Pécs on the Rise: A Growing Regional Hub for Business Service Centres

Hungary’s business services sector is growing into one of the pillars of the national economy. In 2025, the country hosts 245 business service centres (BSCs) employing 118,543 people, almost double the number of centres operating in 2020. While Budapest still dominates this landscape, regional cities are steadily gaining weight – and Pécs with Baranya county is emerging as one of Hungary’s most promising locations for BSCs, offering a cost-competitive alternative to the capital while still providing access to a qualified talent pool.

Although Hungary’s BSC sector remains heavily concentrated in Budapest, where the majority of centres and jobs are located, Pécs already hosts several international and domestic service providers in IT, shared services, customer service and professional services. This regional momentum is further underlined by a new investment in 2025, when an additional BSC – a German customer service company – relocated to Pécs, planning to hire around 100 employees locally. For Baranya, Pécs acts as the clear regional hub, anchored by the University of Pécs, which supplies a steady stream of graduates with language and business skills.

Compared to Budapest, office and labour costs in Pécs are significantly lower, and competition for talent is less intense. This makes the city especially attractive for companies looking to optimise costs or set up a “second site” in addition to their capital-based operations. From a real estate perspective, Pécs offers a distinctly cost-efficient alternative: ‘A’ category office rents are typically EUR 12–14/m²/month, while ‘B’ category options can be even lower. By contrast, Budapest operates on a premier European office market level, with prime rents at around EUR 25.25/m²/month, average ‘A’ category rents of about EUR 17.2/m²/month and ‘B’ category rents at EUR 13.1/m²/month.

At the national level, 79% of companies are planning to bring more high value-added functions to Hungary, and 11% are considering new offices in regional cities rather than concentrating exclusively in Budapest. Pécs and Baranya are perfectly aligned with this direction: they offer credible scale by regional standards but still plenty of room to grow; they combine university talent, cultural attractiveness and lower living costs, supporting both recruitment and retention; and they sit in a region singled out on Hungary’s investment incentive map, which explicitly favours locations outside the capital.

For investors who already have a large presence in Budapest, Pécs can serve as a second-site location for business continuity and risk diversification, a specialist hub (for example a language-specific contact centre, IT competence centre or finance back office), and a platform to deepen R&D and university cooperation in a less crowded environment.

Taken together, these trends show that while Budapest will remain Hungary’s primary BSC hub, Pécs and Baranya are steadily gaining ground as a strategic, future-proof choice for international service investments.