HUNGARY 1945–1946

Hungary’s 1946 Pengő: The Worst Hyperinflation Ever Recorded

Search “worst hyperinflation in history” and most results surface Zimbabwe’s $100 trillion note. Even the people who lived through Zimbabwe’s collapse know better. A Zimbabwean commenter, replying under a 2024 infographic ranking the world’s biggest money printers, listed his own country’s peak — 89.7 sextillion percent a year. Then he corrected the record himself:

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“This is actually only the second highest inflation rate in history. I think Hungary had the highest during some war” — u/Redmilo666, r/Infographics, 2024-03-24, 44 upvotes

He’s right. And the actual gap is bigger than “second highest” implies. Most hungary pengo hyperinflation searches skip past this correction entirely. This episode is one of ten in our hyperinflation examples hub — the one, among the seven we hold no chart for, that most competing pages skip outright.

Hungary’s pengő hit a monthly inflation rate of 41.9 quadrillion percent in July 1946. Prices doubled roughly every 15 hours (Hanke & Krus, 2012). It is the worst hyperinflation ever recorded. Zimbabwe’s own worst month, November 2008, ran 79.6 billion percent (Hanke & Kwok, 2009). Hungary’s peak was roughly 526,000 times faster.

The record, in the number Zimbabwe’s own SERP keeps hiding

Steve Hanke, an economist at Johns Hopkins, put Zimbabwe’s worst month at 79.6 billion percent, November 2008, with Alex Kwok (Cato Journal, 2009). Our own Zimbabwe 2008 page sources the same figure. Hanke and Nicholas Krus later built a table of every documented hyperinflation episode (World Hyperinflations, Cato Working Paper No. 8, 2012). Any hungary pengo hyperinflation ranking should show it: Hungary 1946 pengő tops it, at 41.9 quadrillion percent in July 1946. Divide one figure by the other — 4.19×10¹⁶ ÷ 7.96×10¹⁰ — and Hungary’s worst month ran roughly 526,000 times faster than Zimbabwe 2008’s.

At that rate, prices doubled roughly every 15 hours. Against the Cagan definition (50% per month), Hungary’s peak month cleared it by about 840 trillion times over — 4.19×10¹⁶ divided by 50. Weimar Republic 1923, by contrast, cleared the same line by only 590 times — a currency collapse too, just a far gentler one. On our live series, Zimbabwe’s money supply is still growing 338.2% a year (to 2026-04). That rate is annualised over the 47 months since a 2022 redenomination broke the series, not a ten-year average. It is fast by any modern standard, and still nowhere near either historical peak. Naming the metric matters here, the same way it does on our Zimbabwe page: a 2026 annual growth rate and a 1946 monthly price-inflation rate aren’t comparable numbers, even when both show up as “percent.”

Why we hold no chart for this one

Hungary’s own IMF broad-money series in our dataset starts in 1982. That’s thirty-six years after this episode ended. See the current Hungary money-supply series for what we do hold, starting from that later date. Our coverage overall starts no earlier than 1960, for any country. Nothing about the 1945-46 pengő collapse sits inside a series we hold. We hold no money supply chart for it. Every figure on this page is sourced externally, cited by name — see our methodology for how we build the series we do hold.

The adópengő: a second currency invented to keep taxes solvent

Hungary’s National Bank tried something no other episode in this batch did. On January 1, 1946, it introduced the adópengő — literally “tax pengő.” It was a parallel unit of account, used only for tax bills and postal payments. The ordinary pengő kept circulating separately, in everyday cash transactions. The adópengő’s value against the collapsing pengő was recalculated daily and published. A tax bill written in adópengő held its real value. Cash pengő in people’s pockets lost most of its worth between morning and evening (Bomberger & Makinen, 1983). It didn’t fix the underlying collapse — nothing indexed to a currency in freefall can. It kept the state’s own accounts legible for a few more months, which is not nothing.

August 1, 1946: the fastest fix on record

Hungary replaced the pengő with the forint on August 1, 1946. The conversion rate was 4×10²⁹ pengő to one forint — a number so large it reads less like an exchange rate than a statement that the old currency was simply being discarded. Bomberger & Makinen (1983) trace the mechanics. The National Bank of Hungary stopped financing the government’s deficit through note issue. The new forint carried a fixed link to gold. The coalition government then in office committed to a balanced budget. Inflation stopped within days of the changeover.

That’s a fourth ending mechanism, distinct from the three we chart start-to-finish elsewhere. Dollarization ended Zimbabwe’s collapse in 2009. A currency board ended Argentina 1989’s in 1991. An orthodox stabilisation plan ended Brazil’s in 1994. Hungary’s fix — a new currency plus an immediate, hard stop on deficit financing — worked in days, not years. Yugoslavia 1994 later used a version of the same fast-currency-reset idea, on its own terms. See how hyperinflation actually ends for the full comparison, including what each approach cost the country that used it. Venezuela 2016–2019 hasn’t reached an ending we can chart at all yet.

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