The National Research, Development and Innovation Office — in Hungarian, Nemzeti Kutatási, Fejlesztési és Innovációs Hivatal (NKFIH) — is Hungary’s national government body responsible for research, development, and innovation (RDI) policy and funding. It administers the country’s National Research, Development and Innovation Fund (NRDI Fund), sets national RDI strategy, and represents Hungary’s research and innovation community in international science and technology cooperation, including Hungary’s participation in Horizon Europe. This guide covers what NKFIH is, its legal basis, the funding programs it administers, how international and foreign-based researchers can access NKFIH funding, and how it fits into the broader landscape of national research funders that research administrators supporting cross-border collaboration need to track.
What NKFIH is
NKFIH operates under the authority of Act LXXVI of 2014 on Scientific Research, Development and Innovation, which established the current legal and institutional framework for RDI policy in Hungary and consolidated functions previously spread across earlier bodies into a single office. NKFIH is a central government office, not a university, learned society, or private foundation — it prepares the Hungarian government’s RDI strategy, manages the NRDI Fund on the government’s behalf, and coordinates national participation in international RDI programs. Since September 2023 it has also handled R&D qualification activity (the formal classification of activities as research and development for tax and reporting purposes), a function relevant to institutions and companies claiming Hungarian R&D tax incentives.
Researchers and administrators encountering the acronym “NKFIH” should note it refers specifically to this office; there is no widely known unrelated organization sharing the initialism in English-language research-funding contexts.
The National Research, Development and Innovation Fund
NKFIH’s funding activity flows through the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund (NRDI Fund), the dedicated budget line from which competitive grant calls are financed. The NRDI Fund is structured to support what NKFIH describes as a balance across three broad categories:
- Discovery (basic) research — investigator-initiated, curiosity-driven projects with no requirement for near-term application, roughly analogous in function to a national basic-research council.
- Targeted (applied) research — projects oriented toward a defined technological, industrial, or societal outcome.
- Innovation support for businesses — funding aimed at enterprises developing and commercializing new products, processes, or services.
Annual call volume and total available funding vary year to year and are announced through NKFIH’s own publications; for example, NKFIH’s published 2026 programme strategy indicated new calls worth close to HUF 120 billion would open from the NRDI Fund that year. Because these figures change annually and are set by government budget decisions, researchers and grants administrators should treat any single year’s total as a snapshot and confirm current figures directly on nkfih.gov.hu rather than relying on a fixed number.
Main funding programs and schemes
NKFIH administers a portfolio of named grant schemes rather than a single generic “apply for a grant” mechanism. Programs research administrators are most likely to encounter include:
- National Research Excellence Programme — NKFIH’s renewed, umbrella framework for competitive excellence-oriented funding, spanning career stages from early-career researchers through established research leaders.
- Forefront — Research Excellence Programme (KKP) — large, multi-year awards to individual research team leaders intended to support world-class research groups in Hungary and help strengthen applicants’ competitiveness for European Research Council (ERC) funding.
- Research Grant Hungary (RGH) — a scheme giving priority, multi-year support to outstanding researchers working at the international frontier of their field who are foreign nationals, or Hungarian researchers currently living and working abroad, to relocate to or establish a research presence in Hungary.
- HU-rizon — a national top-up and support programme designed to help Hungarian-based applicants engage successfully with Horizon Europe, including support for proposal preparation and, in some cases, funding for projects that scored highly in Horizon Europe evaluation but were not funded due to budget limits.
- Swiss-Hungarian Cooperation Programme — a bilateral funding mechanism supporting Hungarian research capacity-building in partnership with Switzerland.
- Neumann János Programme — a scheme oriented toward research with direct economic and scientific impact, named for the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann.
Individual call names, budgets, deadlines, and eligibility rules change on an annual cycle. Always verify the current call text on NKFIH’s own site (English-language pages are available at nkfih.gov.hu/english) rather than a cached summary, including this one, before committing an institution’s resources to an application.
Accessing NKFIH funding as a non-Hungarian researcher
Several NKFIH mechanisms are explicitly designed for researchers who are not based in Hungary, or who are Hungarian nationals working abroad:
- Research Grant Hungary is the clearest entry point for a foreign national or diaspora researcher who wants to relocate a research programme to a Hungarian host institution with dedicated NKFIH funding attached.
- Bilateral and multilateral science and technology cooperation agreements — NKFIH maintains bilateral RDI cooperation arrangements with a number of partner countries (for example, the Swiss-Hungarian Cooperation Programme above), and participates in multilateral consortia and calls such as CHIST-ERA, giving non-Hungarian researchers a route into joint calls alongside a Hungarian partner institution.
- Horizon Europe — as an EU member state, Hungarian institutions participate in Horizon Europe on the same basis as other EU-based partners, and HU-rizon exists specifically to strengthen that participation; a non-Hungarian researcher’s most common point of contact with NKFIH-linked funding is therefore as a consortium partner working with a Hungarian institution on a Horizon Europe proposal, rather than as a direct NKFIH applicant.
In nearly all cases, a foreign researcher applying to an NKFIH programme needs a Hungarian host institution (a university, research institute, or, for innovation-track calls, a registered Hungarian enterprise) to formally hold the grant; NKFIH funding is administered through host institutions rather than paid directly to individual foreign applicants without institutional affiliation.
How NKFIH fits into the national funder landscape
Research administrators tracking European national funding bodies alongside NKFIH will recognize a familiar structural pattern: a single government office consolidating what, in some other countries, are split across separate basic-research and applied-research/innovation agencies (compare, for example, the Czech Republic’s split between GAČR and TAČR). NKFIH instead holds basic research, applied research, and business innovation funding within one office and one Fund, which affects how a Hungarian institution’s data management plan and compliance obligations are structured relative to a single national funder rather than several. For research administrators building or maintaining a CRIS record of institutional funding relationships, NKFIH should be tracked as both a national funder and, via HU-rizon and Horizon Europe co-funding, an EU-programme-adjacent funder.
Frequently asked questions
Is NKFIH the same as the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund?
No. NKFIH is the government office; the NRDI Fund is the budget mechanism it administers. Grant calls are financed from the Fund but managed and announced by the Office.
What does NKFIH stand for?
Nemzeti Kutatási, Fejlesztési és Innovációs Hivatal — the National Research, Development and Innovation Office. In English-language materials NKFIH is sometimes referred to as the NRDI Office.
Can a researcher outside Hungary apply to NKFIH directly?
Most NKFIH programmes require a Hungarian host institution to hold the grant. Programmes such as Research Grant Hungary are specifically designed to bring foreign-based or diaspora researchers into a Hungarian host institution, and bilateral/multilateral cooperation programmes and Horizon Europe consortia offer routes to participate as a partner. Direct, unaffiliated individual applications from outside Hungary are not the norm.
Does NKFIH fund both basic and applied research?
Yes. Unlike funding systems that split basic and applied research across two separate agencies, NKFIH and the NRDI Fund cover discovery (basic) research, targeted (applied) research, and business innovation support within a single office.
What legislation governs NKFIH?
Act LXXVI of 2014 on Scientific Research, Development and Innovation is the governing Hungarian legislation establishing NKFIH’s current mandate and the NRDI Fund.
