CEE: Household saving rate ease

Erste Bank Research Team Erste Bank

On the radar

Today, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia will release retail sales growth in September.
Hungary will release also industrial output growth.
Czechia is scheduled to publish September’s inflation rate.

Economic developments

The latest Eurostat data point to a slight decline in the household saving rate in the Eurozone. In 2Q26, the seasonally adjusted saving rate fell to 14.2% from 14.4% in 1Q26, continuing the gradual decline from around 15% in 2024. According to Eurostat, the quarterly decrease reflected household consumption growing somewhat faster than gross disposable income (+1.3% q/q versus +1.1%, respectively). As far as CEE region is concerned, data for 2Q26 are not available yet. Nevertheless, the trend for Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Romania seems to follow the pattern in Eurozone. The latest development suggests some normalization rather than build-up of precautionary savings. On more general level, households in those four CEE countries, continue to save somewhat on average less than their Eurozone peers. As shown in the chart, the average saving rate for Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Romania stood at roughly 11% in 1Q26, around 2–3 percentage points below the Eurozone rate. Within the CEE the situation differs to great extent, however. While in Czechia and Hungary saving rate in close to 20%, in Poland and Romania it is very low. In Romania it even turned negative in 1Q26 (-3.6%) that could be explained by households using their saving buffer to smooth consumption due to loss of purchasing power.

Market movements

As far as global developments are concerned, chief economist Philip Lane signaled that surging energy costs, higher long-term market yields and a fiscal impulse turning negative in 2027 and 2028 may limit the space for the ECB tightening after two hikes. Last week, risk premiums on 10-year French government bonds jumped to around 140bp. At just under 5.0%, the yield on 10-year French government bonds thus reached its highest level since the 2008 financial crisis. A key trigger was the publication of the French government’s draft budget for 2027. Should the situation in the financial markets continue to deteriorate, the ECB could activate the Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI). This instrument was created to counteract unjustified and disorderly market developments, provided they pose a serious threat to the uniform transmission of monetary policy in the Euro Area. In CEE, Romanian President Dan named Foreign Ministry state secretary Luca Niculescu as prime minister-designate. Political tensions remain in place. The Romanian leu recovered marginally on Monday and we see this mild strengthening bias following S&P review. In Slovakia, the government approved the 2027-2029 general government budget draft, targeting a 2027 deficit of EUR 7.44bn or 4.9% of GDP, narrowing to 4.5% in 2028 and 4.0% in 2029 only if additional measures worth 0.8% and 1.4% of GDP are adopted.

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Erste Bank Research Team

Erste Bank

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