TBSZ and Derivatives: Why Futures Do Not Fit a TBSZ Account

General information about tax rules, not tax or legal advice. Rules change and every situation is different: check with a qualified adviser in your country before you file.

Every Hungarian who has ever saved a forint has been told about the TBSZ. Five years, no tax on the gain, the best deal in the country. So the question arrives by itself the moment you open a futures account: can I run my MNQ trading inside a TBSZ and keep the profit tax free?

The short answer is no, and not because of some technicality a clever accountant can route around. A TBSZ is built on three requirements that a futures account breaks structurally: money goes in once, nothing comes out for years, and nothing new goes in afterwards. That is the opposite of how a margin account works.

The longer answer is more useful, because it tells you what actually does apply to your trading, where the real tax advantage for a Hungarian futures trader sits, and one recent change that a lot of people here have not noticed at all.

What a TBSZ is built to do

The tartós befektetési számla lives in the personal income tax act, the 1995. évi CXVII. törvény, at section 67/B. It has been available since 2010 and it is offered by Hungarian investment service providers and banks, not by brokers abroad.

The mechanics are simple and they are strict.

• The collection year. In the year you open the account, the gyűjtőév, you pay money in, as often as you like. At the end of that year the door closes. You cannot add another forint afterwards without breaking the account.
• The lock. From the end of the collection year the clock runs for five full calendar years. Hold the whole term and the lekötési hozam, the gain on the account, is taxed at zero.
• The middle exit. Break it after the three year point and the gain is taxed at a reduced rate rather than the full one. Break it before that and you are taxed as if it had been ordinary capital income all along.
• Partial withdrawal. After the three year mark it is possible to take part of the money out and leave the rest running, subject to conditions and a minimum remaining balance. The details have been amended over the years, so confirm the current version with your provider.

Everything about that design rewards one behaviour: buy things and leave them alone. It is a vehicle for a long term portfolio, and for that job it is genuinely excellent. The published rules sit on the NAV personal income tax pages, and the law itself is in the Nemzeti Jogszabálytár.

Can you put futures in a TBSZ

Start with the most practical obstacle, because it settles the question before any legal argument begins: the broker where you trade CME futures does not offer a TBSZ.

A TBSZ is a Hungarian contract type, defined by Hungarian law, concluded with a provider that offers it here. If your futures account is with a foreign futures broker, there is no TBSZ to open, no collection year to declare and nobody to issue the certificate NAV expects. That is the end of the discussion for the overwhelming majority of people reading this.

If instead you are with a Hungarian provider that does run TBSZ accounts, the next obstacle is the product terms. Providers define which instruments are eligible on a TBSZ, and leveraged derivative and margin products are routinely outside that list. Not because a derivative is forbidden by name in section 67/B, but because the account structure cannot cope with an instrument that can demand more money at any moment. Ask your provider in writing what is eligible on their TBSZ rather than assuming from a marketing page.

Three rules a futures account breaks

Even set the practical obstacles aside and imagine a provider willing to try. The account still fails on its own logic.

You cannot add money after the collection year. A futures position is marked to market daily and variation margin moves in both directions. A bad week can require a transfer into the account. On a TBSZ that transfer is not allowed: paying in after the collection year does not top up the account, it breaks the arrangement. Your alternative is to park a large cash buffer inside from day one, which drags the return on the whole account down and defeats the purpose of the tax advantage.

You cannot take money out. Withdrawing is the entire point of trading. A profitable quarter that you cannot touch for four more years is not income, it is a hostage. Every withdrawal either breaks the term or triggers the rules for early exit.

The gain is measured as a single number at the end. On a TBSZ, what is taxed is the difference between what you put in and what the account is worth when the term ends. That is elegant for a portfolio and useless for a trader, because it locks all of your results inside one container for five years with no way to interact with the rest of your tax position.

The loss offset you would be giving up

Here is the part that changes the answer for anybody who has traded for more than a year. The headline of TBSZ is zero tax on gains. The thing a futures trader actually needs is the treatment of losses, and the ordinary regime is better at that than the TBSZ could ever be.

Transactions that qualify as an ellenőrzött tőkepiaci ügylet, a controlled capital market transaction under section 67/A of the same act, are taxed on the net annual result. Your winners and losers across the year are netted first and the tax applies to what is left. On top of that there is the adókiegyenlítés, the tax equalisation mechanism, which lets a loss year be set against tax you paid on the same type of income in the two preceding years and recovered through your annual return.

Think about what that means over a realistic three year run. Year one profitable and taxed. Year two a loss. Year three a small profit. Under the controlled transaction rules the year two loss is not simply dead: it can be carried against what you paid in year one through the equalisation calculation. Inside a TBSZ none of that exists. A losing year is just a smaller final balance and there is nothing to offset against anything, because the container is sealed.

For a buy and hold portfolio, sealing the container is fine. For a business where losing years are a normal part of the cycle, it is the wrong tool.

There is a second, quieter cost. A TBSZ ties up capital for five years, and capital tied up is capital that is not available as margin. Futures margin requirements are not fixed: exchanges raise them when volatility rises, which is exactly when you least want to be selling something to free up cash. A trader whose entire liquid net worth is locked inside a sealed account is one margin increase away from being forced to break it early, pay the early exit treatment and lose the benefit that was the whole reason for opening it. The TBSZ works best with money you are certain you will not need. Trading capital is by definition not that money.

What actually applies to your futures account

So the real question is not whether futures fit in a TBSZ. It is whether your trading qualifies as an ellenőrzött tőkepiaci ügylet, because that is the favourable regime that actually exists for you.

The definition has conditions, and they are about the venue and the provider, not about you. In outline, the transaction has to be carried out through an investment service provider, on a regulated or recognised market, and the provider has to be established in an EEA state or in a state that has a double taxation treaty with Hungary and is supervised there. Meet the conditions and the result is taxed at the standard personal income tax rate on the netted annual figure, declared in your own annual return, with the equalisation mechanism available.

Contribution rules around capital income have been changed more than once in recent years, including with effect from 2026, so before you calculate a net figure check the current position rather than a two year old forum post. NAV publishes plain language guides on this: the tájékoztató booklets on the NAV information leaflets page are the place to start.

The US treaty problem nobody warned you about

Now the change a lot of Hungarian traders have missed, and it matters precisely because of that EEA or treaty condition above.

The old double taxation treaty between Hungary and the United States was terminated by the American side and stopped having effect from 1 January 2024. Hungary and the United States are, for the moment, without an income tax treaty.

Read that against the definition of a controlled capital market transaction and the risk becomes obvious. If your broker is established in the United States, it is neither in the EEA nor in a treaty state. The favourable treatment depends on a condition that a US established provider no longer satisfies. If the transactions fall out of that category, they do not disappear: they land in the general category of other income, which is taxed less kindly, with contributions on top, with no netting of winners against losers across the year and no equalisation across years.

Two practical consequences. First, check where your broker entity is actually established, on the statement and the account agreement, not on the website's front page. Several international brokers operate an EEA entity, often in Ireland, Germany or Hungary itself, and which entity holds your account is a fact with a tax consequence. Second, if you are with a US entity, raise this specific point with a Hungarian tax adviser before the filing season rather than after, because the classification decides the rate, the base and whether your losing months count for anything.

This is an area where practice is still settling and where a written opinion from an adviser is worth what it costs.

How to organise the two pots

The sensible structure for a Hungarian trader is not TBSZ or trading. It is both, kept strictly apart.

• The TBSZ is for the portfolio. Index funds, bonds, whatever you intend to hold and not touch. Open one, fill it during the collection year, forget it.
• Open a new TBSZ each year if you keep saving. Each account has its own collection year and its own five year clock, so a ladder of accounts gives you something maturing regularly instead of one enormous all or nothing date. This is the standard use of the vehicle and it works well.
• The trading account stays outside. Margin, withdrawals, monthly cash flow, losses that need to be usable. None of that belongs in a sealed container.
• Never fund the trading account from the TBSZ. Taking money out early to cover a margin call converts a tax free position into a taxed one and does it at the worst possible moment.

On the paperwork side, keep the broker's annual statement, keep your own record of deposits and withdrawals separately from profit and loss, and be consistent about how you convert foreign currency amounts into forint. The reference rates published by the Magyar Nemzeti Bank are the usual basis, and the rule about which rate and which date applies depends on the category of income, which is another reason to settle the classification first.

The summary is short. TBSZ is an excellent instrument for the thing it was designed for, and futures are not that thing. The tax advantage available to you as a futures trader is not zero per cent after five years: it is the netting of your annual result and the ability to carry a bad year against a good one, and that advantage depends on where your broker is established. That is the question worth an hour of your attention, and for most people it is not the question they started with.

This article is general information about Hungarian tax rules, not tax or legal advice. Legislation, rates and contribution rules change frequently, and the correct treatment depends on your own circumstances and on where your provider is established, so check the official sources linked above and consult a qualified Hungarian tax adviser before acting.

tbsz and derivatives

Educational content, not investment advice. Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Any reference to Algomyth results is hypothetical, simulated over historical data, and shown in full on the performance page; past performance does not guarantee future results.