Áron Kincses, the head of the Central Statistical Office (KSH), said on Tuesday that data from Hungary’s latest national census shows an increase in marriages and a growing share of people under the age of 30 with children, but the country’s population is ageing.
Presenting the results of the 2022 census, Kincses told a press conference that the data indicated that Hungary was developing and changing. Employment is up significantly and modern technologies are constantly reshaping the labour market, he said. Foreign-language proficiency, education levels and digital skills among the population have gone up significantly since the last census carried out 11 years ago, he said. Marcell Kovács, the census’s project manager, said that Hungary had a population of 9,603,634 at the start of the census on Oct. 1 last year. The natural population loss between the 2011 and the 2022 census was 334,000, he said. The elderly, people aged 65 or older, make up 21% of the population. Their number is around 2 million, Kovács said. As a result of demographic changes, the ratio of men to women was 1,000:1,078 last year, compared with 1,000:1,106 in 2011, he said. Among people aged 15 or older, 43% were married, reflecting an increase in the number of couples tying the knot over the past several years. One-third of the population had never been married, said Kovács, adding that 62% of men aged younger than 50 are single while 57 percent of women had the same marital status in the same age group.
The census showed some 33% of adults with a secondary school degree and another 22% with a university degree. The proportion of people with only a primary school education dropped to 23%, the project manager said. In a marked increase, the number of jobholders went up to 4.7 million, or 49%, from 3.9 million during the eleven-year period, he said, noting that the number of people without a job last year was 237,000. Fully 60% of the population responded voluntarily to the question of religious affiliation. Fifty percent, 2.9 million people, said they were Catholic with 2.6 million of them Roman Catholic and 165,000 Greek Catholic. Altogether 16% were of Reformed and 3.1% of Evangelical faith, Kovács said, adding that 27% declared themselves not religious. As regards the question of national minority, Kovács said the largest national minority was the Roma, with 210,000 or 2.5% of respondents indicating it. The German national minority numbered 143,000, the Slovak 30,000, the Romanian 28,000 and the Ukrainian 25,000, he said. The number of foreign nationals living in Hungary jumped by 52% to 218,000 since 2011 with most of them, 76%, coming from Europe. Fully 82,000 people came from neighbouring countries. In terms of language skills, English is the most common foreign language spoken by one in four Hungarians, said Kovács.