Hungary

It is open, but narrower than when it launched. The Residence Permit for Guest Investor has been in force since 1 July 2024. The headline EUR 500,000 direct residential real-estate route was repealed by an amendment published in Magyar Kozlony on 20 December 2024. That happened before it ever opened to applicants, even though it had been scheduled for 1 January 2025. As of 2026 only two routes remain. One is EUR 250,000 into a Hungarian National Bank-regulated real estate fund held at least five years. The other is a EUR 1,000,000 non-refundable donation to a higher education institution. Any advisor still marketing the EUR 500,000 property route is working from repealed law.

No. The official OIF factsheet states there is no minimum-stay rule for the guest investor residence permit. That zero-presence feature is the main selling point. The permit runs ten years and is renewable to twenty, the longest validity in Europe. The catch is that the same feature blocks any move toward permanent residence or a passport.

Not on its own. Hungarian citizenship requires eight years of legal AND physical residence. Even the permanent-type National Card requires three years of genuine residence in Hungary. Because the guest investor permit is designed for zero presence, a non-resident investor never starts either clock. Advisors who market this as a path to an EU passport are misrepresenting it. It is a residence-and-Schengen-access product, not a citizenship product.

It carries real concentration risk. Only about two funds have been approved by the Hungarian National Bank to date, so you are underwriting a single illiquid Hungarian residential fund for at least five years, with no meaningful secondary market and no track record. Henley & Partners has publicly said the programme is currently stalled and poses several risks, and does not recommend applying. Hungary publishes no approval statistics, so uptake cannot be independently verified. It is also worth remembering that Hungary's predecessor residency bond programme collapsed amid corruption findings, which is why the current scheme is watched closely by the European Commission.

Hungary has the lowest headline personal rate in the EU at 15% flat, but it is not an opacity play. Once you become Hungarian tax resident, you are taxed on worldwide income, and Hungary has CFC rules and is a full CRS participant. Crucially, the zero-presence golden visa does nothing for tax. The 15% rate rewards genuine relocation, and a non-resident permit holder gets no benefit. Capital income also attracts a 13% social contribution tax (szocho) capped at 24x the minimum wage, HUF 7,747,200 in 2026.

There is no wealth tax, and no inheritance tax between spouses or in the direct line of descendants and ascendants. For others, the general inheritance rate is 18%, or 9% on residential property. Combined with the 15% flat income tax and a 9% corporate rate, and long-term investment accounts (TBSZ) that taper to 0% after five years, this makes Hungary attractive for succession. But it only works for a family that will genuinely relocate.

Possibly, and it is usually a better answer than the golden visa. Simplified naturalisation, introduced in 2011 and still open, grants citizenship to descendants of citizens of the pre-1920 Kingdom of Hungary. There is no residence requirement and no investment required, and Hungary allows dual citizenship. The binding hurdle is language. Hungarian is assessed conversationally at the consular interview, roughly at intermediate level, alongside a constitutional-knowledge exam of 40 questions. This covers much of Slovakia, Transylvania, Vojvodina, Transcarpathia and Croatia, plus a large share of the Ashkenazi diaspora. Most advisors never check whether the family qualifies.

The White Card (Feher Kartya) is Hungary's digital nomad permit, introduced in 2022. It is a completely separate instrument from the Guest Investor Programme, though the two are frequently and wrongly conflated. It requires net income of at least EUR 3,000 a month from a non-Hungarian employer or your own foreign company. Family reunification is expressly prohibited. A spouse or existing children cannot join you, except for a child born in Hungary during the stay. It is also a hard two-year dead end, one year extendable once, that by statute cannot lead to permanent residence. The permit is withdrawn if you take a Hungarian employer or acquire any share in a Hungarian company.