I decided to play a little bit with some online tax calculators (bérkalkulátor). If you are planning to work in Hungary you might want to search for such and try it out. But beware - it will make you sad.

I calculated some numbers and I plotted them on a graph. On the first one you can see gross income (X-axis) with net income (Y-axis). The currency used is HUF. It does not look that bad if you do not pay attention to values.



But for the second one I calculated tax percent (Y-axis) for same gross incomes (X-axis) as on the previous graph. Now this makes me sad. Even though I come from Finland which has progressive taxation and plenty of social services to feed with tax money, this graph is not nice to view. As you can see, progression hits very hard and 200 000 HUF gross salary is not a reason for a celebration here.



So, what would highly educated hungarian with some language skills do? He works in a company and earns 250 000 - 350 000 HUF. After some time he gets a 10% raise on his salary. Sounds nice but actually it just covers inflation (7-8%) and also government happily slices almost half of it away. He gets pissed off because he does not see any point to progress on his career. But because he is smart and educated he does not go on the streets to burn cars and to do such nonsense. Instead of that he packs and relocates to another EU country with more sensible taxation.