Hungary's largest religion is Christianity, but in the 2022 census only 42.5% of the population declared a Christian faith: 29.2% were Catholic (27.5% Roman Catholic and 1.7% Greek Catholic), 9.8% Calvinist (Reformed), 1.8% Lutheran, 0.2% Orthodox and 1.5% members of other Christian churches. Another 1.3% followed other religions, including Judaism (7,635 people) and Islam (7,983), while 16.1% said they had no religion and a striking 40.1% declined to answer. The state is formally neutral, but the Fundamental Law of 2011 opens by recalling that King Stephen "made our country part of Christian Europe a thousand years ago", and a 2018 amendment obliges every state body to protect Hungary's "Christian culture". A two-tier church law, Act CCVI of 2011, gives recognised "incorporated churches" state funding that smaller religious communities do not receive. Those national totals hide a sharp geography. Catholics dominate the west, Calvinists the east around Debrecen, Lutherans cluster in a few historic pockets, and Budapest has the lowest Christian share of any region, though two Great Plain counties are lower still. Region by region, this is how the religious map of Hungary looks and why.
Budapest, Where 44.5% Left the Religion Question Blank
The capital is the least Christian of Hungary's regions. In 2022 only 35.3% of Budapest residents declared a Christian faith, against 42.5% nationally: 24.3% were Catholic, 7.5% Calvinist and 1.5% Lutheran, while 19.2% said they had no religion and 44.5% did not answer at all, the highest non-response rate of any region. That reluctance runs through the whole census. Christian affiliation nationally fell from 74.4% in 2001 to 54.2% in 2011 and 42.5% in 2022, and much of the fall reflects people leaving the question unanswered rather than declaring themselves atheist. Pest County, the commuter belt around the city, looks more like the national average, with 42.1% Christian and 28.4% Catholic.
Budapest is also the centre of Hungarian Jewish life. The 1941 census counted 400,760 Jews by religion, 4.3% of the population, and in 1944, after the German occupation, more than 434,000 Jews were deported between 15 May and 9 July, most of them to Auschwitz. Only 7,635 people declared Judaism in 2022, but the city keeps the Dohány Street Synagogue, built between 1854 and 1859 in the Moorish Revival style, the largest synagogue in Europe with 3,000 seats and the centre of Neolog Judaism. The national shrine of Catholic Hungary is here too: St Stephen's Basilica holds the mummified right hand of the founding king, and it serves as co-cathedral of the Archdiocese of Esztergom-Budapest. Smaller faiths have grown since 1990: Hungary's Muslims numbered 7,983 in 2022, up from 5,579 in 2011, and the Hungarian Shaolin Temple, a Buddhist foundation, opened in Budapest in 1994. The city was also where church and state negotiated under communism. In 1964 the Holy See signed an agreement with the Hungarian government on the appointment of bishops, a unique arrangement in the Soviet bloc, and representatives met twice a year from then on, once in Budapest and once in the Vatican.
Zala, Vas and Győr: Western Transdanubia's Catholic Heartland
West of the Danube lies the most Catholic region in the country. In Western Transdanubia 52.9% declared a Christian faith in 2022 and 45.2% were Catholic; in Zala County, on the Croatian and Slovenian borders, Catholics made up 51.5% of the population, the only county where they formed an outright majority, and Vas County followed at 48.1%. These counties also have the fewest people declaring no religion, just 6.6% in Vas. The pattern reflects history: after 1526 western Transdanubia stayed in the Habsburg-ruled kingdom while the Ottomans held the south and the Great Plain, so the Habsburg-backed Counter-Reformation of the 17th century could work here long before it reached the Ottoman-held lands, which were reunited with the kingdom only after the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699.
The region's monastic roots are older still. Pannonhalma Archabbey, on a 282-metre hill near Győr, was founded by Benedictine monks in 996, before Stephen was crowned, and is one of the oldest buildings in Hungary. It is the second-largest territorial abbey in the world after Monte Cassino, and its library holds some 400,000 volumes. The communist state confiscated the order's property and schools in 1950, and they were not returned until after the end of communism. Western Transdanubia also holds the country's strongest Lutheran pockets. In 1910 Sopron, on the Austrian border and then a majority German-speaking town, was 27.8% Lutheran, and Vas County was still 5.2% Lutheran in 2022, the second-highest share of any county. More on how the Danube and the Transdanubian hills divide the country can be found in our guide to Hungary's geography.
Esztergom, Veszprém and Pécs: Central and Southern Transdanubia
The seat of Hungarian Catholicism lies on the Danube at Esztergom, where Stephen was born around 975, crowned at Christmas 1000 or New Year 1001, and where the kingdom's capital stood until King Béla IV moved the royal seat to Buda in the mid-13th century. The Basilica of Esztergom, mother church of the Archdiocese of Esztergom-Budapest, is the largest church in Hungary: 118 metres long, with a dome rising 100 metres from the outside. Komárom-Esztergom County itself, though, is industrial and secular, with only 26.6% Catholic. Across Central Transdanubia the figure is 29.5%, rising to 35.6% in Veszprém County around Lake Balaton.
Southern Transdanubia, around Pécs, carries the strongest Ottoman imprint. After the Battle of Mohács in 1526, southern and central Hungary fell to the Ottoman Empire, which held Pécs from 1543 until the late 17th century. In Pécs, Pasha Qasim the Victorious built a mosque on the main square between 1543 and 1546; Habsburg forces converted it into a Catholic church in 1702 and the Jesuits demolished its minaret in 1766, but the green-domed building still dominates Széchenyi Square. Today the region is firmly Catholic, at 37.6%, with Somogy County at 40.8%, while Tolna County has a Lutheran share of 2.6%.
Debrecen and the Calvinist Great Plain
East of the Tisza the map changes colour. The Northern Great Plain is the only region where Calvinists outnumber Catholics: 22.3% Reformed against 20.5% Catholic in 2022. In Hajdú-Bihar County the gap is wider still, 23.8% Calvinist against 13.0% Catholic, and in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg 29.7% are Calvinist, the highest share in Hungary. Szabolcs is also the most religious county overall, with 59.0% declaring a Christian faith and only 7.5% no religion.
The reason is the 16th century. While the Habsburg west was being won back for Rome, the Great Plain lay under Ottoman rule or under the princes of Transylvania. Calvinism took root among ethnic Hungarians first in Transylvania and soon afterwards in Ottoman Hungary, while Lutheranism came to be seen as a German faith. The reformer Péter Melius Juhász (1532–1572) led the synods that produced the Brief Confession of the Pastors at Debrecen in 1567, and the town became the centre of Hungarian Calvinism, nicknamed "the Calvinist Rome" and "the Geneva of Hungary". Its Reformed Great Church is the symbol of that history; on 14 April 1849, with the revolutionary government sheltering in Debrecen, Lajos Kossuth issued the Hungarian Declaration of Independence from it. In 2011, 24.8% of Debrecen's residents were Reformed and only 11.1% Roman Catholic.
The north-east is also the home of Hungary's Greek Catholics, who follow the Byzantine rite but are in full communion with Rome. Their communities grew from Ruthenian and Romanian settlers in the Carpathian foothills and from Hungarians who joined the church in the 17th and 18th centuries. Pope Pius X created the Eparchy of Hajdúdorog for 162 Hungarian-speaking parishes in 1912, and in 2015 Pope Francis raised it to a metropolitan church with its seat in Debrecen and a new eparchy at Nyíregyháza. The pilgrimage church at Máriapócs, near Nyíregyháza, keeps a copy of an icon of the Mother of God said to have wept. Greek Catholics made up 5.1% of Debrecen's population in 2011.
Sárospatak, Eger and the Northern Hills
Northern Hungary, the hilly band along the Slovak border, sits between the two traditions. In 2022, 49.6% declared a Christian faith, 36.3% Catholic and 10.9% Calvinist. Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County is 16.5% Calvinist. The Reformation first entered Hungary from this northern borderland in the 1520s and 1530s, carried by German itinerant preachers, and the town of Sárospatak gained Hungary's first Protestant college in 1531. The college hosted the Czech educator John Amos Comenius from 1650 to 1654 and still trains Reformed ministers. Heves County, around Eger, is 39.8% Catholic, and Nógrád County is 42.8% Catholic with a 3.3% Lutheran minority. Eger also preserves the northernmost Ottoman minaret, a relic of 91 years of Ottoman rule that began in 1596.
Békés and Szolnok: The Southern Great Plain's Mixed and Secular Counties
The south-east is the most religiously mixed, and the most secular, corner of rural Hungary. Békés County has the country's highest Lutheran share, 6.1%. Its county town, Békéscsaba, lay deserted after the Ottoman wars until 1718, when the landowner János György Harruckern invited Slovak settlers from Upper Hungary, and Slovaks remained the town's majority until the 1920s. The same county has the largest Orthodox share in Hungary, 0.8%, home to the Romanian community of Gyula, a town that still has a Great Romanian Quarter. Hungary's Serbian Orthodox heritage lies further north, at Szentendre, where Serbs fleeing the Ottomans settled in 1690.
Yet Békés is also one of the least religious counties, with only 33.6% Christian and 29.2% declaring no religion, the highest share in Hungary. Neighbouring Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok matches its low Christian share at 33.6%, with 25.6% no religion. Bács-Kiskun, on the Danube side of the plain, is more traditional at 36.2% Catholic, and Csongrád-Csanád, around Szeged, stands at 29.1%. Across the whole plain, as in Budapest, around four in ten people left the census question blank. Hungary's decline in religious affiliation is far steeper than that of its northern neighbour, as our guide to religion in Poland shows.