In last year’s March, Minister of Interior Sándor Pintér, along with every state secretary under the Ministry of Interior received a 17.5% salary increase, according to data sheets uploaded to the government’s website. Hungary’s other ministries have not uploaded such data since the summer of 2022, while our questions regarding the issue have gone unanswered so far. Therefore, we cannot know whether ministerial and state secretary salaries have also increased across other segments of the state.
What makes this interesting is that following a cleverly-worded response from the Prime Minister’s Office, it turns out that last September
Following a legal amendment in June 2022, the salaries of all Hungarian political leaders are determined personally by the Prime Minister. Right after the formation of his fifth government, Viktor Orbán did not hesitate to put this legislative change to use, increasing the salaries of his ministers typically by 33%, corresponding to a monthly raise of 650,000 HUF. At the time, Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office Gergely Gulyás stated that Minister for National Economy Márton Nagy and Minister of Innovation and Culture János Csák earned a monthly gross salary of 5 million forints each, while the rest of their fellow ministers would receive six times the average annual salary of the previous year, approximately 2.6 million forints.
“With the date of July 1, 2023, as indicated in the data request, there had been no change in salaries of ministers, the Prime Minister’s political director, state secretaries, government commissioners, and prime ministerial appointees,” wrote the Government Office of the Prime Minister in response to our inquiry regarding salary levels as of July last year. We tried to inquire further at the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister, the organisation responsible for government communication tasks: we asked whether we understood it correctly that there had been no pay raise for government members. However, the Cabinet Office would not answer our queries. Meanwhile, the former response by the Government Office of the Prime Minister failed to mention that Viktor Orbán had actually raised governmental salaries three months prior to our inquiry.
According to relevant legislation, the Prime Minister determines each government member’s personal compensation package every July 1st, effective until June 30th of the following year. However, a pertaining complementary law adopted in May 2023 supplemented this by specifying that this method of determining governmental remuneration applies from July 1, 2024 onwards. That’s why it could happen that last year’s pay raise occurred in March, not in July.
Since the formation of the fifth Orbán-government, ministerial and state secretary salaries have been shrouded in mystery. As these are determined personally by the Prime Minister rather than by legislation, and precise numbers no longer need to be disclosed in the politicians’ asset declarations (income statements only require providing value ranges, for example revealing only that the amount is between 1 and 5 million forints). For clarity’s sake, we contacted the Government Office of the Prime Minister in order to inquire whether there had been a 17.5% (or any) increase in salaries for ministers at other ministries last year, but we received no response to our questions. Moreover, we have also contacted each ministry with data requests asking to reveal the personal compensation of their respective ministers – we still await their replies.
The 17.5% salary increase received by Sándor Pintér corresponds to the salary increase for parliamentary representatives, which in turn aligns with the gross average wage growth measured by the Central Statistical Office (KSH). The state secretaries of the Ministry of Interior, responsible for not only law enforcement matters but also education and healthcare, received an increase of HUF 346,000 as a result, meaning that they now receive HUF 2,321,000 each month for their efforts. Meanwhile, Sándor Pintér’s compensation was raised by a total of 462,000 forints, so he now takes home a monthly amount of
