Where Do the Most Hungarian Americans Live?
About 1.25 million Americans trace their ancestry to Hungary, and where they live is a map of where the country's factories used to be. Hungarian immigrants arrived in force in the late 1800s and early 1900s to work the steel mills and heavy industry of the Great Lakes and the Northeast, and their descendants are still concentrated in that same belt more than a century later.
By raw numbers, Ohio leads every state, with 153,069 residents of Hungarian ancestry, just ahead of New York. The industrial spine of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan holds a striking share of the national total.
| Rank | State | Hungarian residents |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ohio | 153,069 |
| 2 | New York | 151,471 |
| 3 | Pennsylvania | 105,002 |
| 4 | California | 96,285 |
| 5 | Florida | 92,356 |
| 6 | New Jersey | 79,659 |
| 7 | Michigan | 77,462 |
| 8 | Illinois | 40,042 |
Cleveland is the Hungarian capital of the country
Zoom into metro areas and the industrial pattern gets sharper. The New York metro has the most Hungarian-ancestry residents overall, but Cleveland is the real story: 63,649 people, second in the nation and far more than a metro its size would suggest. Cleveland's West Side was one of the largest Hungarian settlements outside of Budapest a century ago, and the community left a permanent mark. The other steel towns follow the same logic, with Pittsburgh and Detroit both high on the list.
| Rank | Metro area | Hungarian residents |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | New York, NY-NJ | 154,969 |
| 2 | Cleveland, OH | 63,649 |
| 3 | Detroit, MI | 38,634 |
| 4 | Chicago, IL-IN | 38,612 |
| 5 | Philadelphia, PA-NJ | 35,403 |
| 6 | Los Angeles, CA | 35,242 |
| 7 | Pittsburgh, PA | 34,595 |
| 8 | Kiryas Joel, NY | 27,898 |
Two very different Hungarian communities
The metro list holds a clue to a second story. Kiryas Joel, the small Hasidic village in New York's Hudson Valley, ranks eighth in the entire country for Hungarian ancestry, and the city of Monsey nearby is also near the top. That is because a large share of "Hungarian" ancestry in the New York area is Hungarian-Jewish, tracing to the Satmar Hasidic community that originated in what is now Hungary and Romania. It is a different history from the Cleveland steelworkers, feeding into the same census category. One spelling of "Hungarian" covers a Rust Belt industrial migration and a Hasidic religious one at the same time.
You can see the full ranking for every state, metro, and city on the largest Hungarian population by state and by metro pages, or compare the ancestry makeup of any two places with the compare tool.
Sources
Figures are from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (self-reported ancestry), compiled on the CensusEasy Hungarian ancestry rankings.
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How many Hungarian Americans are there?
About 1.25 million people in the United States report Hungarian ancestry, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey.
Which state has the most Hungarian Americans?
Ohio, with 153,069 residents of Hungarian ancestry, just ahead of New York and Pennsylvania. Cleveland is the leading metro area outside of New York.
Why are so many Hungarian Americans in the Rust Belt?
Hungarian immigrants arrived in large numbers in the late 1800s and early 1900s to work the steel mills and heavy industry of the Great Lakes and Northeast, and their descendants remain concentrated there.
