Budgetary scenario analysis for the expansion of free legal aid in Hungary

In Hungary, the income threshold for eligibility for legal aid is extremely low: since 2008, it has been 28,500 forints per month. In this report, we calculate the additional budgetary expenditure that would be required if this threshold were raised to the level of the minimum wage (or at least half of it).

According to our calculations, this would result in approximately 19,000-23,100 more eligible persons in 2023 and a maximum additional cost of HUF 832 million. This is about four times the amount spent on legal aid this year, while the number of beneficiaries could increase more than eightfold.

The main lesson to be learned from our findings is that the increase in demand would be significantly greater than the increase in public expenditure, and that this increase in expenditure would represent a negligible additional cost as a percentage of GDP, the total budget, or even the budget of the Ministry of Justice.

The report was procured by Amnesty International Hungary