Payment Processing · Buyer guide
The Magyar Nemzeti Bank, Hungary's central bank, measures what card acceptance costs merchants, and its latest figure is not flattering. In its Payment System Report published in September 2026 it found that merchants taking less than 1 million forints a quarter by card paid 3.7% of that turnover in acceptance costs in 2025, up from 3.4% in 2024 and 2.6% in 2021. The bank's target for 2030 is 1.5% at most.
The published rates are not that high. Much of the gap is likely fixed costs: a terminal rental of 5,000 forints a month, which is OTP Bank's standard starting price for its smallest merchants, is 1.5% on its own for a shop taking 333,000 forints a month by card. What follows is what the providers charge, read from their own Hungarian pages in October 2026, along with qvik, the central bank's instant-payment alternative, and the rules on electronic payment and surcharges.
Since 1 January 2021, section 5/F of Hungary's Trade Act (Kertv.) has required every merchant that must use an online cash register to give consumers the option of paying electronically and to keep it continuously available. The central bank estimated that about 60,000 businesses were newly affected. The law asks for electronic payment, not for a particular method, and nothing in it requires merchants to accept qvik. The consumer protection authority enforces the rule, and its general fines for a small or medium-sized business run from 100,000 to 2 million forints.
Hungary already pays electronically more often than most of the EU. The MNB found that 51% of the value of purchases in 2025 was paid electronically, ten points above the EU average, though the split is uneven: by number, 62% of shop purchases in Budapest were paid electronically, against 32% in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg and Nógrád counties. In the second quarter of 2026 there were 262,000 card terminals at 153,000 physical merchant locations, plus 89,000 online acceptance points.
Hungary applies the EU Interchange Fee Regulation, which caps the interchange a card's issuing bank receives at 0.2% of a consumer debit card payment and 0.3% of a consumer credit card payment. Viva.com's Hungarian price list states exactly those figures. Business cards and cards from outside the EEA are not capped, and American Express is priced separately. On top come the card schemes' fees and then the provider's margin, which is what the offers below differ on.
Hungary's financial transaction tax does not add a percentage to each card sale. For card purchases, the tax is a flat annual amount per card, 800 forints, or 500 forints for a card used contactlessly, and it falls on the card-issuing bank. It still shapes what banks charge: they paid 537.8 billion forints of transaction tax in 2025, equal to 51.6% of their revenue from payment services, according to the MNB.
Take a shop with 600 card payments a month of 5,000 forints each, all on Hungarian consumer cards: 3 million forints of takings. On the published prices, before VAT on any subscription:
At this volume the app providers sit within 8,000 forints of each other, and SumUp's subscription undercuts all of them. The bank offers are priced as a margin over interchange and scheme fees, so they cannot be put on the same line without your card mix, but OTP's own example of about 1.33% on a debit card suggests a bank terminal is competitive at this volume. At the MNB's smallest tier, the picture flips. A shop taking 300,000 forints a month by card pays 5,850 forints at SumUp's 1.95% and nothing more, while a bank terminal at OTP's entry price costs about 8,600 forints before scheme fees and VAT: 5,000 forints of rental, a 1% margin and the interchange underneath it. That is how a market whose app providers list rates below 2% ends up with its smallest merchants paying 3.7% on average.
The published online prices for a domestic consumer card, read in October 2026:
On 300 online orders of 10,000 forints, 3 million forints a month, that is about 44,700 forints at Barion Starter, 65,700 at Mollie, 70,500 at Stripe, 75,000 at SumUp and 92,400 at Viva.com. For a shop that meets its conditions, the Hungarian gateway is the cheapest of these on domestic cards; the international providers make more sense when a large share of customers pay from abroad.
qvik launched on 1 September 2024. It is the MNB's brand for instant bank-to-bank payments started by QR code, NFC, a link or a payment request, and the MNB required Hungarian payment service providers to support it. It is free for consumers by law. For merchants, the MNB sets no fee cap and says only that acceptance is much cheaper than other electronic methods. Merchants can accept it through OTP's SimplePay, Raiffeisen, Granit Bank and MBH.
What it costs a merchant is only partly published. SimplePay's notice, in force since 6 June 2025, sets two charges it adds to each qvik payment: a system usage fee of 0.115%, at least 5 and at most 100 forints, plus 0.04%, and a payer-side contribution of 0.15%, capped at 50 forints. On a 5,000 forint payment they come to about 15 forints. They sit on top of the merchant fee in each contract, which SimplePay does not publish; one offer it makes through the Chamber of Hungarian Auditors prices qvik at the same rates as cards. qvik payments by private individuals are exempt from the financial transaction tax.
Take-up is real but concentrated. In the second quarter of 2026 Hungarians made 4.6 million qvik payments worth 1,144 billion forints, but 91.2% of that value was payment requests, which the MNB says are used mainly for payments between people, rather than shop purchases. More than 32,000 merchants accepted qvik by the end of 2025. For a shop it is a cheap addition to a card terminal, not a replacement: tourists and anyone paying with a foreign card cannot use it.
Section 36(4) of Hungary's Payment Services Act (Pft.) says a payee may not charge any fee, cost or other payment obligation for the use of a cash-substitute payment instrument. That goes beyond the EU minimum, which bans surcharges only on consumer cards with capped interchange and on euro SEPA transfers and direct debits: in Hungary it also covers business cards and American Express.
Neighbouring countries apply the same EU interchange caps with different local prices; see our guides to Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland.
