Remedies and fines: the KDB sector map

Three peaks, three rankings

The KDB sector map draws three distinct rankings, and not a single sector tops all three. At the top of case volume stands construction: with 586 cases, it accounts for 23 per cent of all KDB proceedings. In the share of fined cases, culture and media leads, where 58.6 per cent of proceedings end in a fine. In average fine volume per case, transport takes the lead: in a transport case, the average fine is HUF 12.4 million, more than five times the construction average.

The divergence between the three rankings is no coincidence. Case volume reveals where the greatest number of review disputes take place. The fine rate shows how likely a dispute is to result in a sanction. The average fine reflects the severity of the infringements found. A sector can perform differently on all three metrics, and in many instances it does.

Structurally, the distribution is unconcentrated. The sectoral Herfindahl-Hirschman index stands at 1,134 for case volumes and 1,343 for aggregate fines. Both fall well below the 1,500 concentration threshold. No single sector dominates the KDB docket. Behind the top lies a long tail: ten sectors and the unidentified category together account for 54 per cent of cases.

Three profiles: construction, transport, healthcare

The divergence among case volume, fine rate, and aggregate fine rankings emerges most sharply in the profiles of the three largest sectors. Each reflects a distinct underlying dynamic.

Construction: volume, not severity

Construction accounts for 586 KDB proceedings, or 23.3 per cent of the total. In this sector, the proportion of established infringements also ranks among the highest: fined cases represent 54.8 per cent of the entire sector. Yet the financial weight behind these numbers is modest. The average fine per case is HUF 2.3 million, and the sector's aggregate fine volume stands at HUF 753 million. Construction fills the KDB docket with its sheer volume, not with crushing individual penalties. The sector's win rate in decisions on the merits is 58.4 per cent.

Transport: few cases, heavy fines

Transport saw 195 KDB cases during the period examined, representing 7.8 per cent of the total. By case volume, it ranks as the fourth-largest sector. In aggregate fines, however, it leads all sectors: HUF 917 million, nearly 22 per cent of all KDB fines combined. The average fine per case is HUF 12.4 million—more than five times the construction average and three times the overall corpus average. In a transport KDB case, a sanction is less frequent, but when it arrives, it is substantial.

However, the transport figure cannot simply be treated as a sector-wide finding. The HUF 917 million fine total is heavily concentrated on three entities: Budapesti Közlekedési Központ (BKK), Volánbusz, and MÁV-Volán. Three companies, three municipal transport or state-owned mobility operators. Interpreting this as representative of the wider domestic haulage and transport market would be misleading. The transport figures in reality reflect the KDB exposure of three dominant public entities.

Healthcare: fined less often, but penalised heavily

With 350 KDB cases, the healthcare sector is the second largest in case volume (13.9 per cent). Its fine rate, however, is among the lowest: a fine is imposed in just 31.4 per cent of cases. Yet when a fine is handed down, the average reaches HUF 6.7 million, the second highest after transport. The healthcare sector's win rate in decisions on the merits is 32.6 per cent, meaning that in two-thirds of cases, the contracting healthcare institution successfully defends its procurement procedure.

These three profiles produce three distinct patterns. Construction is a high-turnover, medium-severity sector. Transport is low-frequency and high-impact, driven by three major players. Healthcare is high-volume with a lower fine rate but large individual fines. Each of the three profiles warrants its own reading.

The long tail: ten sectors accounting for half of all cases

Beyond the top three sectors, ten further categories appear in the data. IT and software ranks fourth in case volume, with 221 cases and HUF 262 million in aggregate fines. Environment and waste management accounts for 187 cases and HUF 162 million in fines. The energy and utilities sector recorded 172 cases and HUF 209 million in fines, alongside a remarkable 59.4 per cent ex officio initiation rate between 2022 and 2026. Food and agriculture generated 118 cases and HUF 366 million. Culture and media, defence and security, public administration, and education contribute a further 401 cases and HUF 614 million to the corpus. The unidentified category comprises 182 cases, or 7.2 per cent of the total, where the "subject of procurement" field extracted from decisions did not permit unambiguous sector classification.

Together, this long tail represents almost half of all proceedings and two-fifths of total fines. The KDB docket covers a broad sectoral spectrum, rather than functioning as a closed system confined to one or two dominant industries.

The fine rate as a sector-level indicator

A discretionary determination lies between an application and a fine. Not every application results in a finding of infringement, and not every infringement is followed by a fine. The fine rate shows what share of proceedings in a given sector ends in a fine. The highest rates:

• Culture and media: 58.6 per cent
• Education: 55.4 per cent
• Construction: 54.8 per cent
• Food and agriculture: 52.5 per cent
• Defence and security: 46.8 per cent

The lowest rates:

• IT and software: 24.0 per cent
• Healthcare: 31.4 per cent
• Energy and utilities: 37.8 per cent
• Transport: 37.9 per cent
• Environment and waste: 46.0 per cent

The fine rate does not reflect the severity of an infringement; rather, it reflects the likelihood that the KDB will identify a material breach when examining proceedings initiated in that sector. It is driven by two factors: the merits of applications (how well substantiated the review requests filed in that sector are) and the thoroughness with which procurement procedures are prepared in the industry. The 24 per cent rate for IT and software is the lowest among all twelve defined industry categories (excluding unidentified cases). One reading is that procurement procedures in this sector are meticulously prepared. Another is that a substantial share of review requests filed in the IT market fails to withstand scrutiny on the merits.

Ex officio initiation rates by sector

Proceedings before the KDB are not initiated solely by market participants. The President of the Public Procurement Authority may launch an ex officio review under Section 152(1) of the Public Procurement Act (Act CXLIII of 2015, hereafter "Kbt."), and the proportion of such cases varies widely across sectors. The sectors with the highest ex officio rates:

• Culture and media: 60.9 per cent
• Energy and utilities: 59.4 per cent
• Education: 54.8 per cent
• Construction: 52.8 per cent
• Food and agriculture: 46.1 per cent

The lowest rates:

• IT and software: 17.7 per cent
• Defence and security: 18.7 per cent
• Healthcare: 20.7 per cent
• Transport: 28.3 per cent
• Public administration: 41.2 per cent

The ex officio rate mirrors which sectors attract the keenest regulatory scrutiny. It is no surprise that utilities, education, and construction head the list: these are traditional areas of public expenditure where the Public Procurement Authority routinely audits contracting practice. In ex officio proceedings launched by the KH President, the KDB finds an infringement in nearly 99 per cent of cases, compared to 62.5 per cent on the complainant side. In sectors with high ex officio rates, regulatory attention is significantly denser.

Project scale and fines: no direct proportionality

Raw fine amounts offer only one perspective on risk. Another is how a fine relates to the estimated value of the underlying procurement. Across the corpus as a whole, the median fine-to-contract-value ratio is one per cent. That represents the typical exposure. Yet in certain sectors the median is higher, and individual outlier cases reach as high as 28 per cent.

The sectors with the highest median fine-to-value ratio are public administration and culture and media (both at approximately 1.9 per cent). The lowest are construction and defence and security (approximately 1.0 per cent). What this means in practice is that in a public administration procurement, fine exposure relative to contract value is greater than in construction. Project scale does not predict fine exposure: in the corpus, low-value procurements occasionally suffered high percentage fines, while multi-billion-forint contracts incurred comparatively modest penalties.

Three caveats to keep in mind when reading the map

The sector map comes with three methodological caveats, without which the interpretation of the figures would be distorted.

Sector classification accuracy is moderate

The sector field was determined during our case-by-case reanalysis using automated classification based on the "subject of procurement" field in the decisions. A methodological audit of this classification (tested across 99 cases) showed a 57 per cent exact match with independent manual coding. While this yields reliable aggregation across the full corpus (divergences balance out over large samples), certainty at the individual case level is moderate. Sector proportions (23 per cent construction, 7.8 per cent transport) are robust, but the sector tag assigned to any single individual case should not be treated as definitive.

The unidentified category absorbs data noise

182 cases, or 7.2 per cent of the corpus, received no canonical sector classification. In these decisions, the "subject of procurement" field was either excessively generic (such as "supply of goods") or spanned multiple distinct sectors. The percentage calculations above keep the unidentified category in the denominator, but treat it separately from the sector rankings.

The transport data reflects three entities

The HUF 917 million in aggregate fines recorded for the transport sector is concentrated in cases involving three entities (BKK, Volánbusz, and MÁV-Volán), as detailed in the transport profile. Sector-level conclusions would therefore be misleading: the transport figures reflect the KDB exposure of three dominant public operators, rather than the Hungarian transport sector as a whole.

Methodological note

The analysis is based on the full set of KDB decisions published between 1 January 2022 and 31 August 2026, comprising 2,511 cases. The raw decisions were sourced from the Public Procurement Authority's portal. The sector field was assigned during case-by-case reanalysis using automated classification based on the textual "subject of procurement" field in the decisions. The system classifies cases into 13 canonical sector categories: construction, healthcare, IT and software, transport, environment and waste, energy and utilities, food and agriculture, culture and media, defence and security, public administration, education, other, and unidentified.

While aggregate sector proportions are reliable, individual classifications and the three-entity concentration in the transport sector call for caution. The details are summarised in the Three caveats section.