Ügetőszilveszter at Kincsem Park: The Budapest New Year's Eve That Ends Before Midnight

Budapest’s biggest New Year’s Eve sporting event finishes at ten in the evening. At the last edition the gates opened at one in the afternoon, the racing started at two and the fireworks went up at ten to nine, so by the time most of the city was thinking about where to stand at midnight, Kincsem Park was emptying out. The organiser’s own description of it is the biggest outdoor before-party in town, which is a rare case of a venue describing itself accurately.

Get that straight and the day makes sense. This is not a countdown event. It is where the last day of the year goes before the countdown, and it happens on 31 December every year, not on whichever weekend happens to be nearby.

Photo: Kispados via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ügetőszilveszter at Kincsem Park on 31 December 2012, in the fog that year. Conditions vary.

The shape of the day

The last edition ran like this: gates at 13:00, racing from 14:00, fireworks at 20:50, site closed at 22:00. The next one is on the operator’s provisional calendar for 31 December but has not been priced or timetabled yet, so treat these as the shape of the day rather than as this year’s schedule.

Between those markers came ten trotting races and three greyhound races, plus a pony “superfinale”, a puszta-ötös horsemanship display, celebrity drivers, the Horse of the Year awards, DJ sets and a roaming Mirror Man. Food comes from the Gastro Courtyard vendors and around ten Kincsem buffets doing mulled wine and pretzels, with the Kincsem Music Bar and the Panoráma Restaurant upstairs for anyone who wants a table and a roof.

That restaurant is worth flagging. Visitors single it out more than any other part of the site: the cooking, the table service, and a view straight down over the track. On a cold last day of December, being indoors and above the racing is not the worst plan anyone has had.

What you are actually watching

Trotting is the bit that catches people out, because the horse is not ridden.

It pulls a light two-wheeled cart called a sulky, with the driver sitting in it behind the horse, and it has to hold a trot for the whole race. Breaking into a gallop gets penalised. Past that, it works how you would expect: first past the post wins. The venue’s own summary is that the rules are simple and the fastest horse with a driver in control wins, and for a first visit that is genuinely all you need.

Kincsem Park runs three racing codes across the year, gallop, trotting and greyhound, and 31 December is the trotting day.

What it costs

Prices below are what the most recent edition charged. The organiser has not published the next one yet, and historically opens sales in the autumn, so treat these as the shape of the pricing rather than a quote.

Ticket tier	Adult	Student
Earliest advance tier	5,000 Ft (about 14 EUR)	4,000 Ft (about 11 EUR)
Second advance tier	6,500 Ft (about 18 EUR)	5,000 Ft (about 14 EUR)
Standard advance	8,000 Ft (about 22 EUR)	6,000 Ft (about 16 EUR)
On the gate, 31 December	9,000 Ft (about 25 EUR)	7,000 Ft (about 19 EUR)

Prices are in HUF, which is what you pay at the counter. Converted at 1 EUR = 364 HUF, the ECB rate on 6 August 2026. Rates move, so treat the converted figures as indicative.

Children under 14 get in free. You may come across a page saying under-18, and that page is old. Advance tickets sell through Cooltix, and the gap between the earliest tier and the door is nearly double, so this is an event worth buying ahead for.

One number to be actively suspicious of: 2,000 Ft. It appears on an evergreen-looking page and gets copied onward by listings sites, and it has not been the price for years. Anyone budgeting from it arrives 7,000 Ft short at the gate.

The betting, for people who have never done it

Betting is central to the day rather than a sideshow, and it is strictly 18+.

The minimum stake is 500 Ft. The bet types are the familiar ones, win, place, exacta and trifecta, and there is a jackpot pool running across the domestic races. Cash works everywhere on site. Card payment is limited to designated cashiers and only for stakes above 2,000 Ft, so bring notes.

The useful part is that the windows deal with people who have no idea what they are doing all day long, and English and German are generally covered at them.

Bringing children, and being straight about it

This is a family-friendly afternoon built around an adults’ betting event. Both things are true at once and the useful version is to say so.

Working in its favour: under-14s go free, and the last edition laid on pony races, a treasure-hunt map for the youngest, a carousel and a photo booth. Dogs are welcome on a lead and muzzle, though not inside the greyhound stadium while those races are running.

Working against it: the betting is 18+ and it is what the day is organised around, and by the time the light goes the crowd has moved on to mulled wine, champagne and DJ sets. Come for the afternoon with children and leave before the evening turns, and it works well. Plan on staying to the fireworks with a five-year-old and you are at a different event.

Getting there

M2 metro to Pillangó utca. The racecourse sits at Albertirsai út 2-4 in District X, alongside the Hungexpo grounds, roughly ten to fifteen minutes on foot from the station depending on which gate you are aiming for.

Do not drive. On ordinary race days the venue has parking, but for New Year’s Eve the organiser states plainly that there is none at the site, and asks people to arrive on foot, by public transport or by taxi. It names all three without ranking them, so a taxi to the gate is as much the intended answer as the metro.

The horse the place is named after

Kincsem means “my treasure”, and she has a decent claim to being the greatest racehorse anyone has ever bred.

Kincsem in the paddock at Baden-Baden after a win, painted by Emil Adam in 1878. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. She was a flat racehorse rather than a trotter, so she never pulled a sulky; the park simply took her name half a century later.

Foaled in March 1874 at Tápiószentmárton, she raced from 1876 to 1879 and won all 54 of her starts. Not most. All of them. She retired unbeaten at five and that record has stood ever since, comfortably ahead of anything since. Her breeder Ernő Blaskovich kept her only because Baron Orczy looked at her and declined to buy, which tells you what the experts thought of a plain chestnut filly with no white markings and a reputation as common-looking. Her English trainer Robert Hesp knew better.

She raced in Germany and Austria-Hungary, and her signature win was the Kaiserpreis in Vienna in 1877 with Emperor Franz Joseph watching. She died in 1887. There are statues of her and of Imperiál standing in the park, and a 2017 Hungarian film about her that was, at the time, the most expensive ever made in the country.

The racecourse itself opened on 10 May 1925 and took her name in 1977. The grandstand holds 3,500.

Before you go

The venue publishes a genuinely useful English section covering the racing codes, the track, the address and the opening hours, which is more than most Hungarian domestic sports venues manage. The New Year’s Eve event page carries its address and its transport directions in English too. What stays Hungarian-only is the commercial half: the ticket tiers, the on-sale dates and the checkout itself.

In practice that means you can turn up on the day, pay at the gate and have an excellent time without a word of the language. What you cannot easily do is plan it in advance in English. So the move is to check kincsempark.hu in the autumn when sales open, put a translation tool on the ticket page, and buy early, because the door price is the most expensive way in by some distance.

And because this one finishes at ten, you still need a plan for midnight. The New Year’s Eve programmes guide covers what the rest of the city is doing once the racing is over, the Christmas markets are still running in the days before it, and if the metro is unfamiliar territory, tickets and the fine trap are explained in the BudapestGO guide.