Chapter IX: Helyi Önkormányzatok Támogatásai (Support for Local Governments)

Overview

Chapter IX carries the central budget’s transfers to Hungary’s local governments — the 3,177 municipalities (települési önkormányzatok) and the 19 vármegye (county) authorities. Total expenditure is 1,419,403.1 millió Ft. Against this the chapter records a single revenue line of 395,800.6 millió Ft: the Önkormányzati szolidaritási hozzájárulás (municipal solidarity contribution), a levy paid by the wealthier municipalities back into the central budget. The chapter balance is therefore a net transfer of 1,023,602.5 millió Ft from the centre to the local tier.

The chapter divides into four titles. Cím 1 (1,256,010.5 millió Ft) is the bulk formula grant for the general operation and sectoral tasks of municipalities — public-education, social-care, child-feeding, and cultural tasks delegated to the local tier. Cím 2 (152,416.0 millió Ft) is supplementary operational support, including mayoral salaries, local public transport, the social-sector wage supplement, and county museum and library funding. Cím 3 (10,976.6 millió Ft) is supplementary capital support — disaster relief plus a list of named single-municipality construction grants. Cím 4 is the solidarity contribution revenue.

The analytically central fact about this chapter is structural and not visible in any single line: it is the architecture of Hungarian local-government finance after the 2011–2013 recentralisation. The chapter is large not because local government is expensive but because, since the Magyarország helyi önkormányzatairól szóló 2011. évi CLXXXIX. törvény and the parallel feladatfinanszírozás (task-financing) reform, municipalities no longer retain a meaningful independent revenue base. The personal income tax share that municipalities once received was withdrawn; local business tax (helyi iparűzési adó, HIPA) remains the only significant own-source revenue.¹ What flows through Chapter IX is the consequence: a centre that collects the revenue and then re-allocates it as task-tied transfers, with the conditions, the formula, and the eligibility for relief all set centrally.

That architecture is itself the object of analysis. A transfer of 1.4 ezer milliárd Ft routed through a central allocation formula is not a neutral plumbing arrangement. It places the level, the mix, and the conditionality of locally-delivered services — schooling, social care, child feeding, culture — under the discretion of the central allocator rather than under the local electorate that consumes them and could price them.

Expenditure Analysis

Cím 1.1 — A települési önkormányzatok működésének általános támogatása (General operating support for municipalities)

• Current allocation: 347,464.7 millió Ft
• Classification: Nominal Freeze
• Rationale: This is the general-purpose operating grant — the block that funds municipal administration, the statutory minimum of local self-government. Local self-government, including a funded municipal tier, is established by the Fundamental Law (Article 31–35) and is a constitutional precondition of the kind the framework recognises: the institutional machinery through which a defined community makes binding collective decisions about itself. The grant itself is not the object of the classical-liberal critique. The object of the critique is that it is a grant at all rather than locally-raised revenue. A municipality funded by a central formula faces the allocator, not its own ratepayers; the feedback loop that disciplines local spending — residents who pay the local tax and can see what it buys — is broken when the money arrives from Budapest. The defensible reform is not to cut the operating function but to restore the local revenue base (a genuine local PIT surcharge or a retained property-tax share) so that the grant shrinks as own-revenue grows. Until that structural reform is enacted, an outright cut would simply strand statutory obligations the municipalities cannot fund. The honest interim classification is a nominal freeze: hold the line, let real-terms erosion at 2–3% inflation apply gentle pressure, and treat the restoration of local fiscal autonomy as the substantive reform.
• Transition mechanism: Hold nominal allocation flat. In parallel, legislate the restoration of a municipal own-revenue instrument; as own-revenue rises, reduce the formula grant one-for-one so the local budget constraint becomes real rather than centrally cushioned.
• Affected groups: All 3,177 municipalities; in the interim, no service disruption — the freeze bites only in slow real-terms erosion.

Cím 1.2 — A települési önkormányzatok egyes köznevelési feladatainak támogatása (Support for certain municipal public-education tasks)

• Current allocation: 403,996.5 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This is the largest single line in the chapter. It funds the public-education tasks that remain with municipalities after the 2013 transfer of school operation to the central Klebelsberg maintenance system — principally kindergarten (óvoda) provision, which stayed municipal, plus ancillary education tasks. Education of children is a function the framework treats as a genuine public responsibility where the child’s interest is involuntary — a five-year-old does not choose their schooling. The line is classified Keep on that basis. But Keep does not preclude a structural observation. Hungary already runs, within its own borders, a demonstration that publicly-funded schooling does not require a centralised single-employer model: church-maintained schools (Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Jewish) receive per-pupil state grants comparable to state-school funding, follow the same national curriculum, and govern hiring and ethos denominationally — covering approximately 15–17% of primary pupils by the early 2020s.² The mechanism that matters is per-pupil funding following the child to a school the parent chooses, with the provider — municipal, denominational, or independent — competing on outcomes. The reform direction for this line is to move from task-grant-to-the-operator toward funding-follows-the-pupil; the envelope stays, the conditioning changes.
• Transition mechanism: Retain the allocation; over a multi-year reform, convert the institutional task-grant into a per-pupil entitlement portable across approved providers.
• Affected groups: Kindergarten-age and school-age children and their families; municipal and church school operators.

Cím 1.3 — A települési önkormányzatok egyes szociális és gyermekjóléti feladatainak támogatása (Support for certain municipal social and child-welfare tasks)

• Current allocation: 322,200.4 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Funds the social-care and child-protection tasks delegated to municipalities — child-welfare services, family support, residential and home care for vulnerable groups. Child protection in particular is a protective response to involuntary harm against identifiable individuals who have no voluntary alternative; that places it inside the rights-protection core the framework keeps. The line is retained. The same per-recipient funding-follows-the-person logic noted for education applies as a long-horizon efficiency reform — care funded per assessed need, portable across municipal, charitable, and church providers — but that is an operating-model reform, not a phase-out, and it does not change the classification.
• Transition mechanism: Retain; subject to ordinary operating- efficiency review and a longer-horizon shift toward per-recipient portable funding.
• Affected groups: Recipients of municipal social and child- welfare services; care providers.

Cím 1.4 — A települési önkormányzatok gyermekétkeztetési feladatainak támogatása (Support for municipal child-feeding tasks)

• Current allocation: 159,668.1 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Funds subsidised and free meals for children in kindergartens and schools. The line concentrates on a defined vulnerable group — children, with the deepest subsidy directed at low-income and large families — and the involuntary-interest test applies as it does for child welfare: a child cannot contract for their own nutrition. Retained. The seen beneficiary is the fed child and the family relieved of the meal cost; the unseen cost-bearer is every taxpaying household, including lower-income working households whose own children may not qualify for the deepest subsidy tier.³ Where the subsidy is means-tested and concentrated on genuine need, that transfer is defensible on the involuntary-harm test. Where free provision extends up the income distribution to households that could fund the meal themselves, the line is funding a transfer rather than protecting a child from harm. The reform is to tighten the means-test gradient, not to cut the function — hence Keep, with a targeting review.
• Transition mechanism: Retain; review the income gradient of the subsidy so the deepest support is concentrated where the child’s nutrition is genuinely at risk.
• Affected groups: Children in subsidised meal programmes and their families; the taxpaying households that fund the line.

Cím 1.5 — A települési önkormányzatok kulturális feladatainak támogatása (Support for municipal cultural tasks)

• Current allocation: 22,680.8 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)
• Rationale: Funds municipal cultural tasks — local cultural centres, community programming, municipal cultural institutions not separately funded under Cím 2.4. Culture is the paradigm of subjective valuation: there is no market price signal and no external aggregator that tells the allocator the optimal level or mix of community cultural programming. What a community values in culture is revealed only through what its members are willing to pay for, attend, donate to, or volunteer for. A central or municipal grant substitutes the allocator’s judgement for that revealed preference. This is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, and not a response to involuntary harm; it is discretionary allocation of resources to cultural activity by political officeholders. The honest classification is a phase-out. The protected party is the municipal cultural institutions and their staff who currently rely on the grant; the five-year horizon lets those institutions migrate to a mixed model — admission and membership revenue, local philanthropic and business sponsorship, and where a municipality’s own electorate genuinely values a cultural institution, locally-raised and locally-accountable funding rather than a centrally-formula’d grant. The five years honour reliance without pretending the function has an enduring claim on involuntary national taxation.
• Transition mechanism: Linear five-year reduction of the formula grant. In year one, municipalities and cultural institutions are notified and begin building admission, membership, and sponsorship revenue. The grant falls by one-fifth of its original value each year, reaching zero in year five. Institutions a community genuinely values transition to voluntary and locally- accountable funding; those that cannot sustain themselves on revealed local demand were, on the framework’s logic, mis-sized relative to that demand.
• Affected groups: Municipal cultural institutions and their staff; communities accustomed to centrally-subsidised local cultural programming. The displacement is real but modest in scale and skill-transferable.

Cím 2.1.1 — Polgármesteri illetményhez és költségtérítéshez nyújtott támogatás (Support for mayoral salary and expense reimbursement)

• Current allocation: 34,460.5 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Funds the statutory salary and expense reimbursement of mayors, principally in smaller municipalities whose own revenue cannot cover it. The mayor is the elected executive of a constitutionally-established self-governing tier; funding the office is funding the machinery of local democratic decision-making, which the framework recognises as a constitutional precondition rather than discretionary spending. Retained. The same structural caveat as Cím 1.1 applies — in a restored local-revenue architecture the office would be funded locally — but the function itself is core.
• Transition mechanism: Retain. Migrate to local funding only as part of the broader restoration of municipal own-revenue.
• Affected groups: Elected mayors, principally of small municipalities; the residents they govern.

Cím 2.1.2 — A kötelezően ellátandó helyi közösségi közlekedési feladat támogatása (Support for the mandatory local public-transport task)

• Current allocation: 12,000.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)
• Rationale: Subsidises the operating deficit of local public transport that municipalities are statutorily obliged to provide. The seen beneficiary is the rider whose fare is held below the cost of carriage; the unseen cost-bearer is the general taxpayer, including those in municipalities with no local transport at all and those who never use the service. More importantly, a fixed operating subsidy to a deficit is precisely the soft-budget- constraint pathology: the subsidy detaches the operator’s revenue from the value riders place on the service, so there is no signal telling the operator which routes, frequencies, or fare structures the riders actually want. Capital and labour are then allocated to the routes the subsidy formula rewards rather than the routes passengers would pay for. The reform is not to abolish local transport but to abolish the open-ended deficit subsidy: move to a transparent, time-limited service contract where the municipality specifies the routes it wants and tenders them, with fare revenue and any explicit subsidy both visible. The function survives; the soft budget constraint does not. The five-year horizon protects current operators and lets municipalities re-procure on transparent contracts.
• Transition mechanism: Linear five-year phase-out of the central deficit subsidy, paired with a requirement that municipalities move local transport to tendered service contracts. Routes the local electorate genuinely wants are retained and funded transparently from local budgets; the open-ended central top-up disappears.
• Affected groups: Local public-transport operators and their employees; riders on routes that survive only because the deficit is centrally covered; municipalities re-procuring transport.

Cím 2.1.3 — A nem közművel összegyűjtött háztartási szennyvíz ideiglenes begyűjtésére kijelölt közérdekű közszolgáltató meg nem térülő költségeinek támogatása (Support for the unrecovered costs of the designated public-interest provider for the temporary collection of household sewage not collected via utilities)

• Current allocation: 280.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: This is a small line, and its size is not the point — the principle scales regardless. It funds the “unrecovered costs” of a designated (kijelölt) public-interest provider for emptying septic systems in areas without sewer connection. The structure is the tell: the state designates a single provider, fixes the service, and then funds the gap between the price the provider may charge and its costs. That is a state-constructed monopoly with a state-funded loss — the regulator-and-subsidy pair is part of the construction, not a cure for a market failure. Septic emptying is an ordinary, contestable service: multiple licensed haulers can compete on price and reliability, and households can contract directly. The honest classification is a phase-out of the designation-and-subsidy arrangement, replacing it with open licensing of haulers and direct household payment, with targeted social support for genuinely low-income households folded into the existing social-assistance lines rather than delivered as a producer subsidy. Three years allows the designated provider’s current obligations to run off and a competitive market to form.
• Transition mechanism: Three-year linear wind-down of the cost-cover subsidy. Year one: open licensing of septic-emptying haulers in the affected areas. The designated provider competes on the same terms as new entrants; the central loss-cover falls to zero over three years.
• Affected groups: The designated provider; households in non-sewered areas, who move to direct payment at competitively- set prices.

Cím 2.1.4 — Önkormányzatok rendkívüli támogatása (Extraordinary support for municipalities)

• Current allocation: 5,500.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: A discretionary reserve from which the central government provides ad-hoc support to municipalities in financial difficulty. The structure invites the public-choice critique directly: a centrally-controlled discretionary fund, allocated case-by-case by the allocator, with no formula and no published entitlement. Whatever the intent, a discretionary municipal-rescue fund concentrates a benefit (the rescued municipality) and disperses the cost (all taxpayers), and it does so through a channel where the allocation decision is political. It also softens the budget constraint of every municipality: a council that knows an extraordinary-support pot exists has weaker incentive to live within its means. The reform is to replace discretionary rescue with a rules-based mechanism — a transparent, formula-driven hardship adjustment within the Cím 1 grant, with published criteria — so that genuine fiscal distress is addressed predictably and the discretionary channel is closed. Three years lets the rules-based replacement be legislated and lets municipalities currently relying on discretionary top-ups adjust.
• Transition mechanism: Three-year wind-down of the discretionary fund, in parallel with legislating a rules-based, published-criteria hardship component inside the Cím 1 formula grant. The discretionary channel closes; predictable, formula- driven distress support replaces it.
• Affected groups: Municipalities that currently rely on discretionary central rescue; in the replacement, all municipalities gain a predictable rule in place of a political allocation.

Cím 2.1.5 — Önkormányzati elszámolások (Municipal settlements / reconciliations)

• Current allocation: 9,824.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: A technical reconciliation line covering the year-end settlement of differences between formula entitlements and actual data across the municipal grant system. It is not a programme in its own right; it is the accounting true-up that any formula-based transfer system requires. The classification follows the lines it reconciles — predominantly the Keep and Nominal-Freeze formula grants of Cím 1 and the operational support of Cím 2 — and the reconciliation function is retained as long as a formula grant system exists.
• Transition mechanism: Retain as the technical settlement of the grant system; its scale shrinks naturally as task-grants are reformed into per-pupil and per-recipient portable funding.
• Affected groups: All municipalities; no direct service impact.

Cím 2.1.6 — Vármegyei önkormányzatok feladatainak támogatása (Support for the tasks of county governments)

• Current allocation: 6,998.6 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (4 years)
• Rationale: Funds the tasks of the 19 vármegye (county) authorities. The county tier in Hungary was substantially hollowed out in 2011–2013: county institutions (hospitals, schools, social homes) were transferred to the central government, leaving the county authorities with a narrow residual mandate centred on territorial development planning and coordination. The line funds a tier whose substantive service functions were already removed, and whose remaining role — regional development coordination — duplicates functions exercised at both the municipal and central levels. This is the case the framework flags: a layer of government whose enduring rationale is unclear once its operating institutions are gone. The honest classification is a phase-out: the genuinely necessary residual functions (statutory territorial- planning duties) transfer to the municipal associations or the central planning apparatus, the county-authority apparatus is wound down, and the line falls to zero over four years. The protected party is the county-authority staff — a small headcount with general public-administration skills, suited to severance-with-overlap, but the scale here is modest enough that a straight four-year administrative wind-down is the cleaner frame.
• Transition mechanism: Four-year wind-down. Year one: legislate the transfer of statutory county-planning duties to municipal associations or the central planning apparatus. The county-authority grant declines by one-quarter of its original value each year; staff transition over the period with standard public-sector severance.
• Affected groups: County-authority employees (a small, skill-transferable headcount); the residual territorial-planning function, which is reassigned rather than abolished.

Cím 2.2.1 — Az esélyteremtési illetményrész támogatása (Support for the equal-opportunity salary component)

• Current allocation: 15,200.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Funds a salary supplement for teachers and staff working in disadvantaged-area public education — the esélyteremtési illetményrész directs additional pay to those working with disadvantaged pupil populations. It is a conditioning component of the public-education task grant (Cím 1.2), targeted at the schooling of children whose circumstances the framework treats as an involuntary disadvantage. Classified Keep on the same basis as the education line it supplements. The per-pupil-funding reform direction noted for Cím 1.2 would absorb this supplement as a needs-weighting in the per-pupil entitlement — additional funding following the disadvantaged child — rather than as a separate salary line, but that is a structural reorganisation, not a phase-out.
• Transition mechanism: Retain; in the longer per-pupil reform, fold into the entitlement as a disadvantage weighting.
• Affected groups: Teachers and staff in disadvantaged-area schools; the pupils that weighting is meant to reach.

Cím 2.3.1 — A települési önkormányzatok szociális célú tüzelőanyag vásárlásához kapcsolódó támogatása (Support for municipalities’ purchase of social-purpose fuel)

• Current allocation: 5,000.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Funds municipal purchase of firewood and other heating fuel distributed to low-income households for winter heating. The line is small and tightly targeted at a defined vulnerable group facing a genuine seasonal hardship. It survives the framework’s tests as a targeted protective transfer rather than a broad subsidy: it is means-conditioned, capped, and directed at involuntary winter hardship among the poorest households. Classified Keep. The honest efficiency observation is that an in-kind fuel transfer is a less efficient instrument than a cash transfer of equal value — in-kind delivery imposes procurement and distribution costs and removes the recipient’s ability to choose the heating solution that suits their dwelling. The reform is instrument substitution (fold the value into the means-tested social cash assistance), not abolition, so the classification stays Keep.
• Transition mechanism: Retain the support; over time consider converting from in-kind fuel to an equivalent-value targeted cash component within social assistance.
• Affected groups: Low-income households dependent on solid-fuel heating; municipalities administering the distribution.

Cím 2.3.2 — Szociális ágazati összevont pótlék és egészségügyi kiegészítő pótlék (Consolidated social-sector supplement and supplementary health-sector supplement)

• Current allocation: 32,227.5 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Funds a wage supplement for staff in municipally- delivered social-care and health-care services. It is a personnel-cost component of the social-care task grant (Cím 1.3), not a free-standing programme; it supplements the pay of workers delivering services already classified Keep on the involuntary- harm test. Classified Keep on the same basis. As with the education supplement, the per-recipient portable-funding reform would absorb this into the care-funding entitlement rather than carry it as a separate supplement, but that is reorganisation, not phase-out.
• Transition mechanism: Retain; fold into per-recipient care funding under the longer-horizon reform.
• Affected groups: Municipal social-care and health-care staff; the service recipients their work supports.

Cím 2.4.1 — Vármegyei hatókörű városi múzeumok feladatainak támogatása (Support for the tasks of county-scope city museums)

• Current allocation: 3,778.3 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)
• Rationale: Funds the county-scope city museums. Museum provision sits, like the Cím 1.5 cultural grant, in the domain of subjective valuation: there is no price signal and no external aggregator that determines the optimal scale or mix of museum activity. Visitor numbers, admission revenue, membership, philanthropic giving, and corporate sponsorship are the channels through which a community reveals what it values in its museums; a central grant substitutes the allocator’s judgement for those signals. This is discretionary cultural allocation, not a rights-protection or constitutional function. Phase-out over five years. The protected party is the museums and their professional staff, who have a real reliance interest and need time to build a mixed-revenue model — admissions, membership, sponsorship, and where the holdings are genuinely valued, local or philanthropic endowment. Hungary’s heritage holdings are not at risk in this framing: collections of genuine national significance can be protected through a narrowly-defined heritage-preservation function, distinct from operating subsidy, but the routine operating grant to county-scope museums is discretionary allocation and is phased out.
• Transition mechanism: Linear five-year reduction. Year one: museums notified, begin building admission, membership, and sponsorship revenue. Grant falls one-fifth of original value per year to zero in year five. A separate, narrow heritage- preservation provision protects collections of genuine national significance.
• Affected groups: County-scope city museums and their professional staff; museum visitors accustomed to centrally-subsidised admission.

Cím 2.4.2 — Vármegyei hatókörű városi könyvtárak feladatainak támogatása (Support for the tasks of county-scope city libraries)

• Current allocation: 4,191.3 millió Ft
• Classification: Nominal Freeze
• Rationale: Funds the county-scope city libraries. Libraries carry a stronger claim than museums or cultural programming: beyond their cultural function they serve as access points to information, public-document access, digital connectivity, and basic civic infrastructure, particularly for lower-income residents without home internet or reference resources. That function is closer to a general civic-access service than to a discretionary cultural allocation, and the case for an abrupt phase-out is correspondingly weaker. At the same time, the line is not a rights-protection or constitutional function in the strict sense, and the digital substitution of many traditional library functions means expansion is unwarranted. The classification that fits is a nominal freeze: hold the allocation flat, let real-terms erosion apply slow pressure, and let municipalities and libraries develop supplementary revenue and local funding where their electorate values the service. The freeze avoids both stranding a genuine civic-access function and treating library subsidy as permanently expandable.
• Transition mechanism: Hold nominal allocation flat; real-terms erosion at 2–3% inflation provides gradual pressure to modernise and develop supplementary revenue.
• Affected groups: County-scope city libraries and their staff; library users, particularly lower-income residents relying on the civic-access function.

Cím 2.4.3 — A települési önkormányzatok muzeális intézményi feladatainak támogatása (Support for municipalities’ museum-institution tasks)

• Current allocation: 1,238.1 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)
• Rationale: Funds municipal-level museum institutions below the county-scope tier. The analysis is identical to Cím 2.4.1: discretionary cultural allocation, no price signal, no external aggregator of the optimal scale. Phased out over five years on the same mechanism, with the same narrow heritage-preservation carve- out for collections of genuine national significance.
• Transition mechanism: Linear five-year reduction to zero; museums build mixed-revenue models; heritage-significant collections protected by a separate narrow provision.
• Affected groups: Municipal museum institutions and their staff; local museum visitors.

Cím 2.4.4 — Táncművészeti szervezetek támogatása (Support for dance-arts organisations)

• Current allocation: 426.4 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)
• Rationale: A direct operating grant to dance-arts organisations. This is discretionary cultural allocation in its purest form: a central transfer to specific named-genre arts organisations, with the allocator deciding which organisations, at what level, on a judgement that no price signal informs. The performing arts are the textbook subjective-valuation case — what audiences value is revealed only through ticket purchases, subscriptions, philanthropic giving, and sponsorship. A standing operating grant detaches the organisation’s revenue from its audience’s revealed valuation. Phase-out over five years; the protected party is the organisations and performers, who have a reliance interest and need time to build audience, subscription, sponsorship, and philanthropic revenue.
• Transition mechanism: Linear five-year reduction to zero. Organisations transition to ticket revenue, subscription, philanthropic giving, and sponsorship.
• Affected groups: Dance-arts organisations and performers; audiences accustomed to subsidised dance programming.

Cím 2.4.5 — Zeneművészeti szervezetek támogatása (Support for music-arts organisations)

• Current allocation: 4,301.7 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)
• Rationale: A direct operating grant to music-arts organisations — orchestras, ensembles, and similar bodies. The analysis matches Cím 2.4.4: discretionary cultural allocation in the subjective-valuation domain, with no price signal to inform the allocator’s choice of which organisations to fund and at what level. Phased out over five years on the same mechanism. The larger line size relative to the dance grant reflects the larger fixed costs of orchestral organisations, which makes the reliance interest somewhat heavier and the five-year horizon appropriate rather than shorter — orchestras need the full period to build subscription bases, touring revenue, and sponsorship relationships capable of sustaining a fixed ensemble.
• Transition mechanism: Linear five-year reduction to zero. Organisations transition to subscription, ticket, touring, philanthropic, and sponsorship revenue.
• Affected groups: Music-arts organisations and musicians; audiences accustomed to subsidised concert programming.

Cím 2.4.6 — A települési önkormányzatok kulturális feladatainak bérjellegű támogatása (Wage-type support for municipalities’ cultural tasks)

• Current allocation: 16,539.6 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)
• Rationale: Funds the wage component of municipal cultural-task staffing — the salaries of staff in municipal cultural institutions. It is the personnel-cost counterpart to the Cím 1.5 cultural-task grant, and it shares that line’s classification: discretionary cultural allocation, phased out over five years. Because this line is specifically payroll, the transition mechanism here is severance-with-overlap rather than a pure funding glide. The protected party is municipal cultural- institution staff — generally skill-transferable workers, many part-time — who receive a transition period during which they retain their post while the institution rebuilds revenue and during which they may take other employment. The five-year line horizon is the funding glide for the institutions; the severance component runs over the first two years of that window and protects the workers specifically. The fiscal logic is the standard two-component split: the wage component is bridged by severance, while institutions a community genuinely values transition to admission, membership, sponsorship, and locally- accountable funding.
• Transition mechanism: Severance-with-overlap over the first 24 months for the affected cultural-institution staff: workers retain their salary for the transition period and may take new employment concurrently. The institutional funding declines over the full five-year window as institutions rebuild revenue. After the severance period, the line falls to its phased trajectory and reaches zero in year five.
• Affected groups: Municipal cultural-institution staff — skill-transferable, many part-time; municipal cultural institutions transitioning to mixed revenue.

Cím 2.4.7 — A települési önkormányzatok könyvtári célú érdekeltségnövelő támogatása (Interest-increasing support for municipalities’ library purposes)

• Current allocation: 300.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: A small érdekeltségnövelő (interest-increasing) grant: a matching-style central top-up that rewards municipalities for spending their own funds on library collection development. The mechanism is a central inducement designed to steer municipal spending toward an activity the central allocator has decided to favour. If a municipality’s electorate values library collection development, the municipality can fund it from its own budget; if it does not, a small central inducement to do so anyway is precisely the substitution of the allocator’s preference for the local one. The line is small and the classification follows the principle, not the size: phase out the central inducement over three years, leaving collection-development decisions to municipalities and their electorates.
• Transition mechanism: Three-year linear wind-down of the matching top-up. Municipalities that value library collection development continue to fund it from their own budgets.
• Affected groups: Municipal libraries; municipalities that currently draw the matching top-up.

Cím 2.4.8 — Zalaegerszegi Mindszentyneum működtetési támogatása (Operating support for the Mindszentyneum, Zalaegerszeg)

• Current allocation: 150.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: A named operating grant to a single institution — the Mindszentyneum in Zalaegerszeg, a museum and exhibition centre dedicated to Cardinal József Mindszenty. A line-item operating subsidy to one specifically named cultural institution is discretionary allocation by political officeholders in its most legible form: the budget names the recipient. The institution’s cultural and historical interest is not in question; the question the framework presses is whether an institution of genuine value needs a standing claim on involuntary national taxation, or whether it can be sustained by admission revenue, the religious community for which Mindszenty is a significant figure, and philanthropic and sponsorship support. Phased out over three years; the protected party is the institution, which uses the period to build a mixed-revenue model.
• Transition mechanism: Three-year linear wind-down. The institution builds admission, denominational, and philanthropic revenue.
• Affected groups: The Mindszentyneum and its staff; visitors.

Cím 3.1 — Vis maior támogatás (Force majeure / disaster-relief support)

• Current allocation: 5,186.9 millió Ft (felhalmozási kiadás)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Funds the repair of municipal infrastructure damaged by natural disasters — floods, storms, and similar irreversible involuntary harm events. Disaster relief for damage no party could have contracted against, affecting infrastructure whose loss is genuinely involuntary, sits inside the framework’s protective-response category. A municipality cannot insure its way out of every catastrophic event, and the harm is sudden, irreversible, and not the result of any party’s choice. Classified Keep. The honest qualification is that the line should fund genuine force-majeure repair and not become a general capital top- up for routine municipal investment; the discipline is in the eligibility definition, not in the existence of the line.
• Transition mechanism: Retain; maintain a tight statutory definition of qualifying force-majeure events so the line does not drift into routine capital subsidy.
• Affected groups: Municipalities suffering disaster damage; residents dependent on the damaged infrastructure.

Cím 3.2 — Kompok, révek fenntartásának, felújításának támogatása (Support for the maintenance and renovation of ferries and crossings)

• Current allocation: 390.0 millió Ft (felhalmozási kiadás)
• Classification: Nominal Freeze
• Rationale: Funds the maintenance and renovation of ferry and river-crossing infrastructure. For settlements where a ferry is the only practical river crossing, the service is genuine local transport infrastructure rather than discretionary spending — the alternative for residents can be a substantial detour, and the crossing is closer to essential local connectivity than to a subjective allocation. At the same time, this is a small, bounded, self-limiting line: the number of ferry crossings is finite and not growing. A nominal freeze fits — hold the line flat, let real-terms erosion apply gentle pressure toward operating efficiency, and avoid both stranding genuinely essential crossings and treating the line as expandable.
• Transition mechanism: Hold nominal allocation flat. Where a ferry is genuinely essential local connectivity, it is funded; where local fare revenue could cover more of the cost, the freeze applies pressure toward it.
• Affected groups: Residents of settlements dependent on ferry crossings; ferry operators.

Cím 3.3 — Ózdi martinsalak felhasználása miatt kárt szenvedett lakóépületek tulajdonosainak kártalanítása (Compensation for owners of residential buildings damaged by the use of Ózd Martin slag)

• Current allocation: 300.0 millió Ft (felhalmozási kiadás)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line compensates the owners of residential buildings damaged by martinsalak — a steel-production byproduct of the Ózd steelworks used as a construction aggregate in northern Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s, which expands on contact with moisture and structurally damages the buildings it was used in. The compensation scheme is governed by 40/2003. (III. 27.) Korm. rendelet, and its defining feature for classification purposes is that it is a closed-class entitlement: eligibility is limited to owners who reported their building’s damage by 15 January 2002.⁴ No new claims can enter. This is a settled restitution obligation to identified individuals who suffered involuntary property damage from a state-enterprise-era construction practice — exactly the good-faith-reliance, accrued-individual-entitlement category the framework protects as a rule-of-law commitment. It is classified Keep, but with a specific character: it is a finite legacy obligation that runs off as the remaining eligible claims are settled. The line falls naturally toward zero as the closed cohort of damaged-property claims is honoured; no policy phase-out is needed because the programme has no future enrolment and self-terminates on completion.
• Transition mechanism: Retain and honour to completion. The obligation is finite — a closed class of pre-2002-registered claims — and the line ends when the last eligible claim is settled.
• Affected groups: The remaining owners of martinsalak-damaged residential buildings with claims registered before the 2002 deadline.

Cím 3.4 — A mohácsi csata 500 éves évfordulójáról történő méltó megemlékezés támogatása (Support for the dignified commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Mohács)

• Current allocation: 400.0 millió Ft (felhalmozási kiadás)
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: A one-off appropriation for commemorating the 500th anniversary of the 1526 Battle of Mohács. A discretionary central grant for a commemorative event is subjective allocation of national tax revenue by political officeholders to a cultural- commemorative activity. It is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, not a response to involuntary harm; and as a one-off event grant it has no dependency chain and no contracted counterparty whose good-faith reliance would be violated by its removal. The seen beneficiary is the commemorative programme; the unseen cost-bearer is the general taxpayer who funds it without being asked whether a 400 millió Ft state-funded commemoration is what they would choose. A commemoration the public genuinely values can be funded by those who value it — through voluntary contribution, sponsorship, admission, and the participation of the historical and cultural organisations for which Mohács is significant. Classified Immediate Cut: there is no transition to manage, because there is no protected reliance interest.
• Transition mechanism: Eliminate in the budget cycle. A commemoration proceeds on voluntary funding to the extent the public values it.
• Affected groups: The commemorative programme; no contracted counterparty with a good-faith reliance claim.

Cím 3.5 — Karcag Város Önkormányzata ingatlanfejlesztésének támogatása (Support for the property development of the City of Karcag)

• Current allocation: 4,491.9 millió Ft (felhalmozási kiadás)
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: A named capital appropriation to a single municipality — Karcag, in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok megye, population approximately 20,000⁵ — for property development. A line-item capital grant earmarked in the national budget for one named municipality’s development project is the clearest form of the public-choice pattern in this chapter. Karcag’s roughly 20,000 residents receive a project worth approximately 225,000 Ft per resident; the cost is spread across the entire national taxpayer base, of whom that municipality’s residents are a small fraction. There is no formula, no published criterion, no competitive allocation — the budget simply names the recipient. This is subjective allocation of national tax revenue to a geographically-concentrated beneficiary by political officeholders. The contrast with the Cím 1 formula grant is the whole point: the formula grant, whatever its other defects, at least allocates by rule; a named single-municipality earmark allocates by discretion. If Karcag’s property development is worth doing, it can be financed by Karcag — from its own revenue, from borrowing serviced by the development’s returns, or from the formula grant that funds every municipality on equal terms. Classified Immediate Cut: there is no protected reliance interest that abolition would violate; if the project is mid-contract, the honest treatment is to honour signed contracts through run-off and cut the unobligated remainder, but a forward appropriation for a named project carries no such claim by default.
• Transition mechanism: Eliminate the earmark. Honour any legally-binding signed contracts through run-off; cut the unobligated balance. Karcag finances genuine development priorities from own revenue, borrowing, or the equal-terms formula grant.
• Affected groups: The City of Karcag and its development project; against this, the national taxpayer base funding a geographically-concentrated benefit.

Cím 3.6 — Szenna Község Önkormányzata sportcsarnok felújításának támogatása (Support for the renovation of the sports hall of Szenna municipality)

• Current allocation: 79.0 millió Ft (felhalmozási kiadás)
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: A named capital grant to a single small municipality for renovating its sports hall. The principle is identical to Cím 3.5 and scales regardless of the small amount: a budget line that names one municipality and one facility is discretionary allocation of national tax revenue to a concentrated local beneficiary, outside any formula or competitive criterion. A municipality’s sports facility, if its residents value it, is funded from the municipality’s own budget or the equal-terms formula grant. Classified Immediate Cut, with the standard honour-signed-contracts qualification.
• Transition mechanism: Eliminate the earmark; honour any signed contract through run-off; cut the unobligated balance.
• Affected groups: Szenna municipality and its sports-hall project; the national taxpayer base.

Cím 3.7 — Nagykörű Községi Önkormányzat orvosi rendelő tetőzete felújításának támogatása (Support for the renovation of the roof of the doctor’s surgery of Nagykörű municipality)

• Current allocation: 15.3 millió Ft (felhalmozási kiadás)
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: A named capital grant to one municipality for one building repair — the roof of a doctor’s surgery. The same reasoning applies as for Cím 3.5 and 3.6: a single-municipality, single-facility earmark is discretionary allocation outside any rule. The healthcare-access character of a doctor’s surgery does not change the classification of the funding mechanism: routine municipal-facility maintenance is exactly what the general operating grant (Cím 1.1) and a municipality’s own budget exist to fund. Carving a 15.3 millió Ft roof repair into the national budget as a named line is discretionary allocation, not a healthcare-rights function. Classified Immediate Cut.
• Transition mechanism: Eliminate the earmark; the roof repair is funded from the municipality’s operating grant and own budget, as routine facility maintenance is everywhere else.
• Affected groups: Nagykörű municipality and its surgery building; the national taxpayer base.

Cím 3.8 — Vezseny Község Önkormányzata komp és kiszolgáló utak felújításának támogatása (Support for the renovation of the ferry and service roads of Vezseny municipality)

• Current allocation: 13.5 millió Ft (felhalmozási kiadás)
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: A named capital grant to one municipality for ferry and access-road renovation. The same single-municipality earmark pattern as Cím 3.5–3.7. Ferry maintenance in general is addressed by the formula-style Cím 3.2 line; a separately-named earmark for one municipality’s crossing is discretionary allocation on top of the rule-based channel that already exists. Classified Immediate Cut: the genuine ferry-maintenance need is met through Cím 3.2 and the municipality’s own budget, not through a named national- budget line.
• Transition mechanism: Eliminate the earmark. Genuine ferry- infrastructure needs are met through the rule-based Cím 3.2 channel and municipal own revenue.
• Affected groups: Vezseny municipality and its ferry infrastructure; the national taxpayer base.

Cím 3.9 — Budapest Főváros XVI. kerületi Önkormányzat Kertvárosi Olimpikonok parkjához kapcsolódó közterület-fejlesztések megvalósításának támogatása (Support for the public-space developments connected to the Kertváros Olympians’ Park, Budapest District XVI)

• Current allocation: 100.0 millió Ft (felhalmozási kiadás)
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: A named capital grant to one Budapest district for public-space development around a named park. The same single-municipality earmark pattern as Cím 3.5–3.8. A district’s public-space development, if its residents value it, is a municipal capital decision funded from the district’s own budget or the equal-terms formula grant — not a discretionary national- budget earmark. Classified Immediate Cut.
• Transition mechanism: Eliminate the earmark; the public-space development is funded from the district’s own budget or the formula grant if the district prioritises it.
• Affected groups: Budapest District XVI and the park development project; the national taxpayer base.

Revenue Items

Önkormányzati szolidaritási hozzájárulás (Municipal solidarity contribution)

• Name: Önkormányzati szolidaritási hozzájárulás (Municipal solidarity contribution)

• Current yield: 395,800.6 millió Ft

• Type: Charge / intergovernmental levy

• Notes: This is the chapter’s only revenue line, and it is not a tax on the public — it is a levy paid by the wealthier municipalities into the central budget. The mechanism, in place since 2017,⁶ withholds a contribution from municipalities whose local tax capacity — measured by helyi iparűzési adó (local business tax) base — exceeds a centrally-set threshold; the contribution is netted against, or paid on top of being excluded from, the formula grants of Cím 1. For 2026, 870 municipalities are liable for the contribution, with those whose computed liability falls below 50 millió Ft exempted; the six largest contributors are Budapest, Győr, Debrecen, Székesfehérvár, Kecskemét, and Budaörs, and Budapest alone pays approximately 97.7 milliárd Ft.⁷

  The solidarity contribution is the keystone of the post-2013 local-finance architecture, and it is best understood as the return leg of the recentralisation. A municipality that succeeds in attracting business activity grows its helyi iparűzési adó base. Under the contribution mechanism, that success above the threshold is partly recaptured by the centre. The seen effect is redistribution toward less wealthy municipalities — the “solidarity” the name asserts. The unseen effect is the marginal disincentive it creates: a municipality weighing the effort and local political cost of attracting an employer faces a central claw-back on the resulting tax base, which dampens precisely the local tax-base competition that, in a system with genuine local fiscal autonomy, drives municipalities to make themselves attractive to investment and employment.

  The contribution also has to be read alongside the central cap on helyi iparűzési adó rates, which limits how far a municipality can set its own business-tax rate. The two together — a rate the municipality cannot freely set, and a contribution that recaptures the base above a threshold — leave the local tier with neither a free rate instrument nor full retention of its own base. The business tax is described as the municipalities’ most important revenue source precisely because the personal-income-tax share was withdrawn and the business tax is the only significant own-source revenue left.¹ What the chapter shows, in a single 395,800.6 millió Ft revenue figure, is the closing of the loop: the centre constrains the local rate, recaptures the local base above a threshold, and re-allocates the proceeds as task-tied grants. The expenditure changes proposed in this chapter would interact with this line directly — restoring a genuine municipal own-revenue base, the structural reform repeatedly flagged above, would over time replace the grant-and-claw-back architecture with locally-raised, locally-accountable finance, and the solidarity contribution as currently constructed would be superseded rather than retained.

Chapter Summary

Classification	Count	Total (millió Ft)
Immediate Cut	6	5,099.7
Phase-Out	12	74,193.5
Nominal Freeze	3	352,046.0
Keep	10	988,063.9
Total	31	1,419,403.1

Revenue	Total (millió Ft)
Total chapter revenue	395,800.6

Key Observations

• The chapter is the financial expression of recentralisation. Chapter IX is large not because local government is costly but because, after the 2011–2013 reforms withdrew the municipal personal-income-tax share and capped the local business-tax rate, municipalities lost an independent revenue base. A transfer of 1.4 ezer milliárd Ft routed through a central formula is the consequence: the centre collects, conditions, and re-allocates. The deepest reform is not inside any single line — it is the restoration of a genuine municipal own-revenue instrument so that local governments face their own ratepayers rather than the central allocator.

• The bulk of the chapter is correctly retained, and the framework says so. Roughly 988 milliárd Ft is classified Keep — public-education tasks, social and child-welfare care, child feeding, mayoral salaries, social-sector wage support, the closed-class martinsalak restitution, and disaster relief. These are constitutional preconditions, protections against involuntary harm to children and vulnerable groups, or settled rule-of-law obligations. The classical-liberal frame does not produce a wholesale cut of local-government finance; it produces a targeted critique of how the function is financed and which specific lines are discretionary.

• The discretionary culture cluster is the phase-out target. Twelve lines totalling roughly 74 milliárd Ft are classified Phase-Out, and the bulk of the count — the Cím 1.5 and Cím 2.4 cultural, museum, library-collection, dance, and music grants — share one mechanism: subjective allocation in a domain with no price signal and no external aggregator of the optimal scale. A central or municipal grant substitutes the allocator’s judgement for the only signal that reveals what a community values in culture — what its members will pay for, attend, donate to, or sponsor. The five-year horizons honour the reliance interest of arts organisations and their staff while moving the function to voluntary and locally-accountable funding.

• Single-municipality earmarks are the cleanest public-choice pattern in the budget. Cím 3.4 through 3.9 are six named appropriations — a commemoration, and five named-municipality capital projects in Karcag, Szenna, Nagykörű, Vezseny, and Budapest District XVI. Each names one beneficiary and concentrates a benefit on a small population while spreading the cost across the entire national taxpayer base. Karcag’s roughly 20,000 residents receive approximately 225,000 Ft per resident from a national appropriation. The contrast with the Cím 1 formula grant is the analytical point: the formula at least allocates by rule; a named earmark allocates by discretion. These are classified Immediate Cut not because the projects are worthless but because the mechanism — naming the recipient in the national budget — is discretionary allocation outside any rule, and the genuine local needs are met through formula grants and municipal own budgets.

• The solidarity contribution closes the loop, and dampens local tax-base competition. The 395,800.6 millió Ft revenue line is the return leg of recentralisation: the centre recaptures local business-tax base above a threshold from 870 municipalities and re-allocates it as task grants. The unseen cost is the marginal disincentive — a municipality that succeeds in attracting employers faces a central claw-back on the resulting base, which weakens the very local competition for investment that a genuinely autonomous local-finance system would harness.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Helyi iparűzési adó 2026: az adó mértéke, számítása, lekérdezés és minden határidő egy helyen. Pénzcentrum. 2026. https://www.penzcentrum.hu/vallalkozas/20260116/helyi-iparuzesi-ado-2026-az-ado-merteke-szamitasa-lekerdezes-es-minden-hatarido-egy-helyen-1191919. On the business tax being the municipalities’ most important and, after the withdrawal of the personal-income-tax share, only significant own-source revenue. ↩ ↩²

2. Oktatási adatok, 2024/2025 (előzetes adatok). Központi Statisztikai Hivatal (KSH). 2025. https://www.ksh.hu/s/kiadvanyok/oktatasi-adatok-2024-2025-elozetes-adatok/index.html. KSH primary-school data for 2019/2020 recorded approximately 15% of primary pupils in church-maintained schools (546 institutions, 111,700 pupils). Biró–Kováts (2024), “How churches make education policy,” Sociology of Education, doi:10.1080/09637494.2024.2399452, documents the institutional share of primary schools rising from 8.6% to 16.6% between 2010 and 2021. The 15–17% range in the text reflects this trajectory; for the current 2024/25 precise figure consult KSH STADAT table okt0004 at https://www.ksh.hu/stadat_files/okt/hu/okt0004.html. ↩

3. The seen/unseen analytical frame — that every benefit conferred on a visible recipient simultaneously imposes a cost on an unseen cost-bearer — originates with Frédéric Bastiat, Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (1850). The frame is applied here without endorsing any specific Bastiat policy prescription; the analytical logic is freestanding. ↩

4. 40/2003. (III. 27.) Korm. rendelet az ózdi martinsalak felhasználásával készült lakóépületek tulajdonosainak kárenyhítéséről. Nemzeti Jogszabálytár. 2003. https://net.jogtar.hu/jogszabaly?docid=a0300040.kor. Eligibility limited to owners who reported the damage by 15 January 2002 (“aki lakóépületének károsodását 2002. január 15-ig bejelentette”) — a closed-class entitlement with no further enrolment. ↩

5. Karcag népessége, lakossága (2020–2025), KSH-adatok alapján. Népesség infó. 2025. https://nepesseginfo.hu/karcag-nepessege-lakossaga/. Karcag permanent population as of 1 January 2025: 19,849. ↩

6. Council of Europe Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, Policy Advice Report: Hungarian Local Government — Solidarity Contribution and Local Business Tax. Congress Document CEMGPAD(2024)4. Council of Europe. 2024. https://rm.coe.int/cemgpad-2024-4-hungary-pad-solidarity-contribution-and-local-business-/1680b213ae. The solidarity contribution was introduced in 2017; the additional central government revenue in that first year was HUF 21.3 billion. ↩

7. Döntött a kormány: 2026-ban milliárdos terhet kapnak a tehetősebb önkormányzatok. Index. 2025. https://index.hu/belfold/2025/12/25/onkormanyzat-szolidaritasi-hozzajarulas-kormany-rendelet-nagy-marton-budaors/. For 2026, 870 municipalities are liable for the solidarity contribution; municipalities with a computed liability below 50 millió Ft are exempt; the six largest contributors are Budapest, Győr, Debrecen, Székesfehérvár, Kecskemét, and Budaörs; Budapest pays approximately 97.7 milliárd Ft. ↩