Hungary is situated in Eastern Europe, in the rolling plains of the Carpathian Basin. It covers an area of 93,000 km2, which is roughly equivalent to 1% of Europe’s territory. There are 3,145 settlements, 289 of which are urban; their number increased by 123 in the last 15 years, and tripled over the past 25 years. Two-thirds of the country’s inhabitants live in urban settlements. Hungary has been an EU member state since 2004.
The population of Hungary was 10,077,000 on 1 January 2006 (male: 4.7 million; female: 5.3 million) (HCSO, p. 9). Hungary’s population is aging; the total number of people in age cohorts above 60 exceeds the total number of 1-year old to14-year-olds by about half a million.
On 1 April 2005, at the time of the micro census, the number of households was more than 4 million, 139 thousand higher compared to that in 2001. The total number of marriages is decreasing, consistently below the number registered in 2000. Slight increases may occur: in 2005, 44,100 couples got married, 0.7% more than the year before. Decrease remains the dominant trend, though. There was no significant change in the divorce rate: 24,700 marriages were dissolved in 2005, about the same as the year before. Since people get married later in life, divorces happen at a later age, too (HCSO, p. 9)
