Why making 4 euros per hour delivering food in Budapest is a good deal for Mohammed from Bangladesh, and his employer too

Anyone who regularly orders food via a delivery app in Hungary has certainly noticed that over the past few years, the number of foreign couriers delivering meals has been steadily increasing. In downtown Budapest, many little islets have sprung up where foreign couriers with Wolt cases congregate in between delivering orders. It was at such a hub that we met Mohammed, who is from Bangladesh and who traveled thousands of kilometers to become a courier in Budapest. "We have to somehow fit in lunch during the breaks we have between deliveries. When there is work, you have to go, but when there is not, you just sit here and wait. Sometimes we barely get a few orders, and at other times there are so many that we don't even have time to drink," he said.

Mohammed is cheerful and speaks fluent English. He arrived three months ago to work as a courier at Wolt, and although the process was not smooth, he would gladly return to work here again later. "I came through an agency that is recognized in Hungary. They sent us an invitation, so we went to the embassy to present our papers, got our visa and came.

Things are not very good in Bangladesh right now, there are not enough jobs. I came to earn some money so I could support my family financially."

Officially, Mohammed is not working for Wolt, but for one of the company's fleet partners, so in addition to paying taxes, he also has to pay the fleet company's commission. Although wages are much higher in Hungary than in Bangladesh, his housing and food costs come on top of these, which Mohammed says ultimately leaves him with just a bit more money than if he had taken a job in his home country. However, he still comes out with extra money in the end and is happy that he has at least found a secure job.

Hungarian manpower is expensive

It took a five-year period of ups and downs, dating back to the years of the Covid-19 pandemic for thousands of foreigners like Mohammed to become couriers in Hungary. The golden years for food delivery were 2020 and 2021, when restaurants saw home delivery as their best chance of survival during the season of lockdowns. In March 2020, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced that restaurants could only stay open until 3pm, but after that they could still deliver. This came in handy especially because of the hungry mouths suddenly working from home, but it also paved the way for those who had been laid off from their jobs elsewhere to quickly find a place in one of the ever-expanding delivery teams of the many food-ordering websites. According to Wolt, almost five times as many people signed up to work as couriers in March 2020 than in the period before the outbreak, and restaurants which had previously shunned using home delivery also appeared on the platforms.

By 2022, however, the couriers' enthusiasm had waned, and it became clear that the previously rumored million-forint salaries had become a myth. Donát Polauf, one of the founders of the group Couriers for Kata, told Telex at the time that the only way to make that much was to work 16 hours a day, because

with the standard eight-hour shifts, the couriers' salaries often did not even reach as far as the average income of the time, 495,000 HUF (1260 euros) gross.

Then, the summer of 2022 brought the new legislation which fundamentally altered the way couriers were paid: in July, parliament amended the taxation law for small business owners (known as KATA – we wrote about that in detail here) prohibiting couriers from invoicing companies. From then on, couriers could only work for private individuals, and as most couriers worked under that framework, this made their job much more difficult.

Before the law was changed, full-time couriers had to pay a fixed monthly amount of HUF 50,000 (127 euros) in taxes after their output-based salary, which depended on the number of deliveries. After the amendment, however, they had to find another form of taxation: most of them switched to flat-rate taxation, which increased their tax burden from HUF 50,000 (127 euros) to between HUF 100,000 (255 euros) and HUF 200,000 (510 euros). Not to mention other cost increases, such as the higher petrol prices or the higher maintenance costs for their vehicles. In addition, tipping, which used to account for a large part of the couriers' income, is also becoming a thing of the past, although Mohammed says that depending on their mood, some people still tend to tip.

In short, the economic climate and the change in taxing reduced the couriers’ income, leading many to look for jobs elsewhere. Attila Elek, president of the Hungarian National Courier Association, told 24.hu last October that it was no longer guaranteed that one could make minimum wage working a forty-hour week. He also said that seventy per cent of couriers worked only on the side, partly because there was no tax liability on income up to half the minimum wage. Elek also pointed out that on top of this, there is a high turnover rate in the profession, with the average courier lasting only four months. However, the big food delivery sites still needed their work, which is why they tried to partly remedy the shortage with guest workers.

However, the lower cost is not the only advantage of having foreign couriers. According to many experts, in many respects foreign workers perform better than Hungarians: they are more resilient, they tolerate monotony better, they are willing to work overtime and turnover is lower, which has made Asian workers increasingly popular in the industry. However, as couriers at Wolt and Foodora are not considered employees of the company, there are three options available for employment:

• working through a school union;
• as a contractor, doing their own taxes;
• working through one of Wolt’s fleet partners.

To work through a school union, couriers have to be students, while a residence permit alone does not entitle Asian guest workers to become self-employed. As most foreign workers do not have a self-employment residence permit, they are left with only the third option, where instead of hiring the couriers themselves, Wolt hires a fleet partner to provide food delivery. This fleet partner then employs their own employees as couriers. In the end, everyone is doing the same job, but this allows the fleet partner to employ foreign workers who are not licensed to be self-employed in Hungary. Sometimes Hungarian couriers also opt for working through fleet companies if, for example, they do not want to bother with doing their taxes and the paperwork required when being a contractor.

Delivering food at full speed

Mohammed is also employed through one of these fleet partners. According to him, the schedule for the following week is drawn up on Sundays, while the couriers who work for Wolt as contractors can arrange their own working hours.

"I work six days a week, because I do need a day off, I'm not a robot."

– Mohammed says, adding that he usually works ten hours a day, which often ends up being 12. On his days off, he relaxes by walking around Budapest or going to the bank of the Danube. "There are lots of good places in the city," he adds.

All Wolt couriers are paid the same, but in the case of guest workers, the fleet company usually supplies the bikes used for the job, along with providing accommodation and administrative assistance. In exchange, they take a cut from their pay, which can be as high as 20 percent of their wages. "At Wolt, we are paid per order, but we get a net hourly wage of around 1,600 to 1,800 forints (4 to 4,5 euros) from our company," said Mohammed.

As of April, Wolt said they had roughly eight thousand courier partners active each month, but because they do not ask for information on nationality when applying, they could not provide the proportion of foreigners delivering for them.

An industry source Telex spoke with put the proportion of foreign couriers at Wolt at around 50-60 per cent,

adding that many of them were believed to be foreign students studying at Hungarian universities on state scholarships. It may come as a surprise at first, but the number of students arriving on Stipendium Hungaricum scholarships increased tenfold between 2015 and 2021, with almost 12,000 foreign students studying in the country in the 2023-2024 academic year. However, the 44,000 HUF (112 euros) monthly scholarship awarded for studies for a bachelor's degree is not enough to live on, so many students have taken up courier work to supplement this. The expert points out that this is why apart from Budapest, the cities with the most foreign couriers are university towns such as Debrecen or Szeged. However, they often work directly instead of through fleet partners, or through a school association, which allows them to work up to 30 hours a week during the semester and up to 40 hours a week in summer.

From Southeast Asia to Budapest

According to our industry source, most of the guest workers employed as couriers came from Pakistan and Vietnam, but there's also a large number who are from Iran, Georgia and India. Once they arrive, the fleet company usually provides them with accommodation and a bicycle and they can start work. According to the expert, most of the guest-worker couriers are concentrated in Budapest, but they may be periodically transferred from one city to another depending on where the extra labour is needed.

"We mostly work in the centre of Budapest, we don't deliver to the outer districts," said Mohammed. It was after he arrived in Hungary that he found out that the fleet company was unable to provide him with accommodation, so he ended up having to find a room himself. "Getting accommodation was not easy. A lot of people didn't want to rent out their flats to just anyone, and many asked for a two-month deposit on top of the rent, which is a huge amount. When we were looking for housing, there were people who said they didn't want to rent to Asians, but not everyone was antagonistic. We also met nice people who welcomed us."

Mohammed would like to work through the full two-year period of his visa in Hungary, which could be extended by up to a year before he needs to apply for another permit. After the two years are up, he would like to return to Bangladesh, but plans to come back to work again in the future. According to our source in the industry,

guest workers employed through fleet partners typically spend a year in Hungary working as couriers.

He also said that compared with Foodora, Wolt has a higher proportion of foreign workers, and because of the lower criteria for entry, English language skills are not a prerequisite for joining Wolt. Since the Covid pandemic, the recruitment process no longer takes place face-to-face, which means that those interested only have to "click through" the couriers' online registration platform, which only takes a few minutes.

It didn't start recently

"Those who have had their eyes open for a while have certainly noticed that restaurants', kitchens were already full of foreign workers," adds the expert, who says that what has changed now is that due to online food delivery platforms like Wolt and Foodora, these jobs have trickled from the kitchen to the street. However, the catering sector is not the only place where one will encounter foreign workers in Hungary: there is an increasing number of migrant workers from faraway countries, and the couriers on bicycles are merely the most visible part of this process.

While a few years ago most of the workers came from Serbia and Ukraine, nowadays it is the Far Eastern workforce that is most popular. This growing trend is well illustrated by the figures of the Central Statistical Office (Központi Statisztikai Hivatal or KSH): in 2022 there were only 74,000 foreigners employed in Hungary, then in 2023 this number jumped to 85,000 in 2024 to nearly 101,000. According to another chart from the KSH, which tracks the number of foreigners residing in Hungary, the biggest jump was in the number of arrivals from Asia. For example, while the number of European nationals residing in Hungary stagnated or minimally increased in 2023, the number of arrivals from Asian countries rose to almost 93,000 from 65,000 in the previous year. The majority of workers from Asia are male: while their number grew by 18 thousand in 2024, the number of women increased by 9 thousand.

When Wolt’s fleet partners, or any Hungarian company, want to work with Asian workers, their options are usually personnel placement and temporary agency work. In case of the former, the foreign worker doesn't retain any legal relationship with the company that arranged his or her placement and is formally employed by the company (or fleet partner in the case of couriers) for whom he/she is actually working. In case of the other option, however, the agency only "loans" the foreign worker to the fleet company, while he or she remains in its employment. In addition, whereas a temporary employment agency can get new people in a matter of weeks, the process used by the personnel placement agencies to select and then obtain visas and work permits for foreign workers can be a lengthy one, taking several months.

However, "lending" workers is a much more complicated process: companies need a special permit to be able to do this, and the government regulates by decree which countries these workers can come from. There are currently ten countries on this list, including Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Mongolia and Brazil. Since Bangladesh was not on the list, Mohammed is only able to work for Wolt's fleet partner through a recruitment agency.

According to Dávid Maier, managing director of Terendo, a company that mainly recruits from India, the first half of this year has been relatively weak in terms of incoming foreign workers, but there could still be at least 100-110,000 guest workers in the country at the moment, and this number is constantly on the increase. In April, Sándor Czomba, State Secretary for Employment Policy at the Ministry of Economic Development said that due to ongoing investments, another half a million workers would be needed in Hungary in the coming years.

According to Maier, the stereotype that guest workers are lazier is not true, and in some places their performance is actually 20 to 30 percent higher than that of domestic employees. He said it was a misconception that it was cheaper to employ workers from the Far East: in addition to the training and extra administrative burden, their accommodation also has to be covered by the company, but their good performance and low turnover rate make employing them worthwhile for companies.