Consumption of electricity, water and gas through pipelines rose 4.9% and manufacturing was up by 3%, the national statistics agency said. Mining activity, however, dipped by 3.1%.
Compared with the same month a year earlier, industrial output was 1.7% higher, driven by manufacturing.
"Even though we do see improvement on the global economic environment, they are still very cautious," said OCBC Bank's head of Greater China research Tommy Xie, on the issue of unemployment.
The seasonally adjusted monthly increase reported by national statistics agency INEGI compared with the Reuters consensus forecast for an advance of 0.7%.
Growth was driven by the construction sector, which rose 2.2%, INEGI said.
Looking at index components, manufacturing production dropped 3.1pc from the same month in 2019, while electricity supply declined 7.2pc as the COVID-19 pandemic hit demand.
Hungary's open economy depends on vehicle manufacturing, which all but halted in March when the pandemic began to spread in the central European country.
Electronics, food, beverage and tobacco products recorded smaller drops in output in April.
Output fell 18.8pc in April from March and 27.2pc from the same month a year ago, both by far the steepest declines since the IBGE series began in 2002.
The median estimates in a Reuters poll of economists projected a monthly fall of 29.2pc and an a