Almost half a million parents-to-be have applied for the “Baby Waiting” grant nationwide, the Mária Kopp Institute for Demography and Families (KINCS) said in a statement sent to Hungarian news outlet Magyar Nemzet. Since the launch of the program, 246,000 families have applied for the grant, and a total of 211,000 thousand children have been born under it so far.
“With the baby loan, families have so far received 2.4 trillion forints ·(€6.15 billion) in government support,” the institute said.
According to the statement, the baby loan scheme is popular throughout the country, with a high level of interest regardless of an area’s size, location or per capita income.
According to the Hungarian State Treasury, the largest share of families receiving the baby allowance was in small rural towns (33 percent) and villages (31 percent), while 20 percent were in towns with county status and 16 percent in the capital. As reported, the highest number of people applying for the grant was in three northeastern counties, Hajdú-Bihar, Borsod, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg, in addition to municipalities in central Hungary.
The baby allowance is reported to be equally popular in the poorest and the richest municipalities and is most common among the middle class. A third (34.7 percent) of all families claiming the allowance were in municipalities in the bottom two income quintiles, most families (36.5 percent) were in municipalities in the middle quintile, while slightly fewer (28.8 percent) were in the top two quintiles, the Kopp institute stated.
The government has now granted an extension until July 1, 2026, for couples who have taken up the allowance in the two years following its introduction but have not yet had the expected child.
