A job search on the website of one well located, four-star Budapest hotel at the beginning of June listed vacancies for 11 employee categories, ranging from corporate sales and senior receptionist to room maid and restaurant manager.
This establishment’s staffing crisis is nothing exceptional; searches at other hotels across the Hungarian capital reveal jobs are there for the taking, with qualified chefs especially in demand.
Little wonder then, when István Kapitány, the new government’s economy and energy minister, declared upon taking office that visa applications for third-country, foreign guest-workers (that is citizens from non-EU countries) would be suspended from June 1, the hospitality industry took fright.
As Pál Zoltán Gál, president of the Hungarian Hospitality Employers’ Association (Vimosz) told state news agency MTI, many establishments would simply be “unable to function” if access to the foreign labor pool were restricted.
The agency reported that Vimosz and other organizations were seeking constructive dialogue with the government over expected regulatory changes, and calling for clarity on how planned measures would affect ongoing applications and workers already employed in Hungary. The hospitality sector is not alone in desperately seeking qualified labor.
“For the companies we serve, predominantly operating in modern manufacturing, production, and processing industries, along with logistics, any regulatory change affecting labor availability impacts short-to-medium-term capacity planning,” Sándor Halas, managing director of Alfa Works Kft., a recruitment agency with four offices across Hungary, told the Budapest Business Journal.
Since business investments in Hungary have been built relying on long-term labor predictability, the sudden suspension of the importation of third-country guest-workers “could lead to temporary operational bottlenecks or slower scaling for certain projects. In the current economic climate, driven by an urgent need for efficiency gains in lower value-added sectors, this measure directly counteracts economic growth,” he warned.
Indeed, the news of the decision to suspend guest-worker visas has already resulted in two specific cases of negative feedback to Alfa Works from companies dependent on foreign labor in Hungary.
“We are aware of an SME with 200 employees currently operating at full capacity. If their foreign workforce is withdrawn, the remaining 80 Hungarian employees will not be enough to sustain operations, and without rapid replacement, the plant faces potential long-term closure,” Halas says.
In the second case, another partner has put the construction of a newly planned facility, intended to employ 50 people, on hold due to the unpredictable regulatory environment.
Speaking of the rationale behind his decision to suspend the issuance of guest-worker visas, Kapitány said the new government was seeking to prioritize jobs for domestic workers. On paper, since the latest figures reveal some 220,000 Hungarians are registered unemployed, this has some logic.
Stuart McAlister, managing director of the Inter Relocation Group in Budapest, told the BBJ that companies in Hungary will, almost always, hire a Hungarian or EU/EEA citizen for a vacancy, if a suitable candidate is available.
“Business does not like to wait [for] the approximately five months for most immigration processes to be completed. It is something employers only go through if there really is no quicker alternative,” he says. The key words, of course, are suitability and availability.
“Our experience shows that the available domestic labor pool is highly limited. In certain regions, such as northeast Hungary, there is some unutilized labor capacity. However, in many cases, registered job seekers lack the skills required by modern industries, and they face severe mobility constraints,” Halas argues.
Furthermore, the lack of personal vehicles and inadequate public transport services frequently prevent potential workers from commuting to where jobs actually are. “Consequently, local labor supply and corporate demand often fail to align,” he notes.
None of this is new. “Significant shortages persist particularly in the manufacturing hubs for production, logistics, engineering, and specialized technical roles, where companies have struggled to find adequate staffing for a long time,” Halas says.
Moreover, ever tighter restrictions imposed by the former Fidesz government have exacerbated the problems in recent years, when guest-worker visas were limited to just 35,000 per year.
“Within Central and Eastern Europe, Hungary currently maintains one of the strictest regulatory environments for employing foreign workers, where the actual proportion of third-country nationals within the total workforce remains one of the lowest in the region, hovering around just 2% of the total. This is significantly lower than figures for Poland and the Czech Republic,” Halas says.
As research for this story began in late May, it became increasingly clear that the official legislation pertaining to the suspension of new guest-worker visas was late in preparation. On June 1, the promised regulations had still not appeared, leaving companies and agencies confused and incapable of creating reliable recruitment plans.
Furthermore, industry bodies complained that there had been no consultations by the government with them over the impact of the new regulations, in complete contrast to statements by the Tisza government on coming to office.
“I am really nervous about putting something in print when there is nothing clear or certain in the law, only political statements, which often don’t align with the technical measures that are implemented. For us, the main question is whether this new law will stop companies that have been hiring foreign workers en masse as guest workers from doing so,” one recruitment professional told the BBJ.
When asked for comment, the management of the four-star hotel cited at the beginning of this story also declined to comment on the record.
“Although I do not personally know minister Kapitány, my understanding is that the intention is rather to pause or reconsider new applications in order to gain a clearer overview of the current labor market situation and future possibilities. Naturally, the hospitality sector continues to face labor shortages, and we all hope that a balanced and sensible decision will ultimately be made,” the management offered in return for anonymity.
One restaurateur was more forthcoming. “This did not start with this government, it’s been like two years now. It’s a difficult situation. We might get a visa for two years, but no extension, [certainly] not for more than one year. We don’t know the exact details [of the new law]. It’s uncertainty,” Wang Songtao, part of the management team at Opium, a high-end Asian restaurant in central Budapest, told us.
With no contact information available for the newly formed Ministry of Economy and Energy, the BBJ requested the government comment for this article one full day before the press deadline, asking why the relevant legislation on this issue had not appeared before the stated deadline of June 1, when any legislation might be expected and why no consultations with representatives of the sectors involved had been undertaken, contrary to stated government policy.
We received no response from the government press office to this request, nor to a later, follow up request in case the first had been overlooked.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of June 5, 2026.
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