EKR guide

When the EKR is mandatory

The EKR (Elektronikus Közbeszerzési Rendszer) is the state system at ekr.gov.hu through which Hungarian public procurement procedures are conducted. It is operated by Új Világ Nonprofit Szolgáltató Kft., with the Nemzeti Fejlesztési Központ as professional owner. The detailed rules are set out in Government Decree 424/2017. (XII. 19.).

The main rule is short. Under the Public Procurement Act (Kbt., Act CXLIII of 2015) 40. § (1) a procurement or concession procedure must be conducted using the EKR, and under 41. § (1) every declaration and item of information passing between the contracting authority and economic operators must be in writing, by electronic means.

Exceptions to the main rule

The exceptions are frequently misquoted, so they are worth separating:

• Kbt. 41. § (2): electronic communication need not be used for declarations falling under 28. § (2) and (4) during preparation, for concluding the contract, or for communication after the contract is concluded. That last item is itself subject to exceptions: preliminary dispute settlement, requests for file inspection and the related written communication, and notification under 45. § (2).
• Kbt. 41. § (3): neither the electronic communication requirement nor 40. § (1) applies to certain negotiated procedures without prior publication, to the acquisition of an individual work of art, or to the contractual phase of an innovation partnership.
• Kbt. 41/C. § (1): the contracting authority may itself decide that the EKR need not be used where the procurement requires specialised equipment or file formats, where formats are needed that no other widely available application can handle, where specialised office equipment is required, where a physical or scale model must be submitted, or where the documents contain trade secrets or classified data. In that case 41/C. § (2) requires the summary of evaluation to state why non-electronic communication was necessary.

One citation worth checking. Points e) and f) of Kbt. 41/C. § (1) have been repealed and stand empty in the consolidated text. Running a procedure on paper because of a prolonged outage therefore no longer rests on that ground. This is not an academic point: the official EKR FAQ and the operator's own fee refund notice both still cite point e).

The four rates

System usage fee under section 1/A of Ministerial Decree 40/2017. (XII. 27.) MvM

Case	Gross	Net and VAT
Procedure conducted in the EKR	HUF 50,800	HUF 40,000 + 10,800
Call-off under a framework agreed outside the EKR	HUF 12,700	HUF 10,000 + 2,700
Retrospective publication after a procedure run outside the EKR	HUF 12,700	HUF 10,000 + 2,700
Waiver under Kbt. 31. § (5) or because of a published outage	HUF 0	none

The fee depends on where the procedure was conducted and on whether it is a framework call-off. The procedure type, the regime and the estimated value make no difference: the base case is payable at a single uniform rate in the words of Ministerial Decree 40/2017. (XII. 27.) MvM, so it is the same in the national and the EU regime. The waiver applies only to the retrospective publication fee, and a refund of a fee already paid has to be requested separately.

Paying the fee

The fee may be paid only by bank transfer, to the account of the EKR operator. There is a single formal requirement, and it is the one most transfers fail: the reference field must carry the EKR identifier of the procedure. The operator asks that no special characters accompany it.

If a transfer cannot be identified, the system does not attach it to the procedure. The procedure then cannot proceed, the operator returns the amount within fifteen days, and the fee has to be paid again with the correct identifier.

We deliberately do not reproduce the account number here. Copying another organisation's bank details and maintaining a second copy of them is needless risk: if the operator changes them, a transfer made from a stale copy goes to the wrong place and the procedure stalls. The figures are worth copying from the operator's own page every time: rendszerhasználati díj.

When it must be paid. Under section 1/A (4) the fee must be paid by the time the initiating notice is sent in the EKR: for procedures started by notice, by the time it is dispatched to the Public Procurement Authority, and for those started without a notice, by the time it is sent to the economic operators. What counts is the day the amount is credited to the account, so initiating the transfer is not enough.

Non-payment and refunds

Where the fee has not been paid, or not in the prescribed amount, the operator is entitled under section 1/B (1) to prevent the procedure from starting. The sole exception is a negotiated procedure without prior publication launched on grounds of extreme urgency.

Section 1/C provides for repayment within fifteen days in three cases: where the authority withdraws the initiating notice before publication and evidences this to the operator, where an administrative error caused the fee to be paid twice, and in the prolonged outage case.

The request must be signed in company form and sent by post or through cégkapu. The operator states expressly that it cannot act on requests sent by e-mail. It issues neither pro forma invoices nor advance payment requests.

The tender deadline and the opening

These rules were rewritten by two separate amendments to Government Decree 424/2017. (XII. 19.), and the two dates do not coincide. The deadline window and the timing of the opening were set by Government Decree 427/2024. (XII. 23.) with effect from 1 March 2025. The rule that no tender can be submitted at all after the deadline expires came later, from section 9 of Government Decree 371/2025. (XI. 28.), with effect from 2 December 2025. Under section 35 (14) the latter applies to procedures already under way at that date. Most EKR summaries online still give the earlier text.

The rules in force under Decree 424/2017 on deadlines and the opening

Question	The rule in force
When may the tender or participation deadline be set?	On a working day, at a time between nine in the morning and four in the afternoon.
When does the opening begin?	Sixty minutes after the deadline expires.
Can a tender be submitted after the deadline?	No. The tender must arrive electronically by the expiry of the deadline, the EKR confirms the time of arrival, and after expiry no tender can be submitted in the EKR.
Can the opening be repeated?	No, section 5/B rules it out.

A contradiction worth knowing about. The official EKR FAQ still states: "Once 24 hours have elapsed after the tender deadline, not even a late tender can be submitted in the EKR." That sentence implies a late tender can still be submitted for twenty-four hours after the deadline. The text of section 15 (3) in force says otherwise. Anyone relying on the FAQ assumes room for manoeuvre that does not exist.

Outage: when the deadline does not expire

Section 16 of Decree 424/2017 governs what happens when the system is unavailable. The consequence is serious: in the listed cases the deadline does not expire, and the contracting authority must extend it.

• 16. § (1) a): the EKR, or the part supporting tender preparation or user login, is continuously unavailable for at least twenty-four hours at any point before the deadline during the tendering phase,
• 16. § (1) b): the condition persists continuously for at least five minutes within the sixty minutes immediately preceding the deadline,
• 16. § (1) c): the condition exists at the moment the deadline expires, or
• 16. § (2): a circumstance suggesting an outage arises in that final sixty minutes or at expiry, and the operator cannot establish beyond doubt whether it exists without investigating.

The length of the extension is set by section 16 (4): it must leave adequate time, but at least two days from the notification of the extension where no amendment notice is required, apart from a negotiated procedure without prior publication, four days where the notice is published in the Hungarian Public Procurement Bulletin, and six days where it goes to the Official Journal of the European Union.

Not every fault is the same. Section 22 of the decree distinguishes three states. An üzemszünet is planned, published maintenance. An üzemzavar is unplanned and means the EKR is only partly operable. A működési hiba is an individual fault arising in a given procedure that prevents a procedural step from being taken. The deadline rule above rests on section 22 (2) and (3), that is on the üzemzavar and the működési hiba. Planned maintenance announced in advance does not fall under it and has to be allowed for when the deadline is set. Section 22 (4) further provides that a fault arising solely within the contracting authority's or the economic operator's own sphere is not a működési hiba, so a problem with your own connection or browser does not push the deadline back.

Where the outage affects the opening rather than the deadline, section 16 (5) requires the EKR to carry out the opening immediately after service is restored.

The operator publishes current and closed outages on its own site rather than on ekr.gov.hu: scheduled and unscheduled outages. Section 16 refers to that publication, which makes it the primary evidence in any dispute over a deadline.

Registration

Under section 6 (1) of Decree 424/2017, using the EKR requires registration, and registration is unified: the same natural or legal person may hold only one.

What the official documentation does not state. The portal user manual (v3.19.1) walks through registration field by field, but nowhere records the point that matters most to a foreign or first-time economic operator: EKR registration requires no Ügyfélkapu, no KAÜ authentication, no AVDH and no qualified electronic signature. Login is by username and password. This is consistent with Kbt. 41/A. §, which does not permit a contracting authority to require a qualified electronic signature as a general matter.

Contracting authorities are in a different position: under section 6 (2) the registration and data amendment of a contracting authority organisation is subject to approval by the Public Procurement Authority. No such approval applies to economic operators.

One terminological point that older summaries consistently get wrong: the adviser register is now called ÁKSZ (state public procurement adviser). FAKSZ has ceased to exist as a legal institution, so the phrase "FAKSZ registration" does not describe the current system.

Who can do what in the EKR

What a contracting authority can do, and what an economic operator can

Action	Contracting authority	Economic operator
Organisation registration	Subject to Public Procurement Authority approval	No approval required
System usage fee	Pays, per procedure	Pays nothing
Creating a procedure, sending the notice	Yes	No
Submitting a tender or request to participate	No	Yes
Rectification notice	Issues it	Responds to it
Access to the procurement documents	Publishes them	Yes, even without registration
Searching notices in the procedure archive	Yes	Yes, even without registration
Requesting alerts on new notices	Yes	Yes, even without registration

Alerts differ from user expectations in two respects: they can be requested without registration, by giving an e-mail address, and they expire after two months. The system sends reminders before expiry, but failing to renew silently ends the alerts.

Creating a procedure also carries a deadline that is easy to overlook: under section 5/A the contracting authority may send the initiating notice for publication, or in a procedure without a notice the invitation to tender or to negotiate, within one year of creating the procedure in the EKR.

The official documentation

The official EKR support materials are published on the support page. It currently links thirteen manuals, set out below. The figures are as at 28 September 2026. The manuals are under copyright, so we link to them rather than reproduce their content.

Core volumes

Manual	What it covers	Version	Length
Volume II, contracting authority	The full set of procedural actions on the authority side	3.0	640 pages
Volume II, tenderer	The same on the tenderer side	2.18.3	167 pages
Portal	The surface available without logging in, the registers and the procedure archive	3.19.1	316 pages
eForms	Completing the EU notice templates	3.0	213 pages

Module manuals

Manual	What it covers	Version	Length
Electronic auction, contracting authority	Preparing and running an electronic auction	3.0	48 pages
Electronic auction, tenderer	Taking part in the auction	3.0	29 pages
Preliminary market consultation	Advertising and running the consultation in the EKR	2.19.1	75 pages
Contract manager and public contract register	Publishing contracts and their modifications	2.10.3	59 pages
eSzámla	Format validation of the electronic invoice	1.4	14 pages
Volume IV, below-threshold purchases	Handling purchases below the procurement threshold	V3	139 pages
Support functions	User and permission management, organisation data	2.12	90 pages
Kbt. 111. § w)	Purchases under Kbt. 111. § w)	not stated	90 pages
Exporting award notice data	Field dictionary for the open data exports	12	242 pages

Four things are worth knowing before relying on any of them:

• The authority and tenderer volumes are not on the same version. The authority volume is at 3.0, the tenderer volume at 2.18.3. The two therefore describe different states of the system, and the divergence is not always flagged.
• Outages are not covered. The highest-stakes scenario a tenderer can face is not addressed in substance in the manuals above. The only treatment is a single FAQ entry that cites a repealed provision.
• The technical requirements are out of date. The FAQ still specifies "at least Internet Explorer 9", Firefox 32 and Chrome 57. Internet Explorer went out of support in 2022.
• The version number does not always come from the document. The portal manual's own cover reads "Backend: 3.17.1 | Frontend: 3.17.1", and 3.19.1 is only the support-page label and the file name. The Kbt. 111. § w) volume states no version at all. Seven of the manuals are protected against copying, and the auction and eSzámla volumes still describe the system as it stood between 2019 and 2021.

Helpdesk: +36 1 465 8899, working days between 8am and 4pm, or ugyfelszolgalat@ujvilag.gov.hu. For questions of procurement law they give ekr@nfk.gov.hu.