OBJECTIVES: An increasing motivation can be experienced among professional workers within Hungarian healthcare system towards foreign employment or career change. Our goal was to assess Hungarian physiotherapists’ migration and career changing behaviour and understand the underlying factors. METHODS: We made a national survey in Hungary during a period of five months (from April to August, 2014). The questionnaire was sent to the members of the Hungarian Physiotherapists’ Association, attached to the monthly newsletter in online form. We received 215 reply out of the sent 340 questionnaire, the response rate was 63.23 %. For data collection the Effort-Reward Imbalance validated questionnaire and our own questionnaire were used  in online form. Only physiotherapists who practice in Hungary were included. The data were analyzed by SPSS 20.0 statistics software. The significance limit was p<0.05. RESULTS: Our results suggest that age (p<0.05) and the rate of financial appreciation experienced in the workplace (p<0.01) significantly affects the appearance of migratory thoughts. Those physiotherapists who do not feel themselves financially appreciated 55 times more likely to search for employment outside the country’s borders [OR=55.28, CI (95%)=18.85 to 161.12]. 50,6% of the subjects involved in the study are considering to leave the physiotherapist career (n=109), the most common causes for that are unfavourable financial-and moral recognition and the lack of possibilities career advancement (p<0.01), (p<0.001), (p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: In order to prevent our already highly-qualified colleagues from leaving the country or from considering to leave the profession we should concentrate on increasing the financial and moral appreciation of the profession within the Hungarian healthcare system and also to provide better opportunities for career advancement.