You got a raise this year. Maybe a good one, 11% or more, if you were among the 42% of Hungarian workers whose pay jumped at the start of 2026. And yet the idea of handing in your notice and looking for something better feels heavier than it did six months ago. You are not imagining it.

According to the BNP Paribas Cardif Biztosító and NMS Labour Market Stability Index for Q2 2026, the share of Hungarian workers who believe they would struggle to find a suitable new job has jumped from 18% in February to 37%. The share who think re-employment would be easy or very easy has collapsed from 53% to 19%. Headline unemployment barely moved. Confidence did.

If you are sitting on a decent offer, or wondering whether the grass is greener somewhere else, this is the market you are actually negotiating in. Here is what the numbers mean for you, and what to check before you sign anything.

The wage-trap: better pay, less confidence to move

The overall Labour Market Stability Index scored 63 out of 100 in Q2 2026, which sounds fine. But the sub-index that captures worker expectations about finding a new role fell from 63 at the start of the year to 42. That is a big drop over two quarters, and it explains the strange feeling many workers describe: wages went up, mobility went down.

Kiss Márk István of BNP Paribas Cardif Biztosító put it plainly: workers are now much more pessimistic about a possible job change than they were at the start of the year, and many already feel they would have to compromise, above all on pay, if they went looking.

Compared with the start of the year, employees are far more pessimistic about the success of a possible job change, which is reflected in the fact that most already feel they would have to make a compromise on essential points, especially pay, during the job search.

Translated for your situation: even if a recruiter comes to you with a shiny offer, the wider market is quietly weaker than the headline suggests. KSH data cited in the survey show that active employment and the unemployment rate have barely changed year on year, but the average job search now takes longer. Roles are there, but the funnel from application to signed contract has gotten slower.

Who feels the squeeze most

The pessimism is not evenly spread. 45% of women think they would find it hard or very hard to find a new suitable role in case of unemployment, compared with 30% of men. If you are a woman weighing a move, you are stepping into a market where nearly half of your peers already assume the search will be uphill, which affects what recruiters can get away with offering.

Location matters too. In central Hungary, 34% of workers rate their re-employment chances negatively. In the Northern Great Plain (Észak-Alföld) region, it is 46%. A Budapest-based candidate and a Debrecen-based candidate are essentially negotiating in two different labour markets, even for the same role title.

And by sector, certain service-sector segments, retail and wholesale, personal and business services, culture and arts, finance and law, showed a 25.6 percentage-point deviation from the sample average on the pessimism measure. If you work in one of those, your gut is right: the environment for switching feels tighter than the national average implies.

Your job feels less secure than your employer's business

Here is one of the more revealing numbers in the survey. 46% of respondents think their employer will still exist for more than five years, but only 33% consider their own position that secure. In other words, you believe in the company, but not necessarily in your seat at it.

When asked why they think their role is safe, workers cited market demand for the company's product or service (30%), general sector conditions (21%), customer and order volume (20%), and company financials (20%). Two-thirds also lean on a more personal answer: their own good performance and knowledge.

That last one is worth pausing on. If your sense of job security rests mostly on your own performance, a small change, a reorganisation, a new manager, a lost client, can shake it fast. It is worth being honest with yourself about which of the four external factors above actually apply to your role, and which do not.

The pay gap you feel, and what to do with it

Pay is the single biggest source of dissatisfaction alongside professional development, each cited by 28% of workers. But the more interesting numbers are the fairness ones:

• 41% feel their pay is unfair compared with colleagues in similar positions.
• 47% feel it is unfair given their experience and qualifications.
• 48% feel it is unfair given their performance.

That is almost half the workforce feeling underpaid on at least one of three counts. And yet only 26% would leave their current job for a better offer; 45% would still prefer to stay. 19% would not change jobs for higher pay alone, and only 28% said they would leave for a raise larger than 30%.

Before you accept that your current pay is simply the market rate, check it. Compare your salary against real data for your role, sector and region. If the gap is real, your negotiation position is stronger than your confidence is telling you.

If you do move, expect to compromise, so pick which compromise

87% of respondents feel they would have to make some compromise in a new job. The most common ones are:

• Pay and benefits (46%).
• Commute length (35%).
• Working hours (31%).

Loyalty is not only about the number on the payslip. Kiss Márk István noted that nearly half of workers' loyalty depends not only on pay but on factors like workplace atmosphere and distance from home. That matches what workers say job listings most lack: adequate pay and benefits (62%), and, at around a quarter each, workplace proximity and workplace atmosphere or culture.

Practically, this means: before you accept a role, be specific about the trade-off you can actually live with. A 15% raise that adds an hour to your daily commute is a different deal from a 15% raise with the same commute. Write both numbers down before you compare offers.

Also worth knowing: 24% of workers would prefer to move to a different industry, 22% would stay in the same role at a different employer, and only 7% plan to start their own business. If you are thinking about a sector switch, you are in a much larger group than you might realise, and you are not the only candidate a recruiter is seeing with that story.

What to do this quarter, if you are considering a move

A short checklist for the current market:

• Benchmark your pay first, then decide. Use a salary calculator or peer data to see whether your fairness gap is real or a feeling. Do this before you take a call with a recruiter, not after.
• Read employer reviews on the target company. With 64% of Hungarian workers saying they feel overall good at their workplace and the same share feeling their supervisor treats them fairly, culture varies enormously between employers. Do not swap a known good manager for an unknown one on pay alone.
• Model the full package, not the headline. Pay, benefits, commute time, working hours. Given the 87% compromise rate, be honest about which lever you are trading.
• Prepare for interview questions about why you are leaving. In a lower-confidence market, hiring managers probe stability. A clear, specific answer beats a vague one.
• If you decide to stay, negotiate now, not at review time. With 47% feeling underpaid versus their qualifications, a documented case for a raise is easier to make while your employer knows the market is tighter for their side too.

The quieter reading of the numbers

The Q2 2026 index does not say the Hungarian labour market is broken. It says something more specific: workers are being paid better, but they trust the exit door less. That combination, higher wages and lower mobility, is not neutral. It changes who has leverage in a negotiation, and it changes what a recruiter needs to put on the table to move someone.

If you are staying, know your worth on paper before your next salary conversation. If you are moving, know which compromise you are actually signing up for. Either way, the number you should trust least right now is your own gut feeling about how hard it would be to find something else. Check the data first.