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A total of 231,000 people were unemployed during the month.
Looking at the broader December 2025–February 2026 period, average employment totaled 4.623 million, down 66,000 from a year earlier. Employment among men fell by 34,000 to 2.453 million, while the number of employed women declined by 32,000 to 2.169 million.
The domestic primary labor market employed 4.439 million people, 87,000 fewer than in the same period a year earlier. The number of public workers stood at 72,000, while 112,000 Hungarians worked abroad.
Among people aged 15–64, the employment rate slipped slightly by 0.3 percentage points to 74.7%. The rate was 78.4% for men and 70.8% for women.
At the same time, unemployment increased. In the December–February period, the number of unemployed rose by 22,000 year-on-year to 236,000, pushing the unemployment rate up to 4.9%, 0.5 percentage points higher than a year earlier.
There were 125,000 unemployed men and 111,000 unemployed women, corresponding to jobless rates of 4.8% and 4.9%, respectively.
The average job search duration was 11.9 months. The share of those unemployed for less than three months fell by 5.7 percentage points to 37.2%, while the proportion of those seeking work for 4–11 months increased by 7.2 percentage points to 28.2%. The share of long-term unemployed — those looking for work for at least a year — remained broadly unchanged at 34.6%.
KSH said the rise in unemployment is linked to the growing proportion of job seekers spending longer periods searching for work, particularly in the 4–11 month category.
Meanwhile, administrative data from the National Employment Service show that the number of registered job seekers fell by 2.7% year-on-year to 226,000 at the end of February.
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