792.5 milliárd Ft to hold down your energy bill — while collecting it back in tax.

Indoklás

This single fund is 792,500.0 millió Ft — 53% of the entire chapter, and larger than every other line in the chapter combined except the grid and government-IT blocks. It finances the household utility-price cap (the rezsicsökkentés): it pays energy retailers the difference between the capped price households are charged for electricity and gas and the market cost of supplying it. In 2025 the equivalent compensation to MVM, the state energy retailer, was 823.4 milliárd Ft. The 2026 allocation of 792.5 milliárd Ft is the same mechanism, slightly reduced. The mechanism deserves a careful, link-by-link reading, because the rezsicsökkentés is the most popular single policy in Hungarian energy debate and the case against it is not the case against helping households with energy bills. The cap sets the household price below the cost of supply. The household paying the capped price sees cheap energy. What is not visible is that the difference does not vanish; it is paid, and the fund is where it is paid from. The 792.5 milliárd Ft is collected from taxpayers and from the energy sector's levied profits, and routed through the fund to the retailer. So the household is not, in fact, buying energy cheaply; it is buying energy at roughly its true cost and paying the difference a second time — once in the capped bill, once in tax. The two payments are split apart so that only the first is visible at the moment of consumption. This matters because the cap also destroys the signal the price carries. A price held below cost tells every household that energy is more abundant, relative to everything else they could spend on, than it actually is. The household that would have insulated, replaced an old boiler, or simply turned the thermostat down faces a price that says it need not bother. Consumption is higher than it would be at the true price; the higher consumption raises the cost of supply; the higher cost of supply raises the compensation the fund must pay. The cap does not reduce the cost of energy — it relocates it and enlarges it. And the relocation has a distributional shape that the universalist "rezsicsökkentés protects families" framing hides. The cap's benefit is not flat across households: it scales with how much capped energy a household consumes. A larger home, more heated rooms, a second property, a pool, more appliances — all draw more subsidised energy and collect more of the fund's transfer. A pensioner in a small flat heating two rooms draws a modest benefit; a high-income household in a large detached house draws several times more from the same fund. The funding, meanwhile, is broadly distributed — general taxation and energy-sector levies whose cost passes through to all consumers. Set the benefit pattern against the funding pattern and the universalist framing inverts: a consumption-scaled benefit financed from broadly-distributed tax means the modest-consuming household is, on net, contributing to the larger-consuming household's heating bill. The wage-earner in a small flat, paying SZJA and the energy-sector levy that flows into the fund, is part-funding the subsidised gas of a household whose home is three times the size. The diagnostic is the standard one — a benefit that scales with consumption, funding that does not, and a universalist label over the top. None of this means households facing genuine energy hardship should be left unaided. It means the aid should take a form that does not destroy the price signal and does not route the largest transfers to the largest consumers. A targeted, means-tested energy payment to low-income households — a defined sum, paid to the household, with the household then facing the true market price for each additional unit it consumes — protects the vulnerable household's budget while leaving intact the signal that tells every household, including that one, what energy actually costs. It is also dramatically cheaper, because it does not subsidise the consumption of households that need no help. The phase-out is set at 4 years, and the horizon is genuine rather than political. Households have built their budgets, and in some cases their housing and heating choices, around the capped price; moving the household price toward cost in a single step would impose a real and abrupt shock on families who relied in good faith on the policy continuing. The protected party is the household, and the bridge is the staged adjustment itself: the cap is lifted gradually over four years while the targeted means-tested payment is stood up in parallel, so that by the time the blanket subsidy reaches zero the low-income support mechanism is fully in place. This is reliance protection in the framework's sense — the destination is the market price, the method honours the families who planned around the old policy.