Chapter LXII: Nemzeti Kutatási, Fejlesztési és Innovációs Alap (National Research, Development and Innovation Fund)

Overview

Chapter LXII is an extra-budgetary fund (elkülönített állami pénzalap) rather than an institutional chapter. It collects a single earmarked levy — the innovációs járulék (innovation contribution) — and redistributes the proceeds through grant competitions to research institutes, universities, and innovating firms, plus a slice channelled to a designated managing agency.

The 2026 figures are unusually clean. Total expenditure is 145,200.0 millió Ft; total revenue is 178,200.0 millió Ft, of which 177,200.0 millió Ft is the innovation contribution itself and 1,000.0 millió Ft is miscellaneous receipts. The fund therefore runs a planned surplus of 33,000.0 millió Ft — and the chapter makes that surplus explicit by carrying a dedicated expenditure line, “Befizetés a központi költségvetésbe” (Transfer to the central budget), of 32,192.2 millió Ft. The fund collects a hypothecated tax in the name of research and innovation and routes roughly a fifth of it straight back to the general budget.

This is the analytically load-bearing fact of the chapter. The innovation contribution is sold to the firms that pay it as a ring-fenced levy whose proceeds return to the innovation system. In 2026 it does not. The chapter is best read as a tax line with a research-grant programme attached, not as a research-grant programme with a funding line attached.

The five expenditure lines:

Line	Allocation (millió Ft)
Kutatási Alaprész (Research Sub-fund)	40,047.7
Innovációs Alaprész (Innovation Sub-fund)	55,531.2
Befizetés a központi költségvetésbe (Transfer to central budget)	32,192.2
Alapkezelőnek átadott pénzeszköz (Funds transferred to the managing agency)	6,416.0
Missziók Alaprész (Missions Sub-fund)	11,012.9
Total	145,200.0

Expenditure Analysis

Befizetés a központi költségvetésbe (Transfer to the central budget)

• Current allocation: 32,192.2 millió Ft
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: This line does not finance research or innovation. It is the fund’s surplus — the gap between the 177,200.0 millió Ft the innovation contribution raises and the ~113,000 millió Ft the fund spends on research and innovation grants — routed to the general budget. The innovation contribution is collected under a specific statutory promise: it is earmarked, and earmarking is the justification offered to the firms that pay it. The 0.3% levy is presented as a contribution to the research-and-innovation system rather than as a generic profit surtax.¹ Once a fifth of the take is transferred to the general budget, the earmarking is fiction for that fifth. A worker following his own money should be able to see the chain close: the contribution leaves the firm labelled “innovation”, and 32 billió Ft of it arrives at the Treasury labelled nothing in particular, indistinguishable from corporate income tax. The honest description is that 32,192.2 millió Ft of the innovation contribution is a general corporate surtax wearing an innovation label. The classification is not “phase out the transfer over time” — there is no protected party, no contract counterparty, no cohort relying on the surplus. The line is an accounting artefact of over-collection. It can be removed in a single budget cycle, and the correct way to remove it is to stop over-collecting: cut the innovation contribution rate so that revenue matches the fund’s actual grant programme.
• Transition mechanism: Two equivalent routes, and the choice between them is itself the reform. Route one: abolish this transfer line and reduce the innovation contribution rate so that revenue matches the fund’s actual grant programme. The grant envelope (lines E2+E3+E4+E5) totals 113,007.8 millió Ft; the rate that yields approximately this amount from the current tax base (177,200 millió Ft at 0.3%) is approximately 0.19%. Alternatively, if the intent is only to eliminate the surplus transfer while retaining the full current grant envelope, the target revenue is 145,007.8 millió Ft (= 177,200 – 32,192.2), requiring a rate of approximately 0.245%. Either way, the levied firms keep the 32,192.2 millió Ft that would otherwise flow to the Treasury. Route two: abolish the transfer line and abolish the earmarked fund structure entirely, folding research-grant financing into a normal budget chapter funded from general revenue (see the chapter-level recommendation below). Either route ends the practice of collecting a hypothecated tax and spending a fifth of it on something else. Route one is the minimal honest fix; route two is the structural fix.
• Affected groups: The firms paying the innovation contribution — companies above the SME threshold, subject to the accounting law¹ — gain directly: the surplus they currently fund returns to them as retained earnings. The central budget loses 32,192.2 millió Ft of revenue, which must be found by reducing expenditure elsewhere rather than by a concealed surtax. No research recipient is affected: this line funds no research.

Innovációs Alaprész (Innovation Sub-fund)

• Current allocation: 55,531.2 millió Ft

• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)

• Rationale: This sub-fund runs competitive grant programmes that pay firms — disproportionately small and medium-sized enterprises — to undertake research and development, increasingly in cooperation with universities.² The grant model places a political officeholder, or a council appointed by one, in the position of deciding which firms’ R&D projects are worth public money. That decision cannot be made well. The value of a research project is whether it produces something a future buyer will pay for; that test is run by the market, through profit and loss, and it cannot be run in advance by a grant committee scoring applications. A committee can score the application’s conformity to the call’s stated priorities — but conformity to a state-set priority is precisely not the same thing as value to a future consumer. What the committee actually allocates is not “the optimal level of innovation” — there is no such observable quantity — but a rent: a sum that flows to the firm best at writing grant applications and aligning its stated R&D plans with the current call. A firm that learns to win calls has an incentive to keep doing so independently of whether the funded work yields anything; a professional grant-capture capability forms, and it lobbies for the programme’s continuation regardless of output.

  The deeper point is visible in the international comparison. Hungary already spends heavily on state-financed R&D and gets thin results. Hungary’s public R&D funding channels a larger share of gross R&D spending through government and fund mechanisms than the EU average, while private business R&D remains below the EU norm;³ on the European Innovation Scoreboard 2024 Hungary scores about 85% of the EU average and ranks among the moderate innovators, behind Czechia.⁴ Hungarian gross R&D spending was about 1.39% of GDP in 2023, against an EU average near 2.2% and Czechia’s 1.83%.⁴ The pattern is a state that funds research generously through grant channels and a private sector that under-invests. The grant channel does not appear to be converting public money into private innovation capacity; if anything the availability of grant money substitutes for, rather than crowds in, firms’ own research spending. The mechanism is the one Estonia’s tax design avoids: where the state taxes corporate profit and then hands a portion back as discretionary grants, the firm’s rational response is to optimise for the grant, not for the product. Estonia instead taxes corporate profit only when it is distributed — retained and reinvested earnings are untaxed — so a firm reinvesting in its own R&D faces no tax wedge on that decision at all and no grant committee to satisfy.⁵ The classification follows: a programme that collects a levy from firms and returns it to a subset of firms via a committee is a circular transfer with a calculation problem in the middle. The honest reform is to stop running the levy-and-grant loop and let firms keep and reinvest the money directly.

• Transition mechanism: A five-year phase-out, not an immediate cut, because firms have entered multi-year grant contracts in good faith and universities have built research staffing around cooperative-project funding. Year 1: no new calls opened; in-flight grant contracts honoured to term. Years 2-5: contracted commitments run off as projects complete; the contractual tail of typical 2-4 year R&D grants is exhausted by year 5. As the sub-fund winds down, the innovation contribution is cut in step — the levy and the grant programme are abolished together, not the grant programme alone, so the firms stop paying the levy at the same pace they stop receiving the grants. The reinvestment incentive is then delivered through the tax base rather than through a committee: the policy that replaces the Innovation Sub-fund is a move toward distributed-profits corporate taxation, on the Estonian model, where earnings a firm reinvests in research are not taxed at distribution.⁵ The bridge is funded by the levy run-off itself: as grant outlays fall, contribution revenue falls with them; there is no separate bridge cost beyond honouring signed contracts.

• Affected groups: SMEs currently winning innovation grants lose the grant income but stop paying the contribution and, under the replacement tax design, face no tax on reinvested R&D earnings. Universities running cooperative projects lose a funding stream over a five-year horizon and must replace it with contract research paid by firms directly, or with the research-grant route in the Kutatási Alaprész. Grant-administration staff at the managing agency are addressed under the managing-agency line below. The firms paying the contribution — the cost-bearers of the whole arrangement — gain: a 0.3% surtax on profit above the SME threshold falls away.

Kutatási Alaprész (Research Sub-fund)

• Current allocation: 40,047.7 millió Ft

• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)

• Rationale: This sub-fund finances competitive grants for basic and applied research, including the National Research Excellence Programme, and supports research institutes and university research.² The classification question differs from the Innovation Sub-fund’s. Basic research has no near-term buyer, so the consumer-sovereignty test cannot be run on it the way it can be run on a firm’s product-development project — basic research is exactly the activity for which “would a future buyer pay for this” is not the operative question. That does not, however, make a central grant committee the right allocator. Which research lines are promising, which teams are credible, which questions are ripe — this is information dispersed across the research community itself, held by working scientists, journal editors, and the institutions that employ them. A national council setting research priorities and a central agency scoring applications cannot aggregate that dispersed judgement; it substitutes a politically-set priority list and an administrative scoring rubric for it. The result is a research portfolio shaped by what the call rewards.

  The reform is not to abolish research financing but to move the allocation decision closer to the people who hold the information. Research-intensive universities and institutes are better placed than a national agency to judge which of their own research lines deserve funding; endowment income, competitively-tendered contract research, philanthropic research funding, and international grant competitions (EU framework programmes, ERC) already operate as non-state or arms-length allocators with their own peer-review machinery. The classification is Phase-Out rather than Keep because the case for a national administrative grant agency as the allocator does not survive the calculation argument — but it is Phase-Out rather than Immediate Cut because abrupt removal would strand research staff mid-project and because the replacement allocators (institutional block funding tied to research output, an arms-length endowment model) take time to stand up.

• Transition mechanism: A five-year phase-out aligned with the Innovation Sub-fund. Year 1: in-flight research grants honoured; no new central calls. Years 2-5: the central grant function is wound down as existing multi-year research grants complete, and research financing is migrated to institutional block grants allocated to universities and research institutes on transparent output-based formulae, with the institutions themselves running internal allocation. This places the decision at the level — the research institution — that holds the relevant information, consistent with institutional block-grant models such as the Dutch eerste geldstroom, where the research institution rather than a national project agency is the primary allocator, alongside competitive funding rather than instead of it. The National Research Excellence Programme’s accrued multi-year commitments are honoured to term; the bridge cost is the contractual tail of signed grants, funded from the run-off of contribution revenue as the levy is reduced in step.

• Affected groups: Research institutes and universities keep research financing but receive it as institutional block funding rather than as project grants from a national agency — a change of channel, not a withdrawal of funds, for the institutions overall, though individual research teams whose work matched the old call priorities better than an output formula may lose relative position. The MTA library and information services and similar research-infrastructure recipients that currently draw on this sub-fund need their funding line explicitly preserved in the replacement structure. Grant-administration staff are addressed under the managing-agency line.

Missziók Alaprész (Missions Sub-fund)

• Current allocation: 11,012.9 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)
• Rationale: The Missions Sub-fund finances “mission-oriented” research and innovation programmes — thematic initiatives in which the state designates a societal goal (a “mission”) and funds projects directed at it. This is the most calculation-exposed of the three sub-funds. The Innovation Sub-fund at least funds firms whose project’s eventual value the market will later test; the Research Sub-fund funds research whose value the research community can assess by peer judgement. The Missions Sub-fund funds projects selected for conformity to a state-designated mission — the allocation is doubly political: a political officeholder sets the mission, and a committee then scores projects on how well they serve it. There is no buyer, no peer-review discipline independent of the mission frame, and no observable quantity the allocation is converging toward. The sub-fund is small relative to the chapter, and its classification is obvious from the mechanism: a state body picking thematic priorities and funding projects against them is discretionary allocation with no external check. It is grouped with the other two sub-funds on the same five-year horizon.
• Transition mechanism: Phase-Out (5 years), aligned with the Research and Innovation Sub-funds. In-flight mission-project contracts honoured to term; no new mission calls; the line reaches zero by year 5 as existing commitments complete. No separate replacement structure: mission-oriented projects with genuine research merit are eligible for institutional block funding via the research institutions; those that are not are simply not financed by compulsory levy.
• Affected groups: Project teams holding current mission-programme grants — a small population given the 11,012.9 millió Ft envelope — lose the grant stream over five years and migrate to contract research or institutional funding. No cohort relies on this line at scale.

Alapkezelőnek átadott pénzeszköz (Funds transferred to the managing agency)

• Current allocation: 6,416.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years), severance-with-overlap
• Rationale: This line funds the agency that administers the fund — runs the calls, scores applications, manages contracts, monitors projects. It is the operating cost of the grant machinery. Its classification follows mechanically from the classification of the three sub-funds: if the grant programmes are phased out, the agency administering them has progressively less to administer, and the line phases out in step. The agency is not an independent rights-protection function; it exists to operate the levy-and-grant loop. Once that loop is wound down, the administrative line has no residual rationale. The relevant question is not whether to phase the line out — that follows from the sub-fund classifications — but how to honour the agency’s employees during the transition.
• Transition mechanism: Phase-Out over 5 years, with the protected party being the agency’s permanent-contract staff. The 6,416.0 millió Ft envelope is administrative: it funds salaries, employer contributions, and the agency’s own operating and IT costs. Severance-with-overlap protects only the payroll component. KSH labour-cost data for the public-administration sector (NACE O) indicates personnel and employer contributions account for roughly 55-60% of operating cost in administrative public bodies of this kind;⁶ applying ~58% gives a payroll component of approximately 3,721 millió Ft. The non-payroll component (~2,695 millió Ft of IT, premises, services) falls to zero as the grant programmes wind down and the systems are decommissioned. Staff are offered 24 months of severance-with-overlap: they keep their full salary for two years and may take private-sector employment in that window while keeping both incomes. Grant-administration, contract-management, and monitoring-and-evaluation skills are general administrative and project-management skills with a broad private-sector and EU-funds-administration labour market. After the two-year overlap, the payroll bridge ends. The line reaches zero by year 5.
• Affected groups: The agency’s permanent staff — on public-administration salary scales — are the protected party; the two-year severance-with-overlap and the transferability of their skills make private-sector or EU-administration re-employment the realistic household path. The non-payroll spend (IT vendors, premises) ends without bridge protection, because those are contract counterparties whose rights are honoured through contract run-off, not employee transition.

Revenue Items

Innovációs járulék (Innovation Contribution)

• Name: Innovációs járulék (Innovation Contribution)

• Current yield: 177,200.0 millió Ft

• Type: Tax (earmarked corporate surtax)

• Notes: The innovation contribution is a 0.3% levy whose base is computed in the same way as the local business tax base.¹ It is paid by companies that fall under the accounting law and do not qualify as small or medium-sized enterprises — micro and small enterprises are exempt.¹ In substance it is a corporate surtax: it is levied on a near-turnover base rather than on profit, so it is owed even by a loss-making large firm, and its statutory earmarking to the research-and-innovation fund is the feature that distinguishes it from a generic profit tax.

  Two analytical points. First, the earmarking is the levy’s political justification, and in 2026 the chapter’s own numbers break it: 177,200.0 millió Ft is collected, roughly 113,000 millió Ft reaches research and innovation grants, ~6,400 millió Ft funds the administering agency, and 32,192.2 millió Ft is transferred to the general budget. For that 32,192.2 millió Ft, “innovation contribution” is a label on a general corporate surtax. Second, the base. Because the contribution is assessed on a local-business-tax base — broadly net sales revenue less certain input costs — rather than on profit, it is a turnover-type tax. A turnover tax falls on the firm regardless of margin and is borne, through the standard incidence channels, partly by the firm’s customers in higher prices, partly by its workers in lower wages, and partly by its owners in lower returns; the share that lands on workers is the part rarely named when the levy is described as a contribution by companies. The contribution is also a discriminatory tax on the larger firm specifically — it begins exactly at the SME ceiling — which creates a threshold incentive: a growing firm approaching the medium-enterprise boundary faces a new 0.3% turnover levy on the far side of it, a small but real penalty on scaling up. On distortion ranking, a turnover-base levy is more distortionary than a profit tax of equivalent yield, because it taxes gross activity rather than net gain and therefore cascades through production chains; it is less distortionary than the payroll wedge, which suppresses employment at the margin directly. It ranks as a moderately distortionary tax — and the reform proposed in this chapter retires it: as the three sub-funds phase out, the contribution rate is cut in step and the levy is eliminated by year 5, with reinvested R&D earnings instead protected through a distributed-profits corporate tax base on the Estonian model.⁵

Egyéb bevételek (Miscellaneous receipts)

• Name: Egyéb bevételek (Miscellaneous receipts)
• Current yield: 1,000.0 millió Ft (914.0 működési + 86.0 felhalmozási)
• Type: Other
• Notes: Minor receipts — interest on fund balances, repayments, and similar incidental income. Immaterial relative to the chapter and not affected by the expenditure reforms in any analytically significant way. No rate structure applies.

Chapter Summary

Classification	Count	Total (millió Ft)
Immediate Cut	1	32,192.2
Phase-Out	4	113,007.8
Nominal Freeze	0	0.0
Keep	0	0.0
Total	5	145,200.0

Revenue	Total (millió Ft)
Total chapter revenue	178,200.0

Year-1 saving: the Immediate Cut on the central-budget transfer yields 32,192.2 millió Ft in year 1. The four Phase-Out lines yield a combined 24,013.1 millió Ft of net saving in year 1 (linear-equivalent first-year tranches; the managing-agency line’s year-1 net figure of 2,694.7 millió Ft reflects the non-payroll component only, with the payroll bridge of 3,721.3 millió Ft continuing). Full saving once all phase-outs complete: 145,200.0 millió Ft annually — the entire chapter envelope — at which point the innovation contribution is also retired and the 177,200.0 millió Ft levy is no longer collected.

Key Observations

• The chapter is a tax line with a grant programme attached. The single most important fact is the 32,192.2 millió Ft “Befizetés a központi költségvetésbe”: the innovation contribution raises 177,200.0 millió Ft, the research-and-innovation grants spend roughly 113,000 millió Ft, and the difference is transferred to the general budget. An earmarked levy that over-collects by a fifth and routes the surplus to general revenue is, for that fifth, a corporate surtax with a misleading label. The honest minimal reform is to cut the contribution rate so collection matches the grant programme.

• The levy-and-grant loop is circular and has a calculation problem in the middle. The state taxes firms 0.3% of a turnover-type base, then a council and an agency decide which firms get the money back as R&D grants. The firms paying and the firms receiving overlap heavily. What the committee allocates is not an observable “optimal level of innovation” but a rent that flows to the best grant-writers; a professional grant-capture capability forms and lobbies for the programme’s continuation independent of output.

• Hungary’s R&D pattern suggests the grant channel is not working. Hungary’s public R&D funding channels a larger share of gross R&D spending through government and fund mechanisms than the EU average, while private business R&D remains below the EU norm;³ Hungary scores about 85% of the EU average on the European Innovation Scoreboard 2024 and trails Czechia.⁴ A state that funds research generously through grants alongside a private sector that under-invests is the signature of a channel that substitutes for private research spending rather than crowding it in.

• The reform replaces a committee with a tax base. The classical-liberal alternative is not “no research financing” but moving the allocation decision to where the information sits. For firms: a distributed-profits corporate tax on the Estonian model, where reinvested R&D earnings are untaxed and no committee stands between the firm and its own research decision.⁵ For basic research: institutional block funding allocated to universities and research institutes, which hold the dispersed judgement a national agency cannot aggregate.

• The cost-bearer is the larger Hungarian firm — and, through incidence, its workers. The innovation contribution is described as a contribution by companies. Because it is a turnover-base levy owed regardless of profit, it is borne partly by customers in prices and partly by workers in suppressed wages. The 0.3% rate is small, but it begins precisely at the SME ceiling, adding a marginal penalty on a growing firm crossing into the medium-enterprise band.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Az innovációs járulék legfontosabb szabályai. Nemzeti Adó- és Vámhivatal (NAV), információs füzet 68. 2026. https://nav.gov.hu/pfile/file?path=/ugyfeliranytu/nezzen-utana/inf_fuz/2026/68.-Az-innovacios-jarulek-legfontosabb-szabalyai-2026.-02.-02. Rate 0.3% of the local-business-tax base; payable by accounting-law companies not qualifying as SMEs; micro and small enterprises exempt. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Csaknem 120 milliárd forintból indulhatnak új pályázatok a Nemzeti Kutatási, Fejlesztési és Innovációs Alapból 2026-ban. Nemzeti Kutatási, Fejlesztési és Innovációs Hivatal (NKFIH). 2025. https://nkfih.gov.hu/hivatalrol/hivatal-kiadvanyai/az-nkfi-alap-2026-evi-programstrategiaja. The 2026 NKFI Alap programme divides support into research and innovation calls; innovation calls target Hungarian SMEs and university cooperation; ~120 milliárd Ft for new calls including a 40 milliárd Ft National Research Excellence Programme framework. ↩ ↩²

3. Eurostat, R&D expenditure by sectors of performance. Tables rd_e_gerdsc (Government intramural R&D expenditure) and rd_e_berdindr2 (Business enterprise R&D expenditure), reference year 2023. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/science-technology-innovation/data/database. Hungary’s government and higher-education sector combined accounts for a larger share of GERD than the EU-27 average, while the business enterprise sector (BERD) accounts for a smaller share than the EU-27 average. ↩ ↩²

4. European Innovation Scoreboard 2024. European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. 2024. https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/statistics/performance-indicators/european-innovation-scoreboard_en. Hungary classified as a Moderate Innovator at 84.8% of the EU average; ranked behind Czechia. Hungarian gross R&D spending ~1.39% of GDP in 2023 vs EU-27 average ~2.2% and Czechia 1.83% (Eurostat / KSH). ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Estonian Tax and Customs Board; OECD Tax Database. Estonia’s distributed-profits corporate tax: corporate profit is taxed only on distribution, retained and reinvested earnings untaxed; standard distribution rate 20%, reduced 14% for regular dividend payers since 2018. https://www.emta.ee/en/business-client/income-expenses-supply-profit/corporate-income-tax. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. Központi Statisztikai Hivatal (KSH), labour-cost statistics for public administration (NACE Rev. 2 section O). https://www.ksh.hu. Personnel cost (wages plus employer contributions) as a share of operating expenditure in administrative public bodies of this kind is approximately 55-60%; directional figure used to apportion the managing-agency operating envelope. ↩