What Hungary's marriage billions actually bought
Hungary is the country everybody points to on family policy, and I wanted to know what was really going on. So, I spoke to Dr Georgina Kiss-Kozma – Deputy Director of Youth Research Institute, Hungary – who spends her working life asking young Hungarians what they want. Our conversation can be found here.
Hungary has gone further than anyone so far. She says Hungarians pursued three pillars: make parenthood pay, easier access to housing, and let work fit round family. In practice, this meant the former Government built tax benefits for families and for first-time married couples, provided an income tax exemption for mothers of four or more children, and gave generous housing subsidies.
Family spending reached about six per cent of national income, probably the highest in the world, and it moved the numbers. On Hungary’s own statistical count, the fertility rate climbed from 1.23 children per woman in 2011 to 1.61 in 2021, then fell every year after, to 1.31 in 2025 – all of it below the 2.1 that keeps a population steady.
The fall since 2021 is not the money drying up. The measures stand, and Georgina believes the new Government knows that improved demographics is Hungary’s future. What has changed, she told me, is the world – the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis and economic hardship worldwide have “shaken family sense of security”, and the figures after 2021 show it.
She does not call it a failure, and nor should we. The short-term effects, she says, “were clearly positive until recently”, and the policy was effective because “all of these measures tried to focus on young people”. Family policy “requires patience and long-term consistency. So, it cannot produce immediate miracles”.
What young people say they need, Georgina tells me, is first a “good financial situation”, then their “own home”, then the right relationship. And that last one, she says, is not easy for most people to find these days. It is difficult, they say, to find “suitable and accessible community places” where they might meet somebody, and most don't believe dating platforms are “the best way to build a relationship”.
A government can hand out money and build houses. It cannot find anyone a husband or a wife. Married women start their families earlier than women who cohabit, and couples who go on cohabiting after the baby comes (instead of marrying) end up with fewer children, even allowing for age and education. Some of that reflects who chooses to marry in the first place. The rest is what a settled home does – and in Britain, a settled home overwhelmingly means a married one. Marriage is still the most reliable setting there is for a bigger family.
“The state cannot force young people to start a family, but it can create a stable and supportive environment in which families feel secure enough to realise their aspirations,” Georgina says. That is the test she leaves for any government.
Britain does not even try. Our recognition of marriage in the tax system is an allowance worth at most £252 a year. And the Government’s live proposal on weddings would cut the words a couple must say down to “a short statement of contract” – a marriage with no promise in it.
Do watch our conversation, and send it to a young person who thinks they are the odd one out for wanting to marry. They are not. Georgina found the same in America, and I hear it from young people here at home. In Britain, three quarters of Gen Z adults say they want to marry.