Invoicing and Bookkeeping in Foreign Currency
Once you record an item in euros, dollars, or another currency, it's not just a question of where the deal is taxed (that's the subject of the foreign income article). You also need to work out which exchange rate, and which date, to use to convert it to HUF, and this applies regardless of whether your client is domestic or foreign: the same conversion rules apply to a foreign-currency invoice and to a cost paid from a foreign-currency bank account, wherever your client or supplier happens to be.
What an invoice must show in HUF
Nothing stops your invoice's net amount, unit price, and total from being denominated entirely in a foreign currency: the VAT Act doesn't require the whole invoice to be in HUF. There's exactly one mandatory exception: if the invoice carries VAT, meaning it's not a VAT-exempt or reverse-charge transaction, the VAT amount itself must also be shown in HUF alongside the foreign-currency figure. This rule exists so the invoice's recipient knows exactly how much VAT they can deduct, since only the HUF figure on the invoice can actually be claimed as input VAT.
VAT: which rate, and which date?
To convert the VAT base from a foreign currency to HUF, the default rule under the Act is the selling rate of a domestic, currency-exchange-licensed credit institution, typically the proprietor's own bank. You can instead choose the official MNB or ECB rate, but you have to notify NAV in advance, as a sole proprietor via form T101E, before you first apply it. That choice binds you through the end of the calendar year following the year you made it: you can't switch back to your bank's own rate partway through.
The date that determines which day's rate applies is, in most cases, the date of performance (teljesítés napja). A few situations use a different date: for an advance payment, the date the money is credited or received; for a reverse-charge purchase, the date the VAT liability arises; for a periodic-settlement transaction, the date the invoice is issued.
This entire question only comes up if your invoice carries VAT in the first place. As a VAT-exempt (alanyi adómentes) proprietor, or on a transaction where the place of performance means you don't charge Hungarian VAT at all, none of this rule group applies, since there's no VAT amount to convert.
SZJA revenue: a different date from VAT
This is the most commonly missed point: the date used to convert your SZJA revenue to HUF is not necessarily the same as the VAT performance date. As a sole proprietor you're taxed on a cash basis, so revenue counts as acquired on the date it's actually received, meaning the date the money is credited to your bank account or you receive it in cash, not the date of the invoice or of performance. If a client pays on 30-day terms, the VAT performance date and the SZJA acquisition date of the same revenue can fall weeks apart, and each has to be converted at the rate for its own date.
The Personal Income Tax Act's general rule is to use the official MNB rate in effect on the date the revenue is acquired. As a simplification, you can instead choose the MNB rate in effect on the 15th day of the month preceding acquisition, provided you apply that method consistently for the whole tax year: you can't switch back and forth between the two methods deal by deal.
Costs in foreign currency, under itemized-cost taxation
If you're taxed under vállalkozói szja with itemized cost deduction and you pay a cost in foreign currency, the same logic runs in reverse: you convert the cost to HUF at the MNB rate in effect on the date of payment, in line with the fact that cost deduction for a sole proprietor is on a cash basis: the cost is deductible in the tax year you pay it, regardless of the supplier invoice's own date. Under flat-rate taxation this question doesn't arise at all, since costs there aren't itemized: they're covered by the statutory cost ratio instead.
Holding a foreign-currency account doesn't create a separate tax
Many proprietors keep a foreign-currency account so they don't have to convert every incoming payment to HUF immediately. That by itself doesn't create any separate tax liability: the HUF amount of your revenue is fixed, under the rule above, on the date you acquire it, and when you actually convert the money to HUF afterward doesn't change that figure. This is different from the rule that taxes private individuals on gains from speculative currency trading: holding and later converting foreign currency you acquired as business revenue isn't covered by that rule.
In practice
For any foreign-currency item, it's worth recording two figures: the original foreign-currency amount and the HUF amount at the applicable rate, since your records and your tax return both have to show revenue and costs in HUF. EV Napló works this way too: for items recorded in a foreign currency, it applies the official MNB daily rate in the background, falls back to the most recently published rate on weekends and holidays, and keeps both the original and converted amounts, so you can trace back which rate an item was recorded at if you're ever reviewed. If, as a VAT-registered proprietor, you want that same MNB rate to also be your officially chosen rate for VAT purposes, you need to notify NAV separately, as described above: without that notice, the default rule still points to your bank's own selling rate for VAT conversion, even if you're tracking the item itself at the MNB rate.
This article is for general information only and does not constitute tax advice. Source: the VAT Act, 2007. évi CXXVII. törvény, primarily § 172 on invoice content and § 80 on the exchange rate, and the Personal Income Tax Act, 1995. évi CXVII. törvény, §§ 5-6 (net.jogtar.hu, net.jogtar.hu).
Last updated: August 10, 2026.