Austria vs Hungary Compared: Similar Size, Very Different Countries

Hungary is slightly bigger and slightly more populous, but Austria is far richer and far higher. Hungary covers 93,030 km² against Austria’s 83,879 km², and it had about 9.49 million people in January 2026, against Austria’s 9.22 million. On IMF estimates for 2026, Austria’s nominal GDP per head is about $67,761, more than twice Hungary’s $28,430. The capitals are Vienna and Budapest, both on the Danube. Austria speaks German and uses the euro; Hungary speaks Hungarian, a Uralic language, and keeps its own currency, the forint. The two countries were joined as Austria-Hungary from 1867 to 1918, and most of the gaps below opened after that union broke up.

Size and population are almost a draw. The large gaps are in altitude, income, language and alliances, and each has a specific explanation.

Grossglockner Against Kékes: A 2,784-Metre Difference

Austria is an Alpine country. The Eastern Alps cover 62% of its territory, only about a quarter of the land can be called low-lying, and only 32% lies below 500 m. Its highest summit, the Grossglockner in the Hohe Tauern, reaches 3,798 m and is the highest mountain in the Alps east of the Brenner Pass. The Pasterze, Austria’s longest glacier, flows down its eastern slope. Austria’s lowlands are confined to the east: the Vienna Basin, the foothills of Styria and Burgenland, and the edge of the Pannonian Plain around Lake Neusiedl.

Hungary is the reverse. Most of it is taken up by the Great Hungarian Plain, the Alföld, part of the wider Pannonian Plain, and the country’s highest point, Kékes in the Mátra range north-east of Budapest, stands only 1,014 m high, with a TV tower on its summit. Where Austria has glaciers, Hungary has steppe: Hortobágy, designated as the country’s first national park in 1973, is the largest semi-natural grassland in Europe. The difference shows in tourism. Austria sells skiing and Alpine summers, while Hungary’s draws are Lake Balaton, the Danube and thermal water, including Lake Hévíz, the largest swimmable thermal lake in Europe. The one landscape the two share is the Danube, which flows 2,850 km from Germany to the Black Sea, passing through or along the borders of ten countries. It crosses Austria past Linz and Vienna, then forms part of the Slovak–Hungarian border before turning south through Budapest and across the plain towards Serbia.

$67,761 Against $28,430: Four Decades on Opposite Sides of the Iron Curtain

The income gap is the largest in the table, and it is mostly a product of the years 1945 to 1989. Austria was occupied by the four Allied powers after the Second World War, but the Austrian State Treaty, signed at the Belvedere in Vienna on 15 May 1955, restored full sovereignty. Austria then developed as a Western market economy with strong trade unions and a large industrial base, with international tourism as one of its most important sectors, and it now has the 13th-highest nominal GDP per head in the world.

Hungary spent the same decades as the Hungarian People’s Republic (1949–1989), a one-party state in the Soviet bloc. After 1989 it privatised quickly, and the removal of state subsidies in 1991 together with the Yugoslav Wars on its southern border produced a severe recession. Since joining the EU on 1 May 2004, Hungary has grown into an export-oriented economy built on foreign investment in the automotive and electronics sectors, and it is now classed as high-income. Budapest’s metropolitan area produces more than 40% of the national output.

The gap narrows sharply once prices are taken into account. At purchasing power parity, Hungary’s GDP per head of about $50,570 is roughly two-thirds of Austria’s $78,334, because rents, services and food cost considerably less in Debrecen or Pécs than in Salzburg or Innsbruck.

German Against Magyar: An Indo-European and a Uralic Language

Few neighbouring countries in Europe have languages as unrelated as these two. Austria’s official language is German, and Austrian German is spoken by almost the whole population, while Hungarian, Slovenian, Burgenland-Croatian, Czech, Slovak and Romany are recognised minority languages. Hungarian, or Magyar, belongs to the Uralic family, whose largest members are Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. It shares no common origin with German and is known, like other Uralic languages, for a large number of grammatical cases and for vowel harmony.

The language border does not exactly follow the state border. Hungarian is still spoken in Burgenland, and after 1920 Hungarian communities were left in southern Slovakia, Transylvania in Romania, Vojvodina in Serbia and Transcarpathia in Ukraine. Hungarian is one of the 24 official languages of the European Union.

The Dual Monarchy, 30 March 1867 to 31 October 1918

For half a century Austria and Hungary were halves of one great power. The Compromise of 1867, the Ausgleich, ended the absolutist rule that Emperor Franz Joseph had imposed on Hungary after the revolution of 1848 and restored the Kingdom of Hungary’s constitution. It created the Dual Monarchy: one monarch, who was Emperor of Austria in Vienna and King of Hungary in Budapest, with a joint army and foreign policy but separate parliaments and governments.

The arrangement shaped both capitals. Budapest was formed by uniting Buda, Óbuda and Pest in 1873 and built much of its grand architecture in these decades, while Vienna remained the imperial seat. The union ended in the collapse of 1918: on 31 October the Budapest government declared Hungary independent of Austria, and on 12 November German-Austria was proclaimed a republic. Today Vienna is the larger city, with just over 2 million people and a metropolitan area of nearly 2.9 million, against Budapest’s 1.7 million and metropolitan 3.3 million.

Saint-Germain and Trianon: Why Hungary Shrank to 28 Percent

The peace treaties of 1919–20 treated the two halves very differently, and the result explains why the two modern states are almost the same size. Austria signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 10 September 1919. It lost Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, South Tyrol and other crown lands, and Article 88 barred it from compromising its independence, which ruled out union with Germany; the new state dropped the name German-Austria in October 1919.

Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon at Versailles on 4 June 1920. The post-war state kept 93,073 km² and 7.6 million people, only 28% of the land and 36% of the population of the pre-war Kingdom of Hungary. About 3.3 million Hungarians found themselves in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia and Austria. Hungary became landlocked, and its army was capped at 35,000 men. Trianon is still commonly called a “diktat” in Hungary.

Austria was one of the gainers. The German-speaking western fringe of the Hungarian counties of Moson, Sopron and Vas was transferred to it and became the state of Burgenland in 1921. A plebiscite returned Sopron and eight surrounding villages to Hungary, which is why the border still bends around the town.

Neutral Since 26 October 1955, in NATO Since 1999

On 26 October 1955, months after the State Treaty, the Austrian parliament passed the Declaration of Neutrality as a constitutional law. The State Treaty itself contains no neutrality clause, but Austria’s promise of perpetual neutrality had helped win Soviet agreement to it. A year later Hungary rose against its Soviet-backed government. The revolution began on 23 October 1956 and was crushed by Soviet troops in early November; about 2,500 Hungarians were killed and some 200,000 fled the country. Austria’s new neutrality faced its first test: refugees crossed the border freely, and most of them went to Austria.

The alliances have stayed apart since. Austria joined the EU on 1 January 1995 after a referendum in which two-thirds voted yes, adopted the euro in 1999 and remains outside NATO. Hungary joined NATO in 1999, the EU in 2004 and the Schengen Area in 2007, but still uses the forint.

Lake Neusiedl and the Sopron Picnic of 19 August 1989

The shared border runs through flat, marshy country around Lake Neusiedl, known in Hungarian as Fertő. The lake is saline and endorheic, covering 315 km², of which 240 km² lie in Austria and 75 km² in Hungary. Hungary’s own great lake is Lake Balaton in Transdanubia, about 78 km long and roughly 600 km² in area, the largest lake in Central Europe.

Balaton links to the most famous day in the border’s history. East Germans had long used the lake for summer holidays, where they could meet relatives from West Germany, and in the summer of 1989 many stayed on in Hungary. On 19 August 1989, at the Pan-European Picnic near Sopron, organised with the support of Otto von Habsburg and Hungarian opposition groups, a border gate was opened for a ceremony. Several hundred East Germans crossed into Austria unhindered, the largest mass exodus since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. Hungary opened its borders fully on 11 September, and the Wall fell on 9 November.

For more on each country, see our guide to Hungary’s geography, our profile of Vienna, and our look at Budapest, capital of Hungary.