the end of this page.

KSH: the index and the street-level Ingatlanadattár

The statistical office's methodology is explicit about the source. KSH has taken the housing market information from the duty offices' records since 1997, covering cities only until 2007 and the whole country from 2008. The records are the sale contracts of private individuals for residential property. Only transactions for which a price per square meter can be computed are used, which means the floor area must be in the contract, and only streets and settlements with at least three transactions in the observation unit are published; locations with one or two transfers are kept in the aggregates but suppressed in the detail, which is why a county total can exceed the sum of its published settlements. KSH notes that the transactions it can use represented between 57.7 and 73.5 percent of all used-home sales in 2015 to 2024, and describes the summaries as informational in nature because statistical verification is limited.

The quarterly index publication is the official measure of change. The Q1 2026 edition, published on 31 July 2026, reports the aggregate nominal index up 8.6 percent on a year earlier and 6.7 percent in real terms, but down 2.5 percent nominal and 3.0 percent real on Q4 2025, a slowdown from the roughly 20 percent nominal growth of 2025. Used homes rose 9.2 percent year on year and new homes 3.9 percent, with KSH observing that new-home prices in a given quarter reflect contracts signed one to two years earlier. Budapest prices rose 7.4 percent while its transaction volume fell 17 percent; county seats rose about 15 percent, smaller towns 11 percent and villages 14 percent. Q1 2026 registered about 32,500 sales, 11 percent below Q1 2025, a figure KSH expects to move closer to the prior year's roughly 36,000 once late records are processed.

The Ingatlanadattár is the one Hungarian source that publishes a transaction-based level below county level. It gives average prices per square meter and transaction counts by property type for every settlement, by street in selected settlements, as maps at regional and municipal level with a separate Budapest street map, and as rankings of the highest and lowest prices nationally and by county and district, with the archive reaching back to 1997 in its original format. It is a set of averages of anonymized contracts, not a list of comparables, and its value is as a prior for what a given street trades at rather than as evidence about a specific flat.

MNB and Eurostat: the second index and the European frame

The central bank publishes its own house price index on the same NAV transaction base and presents it in the Lakáspiaci jelentés, the Housing Market Report issued every May and November. The May 2026 report puts nominal price growth for 2025 at 23.5 percent nationally and real growth at 19.0 percent, the highest real appreciation in the past 25 years, and estimates that house prices nationwide exceeded the level justified by fundamentals by 22.5 percent in Q4 2025. It counts an estimated 152,000 transactions by private individuals in 2025, up 3 percent on 2024, and a fall of 18 percent year on year in Q1 2026, and it records that after the Otthon Start program launched in September 2025 the share of first-time buyers in Budapest rose from 25 to 40 percent within a year.

The MNB and KSH figures differ in pace because they differ in method: the bank's index controls for the characteristics of the flats sold in each period, so it reads composition changes differently from a stratified average, and the two use different cut-offs for late-arriving contracts. Both are transaction-based and both rest on the same anonymized NAV data, so neither can say what a particular property sold for; they are the two official readings of the same census, and a serious analysis quotes both with their dates.

Eurostat republishes the KSH index as the Hungarian column of prc_hpi_q, compiled under Regulation (EU) 2016/792 as the price change of all dwellings bought by households from market transactions only. The 2 July 2026 release shows annual changes of 15.5, 21.1, 20.8 and 11.2 percent for Q2 2025 through Q1 2026, all flagged provisional, which is the European frame for the slowdown KSH and the MNB describe and the series to use when Hungary is compared with its neighbors.

The land registry: paid, logged in, and silent on prices

The Hungarian land registry is the legal record of ownership and the most often misunderstood price source, because the contracts it registers carry prices that it never publishes. The official land administration portal states that copies of the title sheet (tulajdoni lap) are now requested from the new electronic land registry system, E-ING, reached through the central government identification service, while map extracts and related services remain in the older Földhivatal Online system. Professional users such as lawyers and surveyors have long worked through the TAKARNET network under contract. Every route charges per copy, requires a government login, offers no programmatic interface and shows ownership, encumbrances and legal data but not the consideration paid.

The price itself exists only in the NAV duty records, and those reach the statisticians anonymized. That is why Hungary has neither a Polish-style open register of deeds nor a Czech-style paid price record per transaction: the data is collected for tax and released only as aggregates. The Lechner Tudásközpont, the national mapping agency, sells the cadastral map, orthophotos and other spatial products through its Geoshop geoportal with free viewing services and priced downloads, and catalogues the national INSPIRE services, but it holds geometry, not prices.

For price work the registry still matters as structure. A title sheet gives the legal floor area of a flat, its share of the building and the land, and the mortgages and other encumbrances that bear on a valuation, and a transfer entry marks when a property changed hands. It is the spine to which asking prices, KSH street averages and index movements can be attached, not a source of the prices themselves.

Portals and the agency barometers

Portal data is the raw material beneath most Hungarian price commentary, and ingatlan.com is the portal that matters, with otthonterkep.hu and ingatlannet.hu behind it. An advertised flat carries the asking price, floor area, number of rooms, floor, year of construction, condition, location and photographs, refreshed daily, and the portal publishes its own asking-price index and market notes. That granularity is unmatched by any official source, and the year-of-construction field in particular fills a gap that no registry extract covers. The weaknesses are equally structural: the same flat is often advertised by several agencies at different prices, offers are withdrawn or repriced without trace, the asking price is the seller's opening position, and the mix of what is advertised shifts with the season and the cycle. A median of raw offers therefore measures the advertised stock, not the market, unless duplicates are resolved and composition is held constant.

The two large agency networks publish transaction-based readings of their own. The Duna House Barométer, issued in the middle of every month with quarterly supplements on credit and new construction, contains a transaction count estimate for the whole market (DH-TB), a demand index and price indices for panel and brick flats, built on the network's own completed sales, which the publisher describes as tens of thousands a year with an accuracy it puts within about 10 percent; the July 2026 edition appeared on 12 August 2026. Otthon Centrum runs an analysis division that publishes regular notes from its own data, for instance on the slowing of used-home prices in Budapest in August 2026 and on Balaton holiday homes at an average of 652,000 HUF per square meter. Both are transaction-based and timely; both are samples from one network's book rather than the market, and both are commentary rather than statistics.

Asking prices versus transaction prices

KSH and the MNB describe completed sales as recorded for duty; the portals describe what sellers ask; the agency barometers sit between, being transaction-based but partial. The table sets out which family answers which question.

KSH methodology and Q1 2026 publication; MNB Housing Market Report, May 2026; Eurostat prc_hpi_q, 2 July 2026 release.

A working order for using the sources

A practical sequence for anyone building a Hungarian price view, from the official anchor to the granular signal.

1. 1

   Anchor on the KSH index

   Take the quarterly index for direction, nominal and real, with the used and new split and the settlement classes. Note the publication date and expect the transaction counts to rise as late contracts are processed.

2. 2

   Read the MNB report for the valuation frame

   Use the May and November reports for the bank's own index, its fundamentals-based valuation gap and the transaction estimate. Quote both official indices with their dates rather than picking one.

3. 3

   Take the street level from the Ingatlanadattár

   For any settlement, and for streets in the larger ones, use the KSH averages per square meter and transaction counts as the prior for a locality. Remember the three-transaction floor and that these are averages of anonymized contracts, not comparables.

4. 4

   Add the agency barometers for the current month

   The Duna House Barométer and the Otthon Centrum notes give a transaction-based reading weeks rather than quarters after the fact, from one network's sales.

5. 5

   Layer deduplicated portal offers last

   Resolve duplicates across agencies, hold the mix constant and calibrate the asking level against the KSH street averages. Use the registry for legal area and encumbrances, never for prices.

How a model combines these sources

A price model treats these sources as layers with different jobs. The transaction indices set the direction and the revision discipline, the KSH street averages set the local level, the agency barometers give a timely transaction-based check, and deduplicated portal offers supply the daily, property-level signal that is then mix-adjusted so that a change in what is advertised is not mistaken for a change in price. Availability by market is listed on the coverage page.

Questions