Scholarships to Study in Hungary (2027)

Hungary is one of the few places in Europe where a foreign student can read medicine, dentistry or pharmacy in English at a state university, and the degrees are recognised across the European Union. There is no national tuition rate: at the University of Debrecen the 2026/27 range runs from USD 5,500 a year to USD 17,500 for dentistry. Admission is by the university's own entrance examination rather than a central system, and the Hungarian government's Stipendium Hungaricum scholarship covers tuition in full for nominated applicants.

Verified 12 Sep 2026 Sources

Stipendium Hungaricum is the reason many international students look at Hungary at all. It is the Hungarian government's own scholarship programme, and it covers tuition in full and contributes to accommodation costs. It is not a discount scheme run by a university; it is a state programme, and that changes how it works.

The programme runs through bilateral agreements between Hungary and specific countries, so eligibility depends on whether your country is a partner. An application is submitted twice, once to the Hungarian online system and once to the sending partner in your own country, which is usually the ministry responsible for education or the Hungarian embassy. Each sending partner sets its own deadline and its own document list, and those deadlines come earlier than the Hungarian one, which is the part applicants most often get wrong.

The 2026/27 call for bachelor's, master's, one-tier master's and non-degree programmes closed at 14:00 Central European Time on 15 January 2026, with results moving through February to June. A separate call covers doctoral programmes, and there is a separate dissertation scholarship. The 2027/28 call had not been published when this was written on 9 September 2026, although the programme's operational regulations were updated on 31 August 2026, which is normally a sign the next round is close.

One practical point that saves a wasted trip: a Stipendium Hungaricum applicant does not use the entrance examination dates a university publishes for fee paying applicants. The University of Debrecen states this explicitly. Scholarship applicants are contacted about their own examination dates after their country has nominated them.

Semmelweis makes one boundary explicit that applicants often miss: its English-language programmes are for applicants without Hungarian citizenship, and Hungarian citizens apply to the Hungarian-language programmes through FELVI instead.

Beyond Stipendium Hungaricum the picture is thinner. Hungarian universities do not generally run large tuition waiver schemes of their own for international students in the way Nordic and Finnish universities do, so an applicant who is not nominated for the government programme should budget for the full fee.