No separate figures for those of Hungarian birth living in the country are obtainable before 1921. At that census there were 44, but in the 1961 census there were 1,025 registered as aliens.

Before the First World War a number of peasants settled at Tuatapere in Southland, where they took up dairying and potato growing, but they have now been assimilated. In 1956, after the uprising in Hungary, the Government decided to allow an entry of 1,000 of those who had fled the country. This raised the number from 378 in 1956 to 1,496 in 1961 and 1,025 in 1963.