From the 2026 budget audit
210 milliárd Ft a year to one company for 35 years — no competitive re-tendering.
Hungary pays a single concessionaire an availability fee for 1,237 km of motorway under a contract that runs until 2057, set by negotiation, not competitive price discovery.
About 53,900 Ft per taxpayer per year — 210,000.0 millió Ft total. Year-1 net saving of 21,000.0 millió Ft as the transition begins; the full margin is recovered in Year 10.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: the motorway network maintained and operated. The unseen: the difference between what competitive tendering would establish as the genuine cost of maintaining 1,237 km of asphalt and what a 35-year single-operator contract, negotiated rather than competed, adds on top — a margin every motorway user and taxpayer funds without knowing its size, for a generation.
Objection
"Repudiating the concession contract would cost the state more in compensation than it saves."
Answer
The proposal is not repudiation — the existing contract is honoured on its terms, which protect the concessionaire's rights as the rule of law requires. The reform is the disciplined non-renewal of the concession at its break-points: as the contract allows renegotiation or transition, motorway operation reverts to directly-budgeted, competitively-tendered maintenance. The road exists and will be maintained; the question is whether one company is guaranteed the contract for 35 years or whether the maintenance market is tested on each cycle.
Share if you think motorway maintenance should be competed for, not guaranteed to one company for 35 years.
The analyst's verdict
Motorway network availability fee
Rationale
This is one of the two largest lines in the chapter: 210,000.0 millió Ft paid as an availability fee for the motorway network. Since September 2022 the operation, maintenance, and development of roughly 1,237 km of the Hungarian motorway and express-road network has been carried out under a 35-year concession contract by a single concessionaire, MKIF Magyar Koncessziós Infrastruktúra Fejlesztő Zrt., to which the state pays a kilometre-based "rendelkezésre állási díj" (availability fee) for operating, maintaining, and developing the network. The classification has to separate two things the line fuses. The motorway network itself is durable, publicly-relevant infrastructure with a genuine network character — that is not at issue. What is at issue is the contractual form through which it is financed: a 35-year, single-concessionaire, availability-fee structure under which the state commits to a multi-decade stream of payments to one operator. An availability-fee concession is not the only way to keep a motorway network operated and maintained — the maintenance and operation of the ordinary public road network appears elsewhere in this same chapter as a directly budgeted line, not as a 35-year concession — and a structure that locks the state into a single counterparty for three and a half decades is the form most exposed to the calculation and public-choice problems the frame identifies: the fee is set by negotiation rather than by competitive price discovery on each maintenance cycle, the concessionaire's profit is structurally protected by the contract rather than competed away, and the duration removes the function from periodic competitive re-tendering for a generation. The honest classification of the financing arrangement is Phase-Out: not the abrupt repudiation of the concession — the concessionaire is a contract counterparty with rights the rule of law protects, and the contract binds while it binds — but a 10-year transition in which the network's operation and maintenance is brought back to a directly-budgeted, competitively-tendered model as the concession's terms and break-points allow, with the availability-fee envelope falling toward the genuine, tendered cost of operating and maintaining the network. The 210,000.0 millió Ft is not the cost of the asphalt; it is the cost of the asphalt plus the contractual margin of a 35-year single-operator structure, and the reform recovers the margin.
Transition mechanism
Phase-Out over 10 years, linear glide. The protected party is the concessionaire as a contract counterparty: the existing concession contract is honoured on its terms — abrupt repudiation is not the proposal — and the transition works through the contract's renegotiation points and break clauses, bringing motorway operation and maintenance back to a directly-budgeted, competitively-tendered model over a decade. The glide reflects the contractual reality that the saving cannot be realised immediately: net saving rises from 21,000.0 millió Ft in Year 1 to the full 210,000.0 millió Ft in Year 10, as the availability fee converts to a tendered operating-and-maintenance cost. The "full saving" figure is the elimination of the availability-fee structure; the genuine tendered cost of operating and maintaining the network reappears as a directly-budgeted line, materially below the fee, and the net improvement is the recovered contractual margin.
Affected groups
The concessionaire, MKIF Zrt., whose contractual rights under the existing concession are honoured through the transition rather than repudiated. Motorway users, who are unaffected in service terms — the network continues to be operated and maintained — and taxpayers, who over the decade fund the tendered cost of operation rather than the concession's contractual margin.
Sources
Free Society Institute
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