Hundreds of thousands are missing from the domestic labor market

150-250 thousand jobs have therefore remained partially or completely vacant, of which at least 65 thousand positions can be considered permanently vacant – Tamás Horváth, owner and managing director of Menton Jobs Kft., pointed out the domestic situation. 

The expert of the company dealing with labor leasing and mediation added that these needs must be contrasted with the domestic employment of approximately 4.6 million, which is outstandingly high even in European comparison in terms of its proportions. Based on all this, it can be stated that for years the Hungarian population has not had labor reserves that can be mobilized quickly, within months. Those who want to work and are suitable for it have typically already found a job. There are regions where the number of job opportunities and the mobility of the population are low, and there are those who can perhaps be brought back or introduced to the labor market with training over a long period of time, but this would require long-term substantive programs and significant state involvement, and here too we are not talking about hundreds of thousands.

In comparison, domestic industry would immediately need, in the order of several thousand, among other things, qualified welders, truck drivers, CNC machinists, factory operators, logistics workers, technicians and maintenance workers, but the list is not complete, the demand is huge in agriculture, for example.

Tamás Horváth pointed out that although all narratives and comparisons are a matter of fact, Hungary is a European welfare state, with problems typical of the continent. Such are the aging population, the rising proportion of people with higher education, and the high standard of living in global comparison. We must acknowledge that certain, otherwise well-paid professions are becoming less and less attractive to the domestic workforce, especially young people.

These positions can best be realistically filled with foreign labor, as is the case in all European states that are referred to as “slum countries” here. In 2025, more than 100,000 foreign workers were working in Hungary, mainly in logistics, construction and manufacturing. However, it is very important to realize that this is not the migrants mentioned earlier, let alone immigrants. The only thing the two groups have in common is that they are foreigners, and there is no overlap between their countries of origin. These workers, wherever they come from, enter the country under incredibly strict conditions, under continuous on-site, official control, for a maximum of a few years, to earn the same money as Hungarians, in order to perform all the tasks for which employers could not find Hungarian workers. You do not even need to have economic or labor market insight to see that without them, entire industries would cease to exist or would lose their growth potential.

It is a multifactorial contradiction that experts have long envisioned a future that fits the country’s characteristics in high-value-added services, typically in a highly educated workforce. In comparison, the domestic industrial structure, the majority of industries established and established in the past 30 years, would need hundreds of thousands of hardworking hands with primary and secondary education the most. We can also add here that foreign companies often fill the aforementioned high-value-added management positions with foreigners, mostly people from the company’s home country – Tamás Horváth concluded his words with another anomaly.