High rent, low number of rooms: nowhere to stay for Hungarian students

24.hu reported about a comparison regarding rent and student jobs. According to this, while a student in Vienna has to work 97 hours a month to pay for a single-room flatlet with furniture, a student from Budapest would have to work in a fast food restaurant for 179 hours monthly to have the same flat. To make matters worse, Pénzcentrum.hu tells us that there are not enough dorm places either.

European comparison

The comparison made by the CIG Pannónia Insurance Company took into account the rent prices in European capitals, and the wage for the most typical student job: working in a fast food restaurant. Thus they could compare how much a student in each city has to work on average to pay rent. They compared the rent for 25 m² single-room flats, on the 1^st-4^th floors with furniture.

The most expensive flatlets are in Vienna, they cost 282,000 Forints for a month in general.

The Austrian capital is followed by Prague (236,000 Ft), Budapest (170,000 Ft), Warsaw (157,500 Ft), Bratislava (153,000 Ft) and Bucharest (113,000 Ft). Of course, these are average numbers, and in each city, there are great differences, for example in Budapest the prices can be anywhere between 80,000 and 320,000 Forints.

In the capitals with the biggest dispersion in prices the number of tourists and long-term foreign renters is always high.

The other factor of the research was the local wage in fast food restaurants which is different in the countries just like rent, so it forms a good basis for comparison.

The results show that although the rent is usually the highest in Vienna, the wages are also higher, so it is here that students have to work the least for their housing: 97 hours a month.

On the other hand, it is in Budapest that students have to work the most, with 179 hours.

The Hungarian capital is followed by Warsaw and Prague, with 175 and 163 hours, respectively. So all in all, a student in Budapest has to work among the French fries twice the time his or her Austrian counterpart has to.

What about the dorms?

You might ask why the students rent then, why do not they just stay in dorms?

Well, at the moment the Hungarian public higher education has room in dormitories for 44,444 students, but there are more than four times more students at the universities.

Although the number of students is continually dropping, from 380,632 students in the 2005/06 academic year to about the 247,000 last year, the available dorm places do not change.

This means that there are about four times more applications for dorms as there are places available.

Imre Hegedűs, president of the National Association of Higher Education dormitories, also explained that the country is divided into three sections.

Three scenarios

Firstly, in Budapest and Gödöllő there are four or five times more applicants than free places.

The second group contains the bigger university towns where there is a sufficient number of students, and this leads to over-application. Here, however, we also must mention the increasing rent.

Imre Hegedűs attributes this partially to the growing number of foreign students.

They can pay larger sums, which causes the rents to rise, or in other cases, they take up about 10-12 percent of dormitory capacities.

He added that the guest workers also choose the cheaper sublets so in an indirect way they also contribute to the rising prices and diminishing options.

Finally, the third group consists of the smaller universities and colleges where the student body is dwindling annually, so there are empty dorm rooms left.

All in all, there are free places in the system but they cannot be utilised due to institutional and mostly geographical reasons.

Every dorm has their own set of criteria for choosing its residents, but in general, we can say that eminent students who are also socially in need have the best chances to get in.

On the sunny side, we can mention that the cheapest student lodgings are already available for less than 10,000 Forints. Of course, there are luxury options, but mostly the prices are not too high.

The monthly costs is between 10,000 and 17,000 on average but what one gets for the money can vary.

For this sum, you might share a room with just one person, but it can also be three other students. It also does matter if the bathroom is at the end of the hallway or if every room has its own. Check the pénzcentrum.hu charts for a full comparison.