When, in 2023, Ana, then a student at Corvinus University, joined a large, international business services center in Budapest as a financial trainee, her impact was immediate.
“Ana quickly demonstrated an exceptional ability to translate academic knowledge into practical application, establishing herself as one of the most capable and promising members of her team,” her manager told the Budapest Business Journal. (Anonymity was requested for this story on grounds of personal and company confidentiality.)
Within a few months, Ana was selected to support a strategic client task force, where she assisted senior analysts by leveraging her technical skills, particularly in automated tools and customer portal navigation. She consistently performed beyond expectations and contributed to critical team efforts, the manager added.
Recognizing her performance, Ana transitioned to a part-time role during her final semester, then extended her contract to full-time employment upon completing her studies.
However, changes in government regulations during her university studies abruptly cut short her career in Hungary.
“With the expiration of her student visa and despite our efforts, it was not possible to secure the necessary authorization for her to remain employed,” the manager said. Ana was required to leave Hungary at short notice and return home.
Ana had fallen foul of Hungary’s latest stringent, complex work permitting regulations. A native of South America, she was, according to immigration legislation passed in 2023, classed by the Hungarian authorities as a “third-country” national, that is, a citizen from outside the European Union. [See box.] As such, despite wishing to pursue her career in Hungary at a company that very much wanted to employ her, she failed to meet the criteria for a work visa.
Ana’s story is not unique: indeed, a similar fate would have awaited her had she been, say, an American, Canadian or Japanese citizen, according to Barbara Ürögdi, managing director at Helpers Hungary, a company specializing in assisting foreigners seeking to work or settle in the country.
“This is a practical problem. Let’s say you want to set up a shared service center here, and you need Spanish speakers because you’re serving South America or Spain. Spanish citizens won’t come [because of lower pay], and you can’t hire Latin Americans for these jobs because there is simply no category [of work visa] that fits them,” she says.
This impediment has thwarted expansion plans at more than one SSC over the past two and a half years, costing jobs to both Hungarians and third-country nationals, she insists, without giving details for reasons of confidentiality.
Pre-2023, Ürögdi stresses, Hungarian permitting largely followed practices employed across the European Union; if no suitable domestic or EU recruit was available for a position, the employer could submit a working visa request for a specific person, for a specific job and at a specific salary set out in a preliminary contract. If the relevant labor office in the locality agreed with the request, the problem was solved.
Since 2024, this option has, in most cases, no longer been available. As a result, Hungarian employers in sectors ranging from SSCs to engineering and hospitality have struggled with staffing issues.
For Ürögdi, the whole, complicated package of classifications, country lists, exemptions, salary limits and, perhaps most bizarrely of all, the refusal by the authorities to recognize degrees awarded by Hungarian universities, is “a complete disaster.”
Desperate to find a solution, she invited a group of business and diplomatic contacts in mid-summer to a hastily arranged roundtable meeting to assess the extent of the issues.
“I said, ‘Okay, let’s see who’s interested.’ And with just three days’ notice, heads of chambers, big HR providers and diplomats all showed up. This was clearly something on everybody’s mind,” she says.
The result is an eight-page document entitled “Simplifying Hungary’s Work Permit System: A Comprehensive Proposal,” which bluntly states early in its preamble that the employment of third-country workers is “indispensable” to attracting high-value-added jobs and activities to Hungary and to sustaining economic growth.
To assuage any concerns regarding Hungarians losing job opportunities, it equally stresses that the proposal is not a call for any “relaxation” of regulations, but rather “to correct the overly complicated legislation introduced in 2024 without consideration for market needs,” which has subsequently “caused serious investors and companies to turn towards other countries in the region or elsewhere in Europe.”
And in a challenge to the Tisza government to keep to its promises on consultation, the proposal has been sent to every ministry that might be interested, together with notice of plans to hold a conference for all stakeholders in mid-September.
István Lenk, head of ABSL Hungary, an association created to represent the interests of the business services sector “both internationally and within Hungary,” is one of the key signatories to the proposal.
“This proposal is about legislation that is currently a block on companies’ ability to hire the right people regardless [of whether] the employee is Hungarian or a third-country national,” he told the BBJ.
Stressing that the companies he assists (the ABSL website lists 46 in Hungary, ranging from Citi and Computacenter to Sanofi and Syngenta) will always recruit Hungarian and EU talent if available, he is equally eager to emphasize that the jobs on offer typically involve high-quality career paths “critical to maintain the diverse service portfolios. The business services sector [in Hungary] represents 10% of GDP and employs 15-25% non-Hungarians, of which 5-8% are third-country people,” he said to illustrate its importance.
Partly as a result of anti-immigration government policies, the Hungarian public has a distorted, usually negative view of so-called “third-country nationals,” according to Barbara Ürögdi, managing director at Helpers Hungary.
“When you ask someone who they think third-country workers are, nobody knows. They will say manual workers from Vietnam and the Philippines, not U.S. or U.K. citizens teaching English, Japanese sushi chefs or South Americans employed in fancy offices for their native Spanish knowledge,” she says.
In fact, all non-EU and non-EEA (the European Economic Area: Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway) citizens are classified as third-country nationals for employment purposes in Hungary.
This currently means that all but citizens of a small circle of East European countries (Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine) cannot obtain work permits in Hungary, except for those in highly skilled jobs conforming to the high-income, EU Blue Card conditions. The only other exceptions are employees of major investors who have signed so-called strategic partnership agreements with the Hungarian government.
The laws governing the granting of working visas are complex, and last changed on June 6, when so-called “guest-worker” visas (for Filipino, Georgian and Armenian citizens) were suspended. Concurrently, the government said it would conduct a full review of the labor law, but at the time of going to press, according to Ürögdi, no one had yet been named to oversee this task.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of July 31, 2026.
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