Who Do Hungarians Prefer to Borrow Money from?

When they need a loan, Hungarians still turn primarily to family members for financial assistance, but compared to last year, there has been a change in that they are more willing to ask friends and colleagues than financial institutions and financial service providers, according to a representative survey of 1,000 people in nine countries commissioned by Provident Financial Ltd. (International Personal Finance – IPF). The Provident Financial Wellbeing 2025 Report aims to map out each year how respondents view their own financial situation and what factors influence their financial decisions.

Fewer Hungarians are making ends meet than a year ago. At least, this is the conclusion that can be drawn from the fact that while more than half (53.4%) of those surveyed in Provident's 2024 survey said they had not taken out a loan in the previous twelve months, in the 2025 survey, those who had not taken out a loan were in the minority, albeit by a narrow margin (49.9%).

At the same time, Hungarians are doing well in international comparison, as there has been no change in the fact that the proportion of Hungarians without loans remains higher than the average for the nine countries included in the survey, which this time was 44.6% (in 2024 it was 45.7%). Only Poland had a better rate than Hungary (58.6%), while 36.9% of Mexicans, 38.1% of Romanians, and 38.5% of Latvians can get by without loans.

According to the research, if a Hungarian needs a loan because they have no money left at the end of the month and have not saved anything earlier, they still turn to family members first – younger people to their parents, while older people to their children. Hungarians do this more actively (27.6 %) than the average of 25.8 % for the nine countries surveyed. However, Estonians (31.6 percent) and Romanians (31.3 percent) are the most likely to seek financial assistance from family members, while Mexicans (21.0 percent) and Poles (20.3 percent) are the least likely.

This phenomenon was more common among Hungarian women in the past year, i.e. they asked their family members for financial assistance at a slightly higher rate (31.8% instead of 31.6%) than in the previous survey, compared to men, only 23.2% of whom took advantage of this opportunity, down from 25.1% in 2024.  Instead, it seems that the stronger sex preferred financial institutions and financial service providers – which may have been influenced by a slight decrease in domestic interest rates – with 14% requesting loans, compared to 11.6% a year earlier. In sharp contrast, the proportion of women fell from 15.9% to 10%, bringing the national average down from 13.8% to 12%.

This puts Hungarians in second place among the nine countries surveyed, with only Lithuania ahead of Hungarians, where only 10.9% of respondents applied for a loan from a financial institution. In this comparison, the differences between countries are greater, with Mexico at the other end of the list with a rate of 39.1%, followed by Australia with 28.7% and Latvia with 24.6%. However, in the other three countries belonging to Hungarians’ narrower homeland, i.e. Central and Eastern Europe, the demand for loans from financial institutions is much higher than in Hungary: 21.8% in Poland, 22.2% in the Czech Republic, and 24.2% in Romania.