The number of applicants for refugee status in Hungary was not very high from the years after the transition to democracy until 2014. A few thousand applications were received by the authorities each year, and about one-tenth of the applicants, a few hundred, were granted refugee status or a more limited-term status (beneficiary of subsidiary protection or beneficiary of humanitarian protection).
In the crisis year of 2015, the Hungarian authorities registered an unprecedented number of 177,000 applications. The vast majority of asylum seekers did not wait for the procedure to end but traveled further to Western Europe. In 2016, only about 30,000 applications were received, and in 2017, three and a half thousand applications were filed. However, the number of recognized refugees has not been much higher than in previous years: a few hundred or slightly more than a thousand have received international protection each year. The high number of applicants did not therefore mean a significant increase in the number of refugees in the country.
Due to the construction of the border fence, the establishment of transit zones, and the deliberate difficulty of submitting an asylum application, the number of asylum seekers in Hungary has decreased year by year. By 2020, only 117 had applied for refugee status (because under the new rules, there were hardly anyone who could apply at all).