From the 2026 budget audit
7.3 billion Ft for optional religious classes — compulsory for taxpayers
Optional religious education in Hungarian schools costs 7,337 million Ft per year from the state budget: it is optional for parents to choose, but mandatory for every taxpayer to fund.
About 1,840 Ft per taxpayer per year for religious education that parents opt into — whether those taxpayers share the faith or not.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: religious education available to children whose parents opt in, funded from the central budget. The unseen: the non-religious taxpayer, the parent of a different faith, and the parent who opts out — all of whom fund instruction in a specific religious tradition because the budget line is compulsory even when the class is not.
Objection
"Religious education benefits children and supports families who choose it — the state rightly supports parental choice."
Answer
Parental choice means parents choosing and parents funding. The SZJA 1% designation mechanism lets parents who value religious education direct part of their own tax to the church providing it. The state funding a specific curriculum choice is not neutrally supporting parental choice; it is subsidising one educational option over all others. The three-year phase-out gives church-run religious education time to migrate to parish and denomination funding.
Share if you think optional classes should be paid for by the families who choose them.
The analyst's verdict
Support for Optional Religious Education
Rationale
Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The seen here is a funded parish, a renovated church building, a supplemented clergy income. The unseen is the wage-earner — of any faith or none — whose SZJA was routed to a religious institution they may not belong to and did not choose.
Transition mechanism
The 7,337.3 millió Ft optional-religious-education line and the 2,718.0 Charity Council line phase over three years, long enough for the activities to migrate to church and parish funding. Across the cluster, the SZJA 1% church designation — the genuinely voluntary channel — is untouched and becomes the primary funding route.
Affected groups
Churches and religious institutions providing optional religious education, who transition from state grant to parish and membership funding; no believer loses the right to practise or to fund their church.
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