In the domestic legal and administrative literature, the earliest legal scholar to use the concept of administrative contract was Zoltán Magyary (1888-1945).2 It is not mentioned explicitly in secondary literature, but Magyary himself mentions contracts between two municipalities, or a city and a county, or a city and a state as examples of administrative contracts,3 or rather, without mentioning examples, he summarises this as a contract on administrative matters between two administrative legal entities.4 (It would be worthwhile to review the extent to which such contracts have survived in our city or perhaps national archives, given the sad destruction of the documents of the Hungarian Royal Administrative Court and the small number of sporadically surviving administrative court judgments, such a type of memorial material could open up new perspectives. The regrettable elimination of administrative court documents, which is basically the result of the burning down of the predecessor of today’s the National Archives of Hungarian National Archives5 in 1956, is somewhat offset by the abundant and exemplary literature6 on adjudication law).7

Legal literature also refers to administrative contracts that already existed at that time, so the administrative contract was not only a scientific but also a living legal concept, even if it was not given a separate name before Magyary.8

However, it is necessary to note that rereading the works of previous authors may yield promising results. In his first Hungarian university textbook on administrative law, Volume IV of the Handbook of Administrative Law, Emil Récsi (1854-1855), he does not examine administrative contracts but rather draws lessons for commercial administration from contemporary bilateral international legal acts known as commercial contracts (the Austro-Turkish commercial treaty of 1718 and the Austro-Russian commercial treaty of 4 July 1846).9

As regards the socialist period, some authors speak of the banishment of the legal institution,10 however, it did exist in a narrow circle under the name of a state administrative agreement (state administrative contract), as non-state administrative legal acts of state administrative bodies. At that time, it existed in the form of public service contracts (as civil law contracts), or in the context of cooperation between council bodies and other social bodies, or in the form of research contracts concluded by state administrative bodies with researchers, also on civil law grounds. In the context of state administrative agreements concluded between a state administrative body and economic organisations for the creation of a common object, the public administrative nature in the modern sense prevailed to some extent.11

Act I of 2017 on the Code of Public Administrative Procedure (abbr. Kp.) Section 4 (7) para. Point 2 of the Act makes the public administration contract no longer a doctrinal, i.e. a legal principle, but a law-based, i.e. a legally defined and circumscribed concept:

The possibility of initiating litigation has also been opened in relation to administrative agreements.14 The typology of domestic administrative agreement is not a matter on which legal science has clearly reached an agreement. Instead of a clear-cut system, insufficiently settled views prevail on the issue. Systematic categorisations, enumerative descriptions, and fragmented approaches can be distinguished.15

In addition to the authority contract, administrative agreements also include the public space use contract; the state support contract; the public procurement contract; the concession contract; and the public service contract.16 The association agreements and agreements on the assumption of competences of local governments can also be classified in this category.17