All You Need to know about FTE Full-Time Equivalent

what is fte employment

Divide the total hours worked by all of your employees by the number of available full-time hours in a year (usually 2,080). This gives you the total number of hours worked by all of your employees. FTE uses 1.0 to mean one full day of work, while 0.5 would mean half of that amount or less than a full day of work. Not every full-time employee is an FTE employee, since FTE status only includes employees who work hours contributing toward a 1.0 or 0.5 FTE measurement.

According to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), employers with 50 or more FTEs are required to offer ACA-compliant benefits. The ACA defines a full-time employee as someone who works 30 hours per week or 130 hours per month. If your company considers the number of hours for a full-time position as 40 hours per week, note that working 30 or more hours counts as 1 FTE for purposes of ACA compliance. A full-time equivalent (FTE) is a unit of measurement used to figure out the number of full-time hours worked by all employees in a business. If your business considers 40 hours to be a full-time workweek, then an employee working 40 hours per week would have an FTE of 1.0.

Calculating FTE for the Small Business Tax Credit

With 14 employees, 7 of which are full-time and 7 part-time, the staffing capacity is 9.04 full-time employees per year. First, it is necessary to determine the number of hours worked by part-time employees. Five of them work full-time (40 hours per week), three occupy a part-time position each working 20 hours a week, and the other two each work 10 hours per week.

  • The full time equivalent, often abbreviated as FTE is an indicator that reflects an employee’s productive capacity.
  • Calculating headcount is as simple as adding up your employees, while FTE refers to the number of full-time hours being worked at the company.
  • If you’re trying to determine whether or not you’re an ALE in the United States, you should use the IRS’s minimum of a 30-hour work week in your calculation.
  • An FTE 100% is a full-time employee, the one working 40-hour workweeks (also known as an FTE 1.0).
  • Our model will then instantly calculate the Full Time Equivalent for you.
  • Horizons can support your business by helping you hire full-time employees anywhere in the world.

If the employees work the same number of hours every week (especially part-time employees), the FTE will be the same every week. Still, in this case, it’s more reasonable to take some bigger periods, let’s say, 90-day or 120-day periods, during which you can take the average number of hours spent by part-time employees. A full-time equivalent (FTE) is a unit of measurement used to determine the amount of full-time hours worked by all employees in an organization. If a normal work week consists of 40 hours, an employee who works for 40 hours per week has an FTE of 1.0 while a part-time employee working only 20 hours per week has an FTE of 0.5.

Spend Minutes Tracking Hours.

If you are such an employer, then you are eligible to apply for a tax credit in the amount of 50% of employer-paid health care premiums. To calculate an FTE salary, you must convert an employee salary into a full-time equivalent salary within a full year, regardless of whether the employee has a full-time or a part-time position. Essentially, the FTE fte meaning is the number of determined full-time positions in an organisation. It is used to count employees depending on their degree of employment. It can also do the same for a full-time employee who hasn’t completed a whole year of work yet. Once all employee hours are accounted for, you can complete this step by adding all the hours worked for the week.

In a 0.75 FTE position, an employee will typically work 75 percent of the hours of a full-time employee. If a working week is 40 hours over 5 days, a 0.75 FTE employee will work just 30 hours in that same period. This could refer to either a single full-time employee or two or more part-time employees whose contributions add up to the equivalent of one full-time worker. We’ll assume that where you are, full-time employment means working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 52 weeks a year. Benefits like paid time off and maternity/paternity leave are all included within the number of hours worked, so don’t worry about accounting for these hours. Let’s say you have four full-time employees, three part-time employees working 20 hours a week for 30 weeks per year, and one part-time employee working 15 hours a week for 52 weeks per year.

What does FTE mean?

Headcount is the total number of employees working in your company, including part-time and full-time workers. They are not measured in fractions or percentages — one employee is equal to one employee, no matter how many hours that employee has worked throughout the year. Calculating headcount is good for creating organizational strategies and setting goals, but it doesn’t give you specific insight as FTE does for data like departmental labor. Standard FTE assumes that typical employees work 40-hour workweeks, five days a week, and eight hours a day. Since there are 52 weeks per year, this equates to an average full-time employee having the opportunity to work a total of 2,080 hours. This number doesn’t reflect sick leave, paid time off, seasonal assistance, or paid overtime.

You just need to add the total amount of hours worked by all of your employees and divide it by 40h. To track employee work hours and decide whether your employees are full-time equivalents, there are a lot of great tools for tracking teams. The baseline in order to qualify as 1.0 unit of a full-time employee is set at 40 hours, so a part-time employee that worked 20 hours would be marked as a 0.5 FTE. Employers can use FTE to evaluate their hiring capacity and current payroll, as well as for reporting purposes related to labor laws and employee benefit programs. Managing employees, time tracking, overtime, and time-off data in disparate systems is complicated.

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Whether you are looking to expand your business internationally, outsource your operations, or take on more remote staff contact us today to discuss your needs. FTE stands for full-time equivalent and measures how many full-time employees an organization has. To help you determine if you are eligible for a small-employer healthcare tax credit, you need to count the number of employees employed in your company throughout the year. Let’s say that a full-time weekly schedule in your company is 40 hours per week, and your employees are scheduled with 40 hours of work a week. This is a straightforward example since each employee who works 40 hours per week in your company has a 1.0 FTE. Since both are considered to be full-time schedules in their respective companies, both count as a 100% or 1.0 FTE.

  • Once you have this information, you can determine how many part-time employees are equal to a full-time employee in terms of FTE.
  • Some are part-time workers, others only work during certain months of the year, others have flexible schedules, others work during one project, and so on.
  • And the actual number of hours attached to an FTE will also depend on your organization’s policy.
  • Once you’ve calculated your employee FTE, you can see how many part-time employees it takes to complete the same workload as a full-time employee.

FTE is also used in the United States to determine whether an employer is an ALE (Applicable Large Employer) for the fiscal year. Finally, small business owners in the United States need this metric to see if they can apply for a tax credit in the amount of 50% of the employer-paid health care premiums. You can use your business’s definitions for full-time and part-time employees.

Calculating FTEs for Large Employers Under the ACA

Because the number of employees says nothing about a company’s actual work performance. First, let’s look at what full-time equivalent or FTE actually means. The full time equivalent, often abbreviated as FTE is an indicator that reflects an employee’s productive capacity. An FTE of 1.0, for example, corresponds to the hours worked in a day for a full-time employee.

what is fte employment

The FTE is used to determine how much paid time off employees can take, and different organizations have different policies regarding PTO. The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) is a law requiring some employers to offer continued health coverage to workers and their families when they are no longer eligible for the company-provided plan. The remote workforce model is ideal to build a global team and can be a win-win for both your company and employees. Hours worked are just like they sound — how many hours an employee has worked. You need to understand hours worked for financial processes, like billing and budgeting. Independent contractors are not the same as employees, and the U.S. government has strict standards to reduce how many companies misuse contractors as laborers without paying the appropriate taxes and benefits.

How To Calculate FTE

To get a total, divide the total number of full-time hours worked by part-time hours worked. For example, if your full-time employees work 40 hours per week and part-time workers average 20 hours per week, divide 40 by 20 and you’ll get 2, meaning two part-time workers equal one full-time employee. In other words, one part-time employee is equal to 0.5, or half, of a full-time employee for hours, worked. Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a way for employers to standardize their headcount and combine their part-time workers’ hours to figure out how many full-time employees would work those hours. Like we mentioned, some employees count 37.5 to be the standard workweek, which is the number of hours actually worked when you exclude the breaks. HR departments use FTE salaries to determine part-time workers’ salary compensation.

what is fte employment

This is particularly true for large organizations that employ a variety of full-time, part-time, and flexible staff. In the context of the Health Care Reform Act, the Affordable Health Care Act requires the calculations that determine whether a business is classified as owned by a large employer or a small business. These calculations are used to clarify the company’s obligations regarding employee health benefits. In practice, these numbers still usually fall somewhere between 32 and 40 hours per week, with 40 hours per week (8 hours per day, 5 days per week) being a common norm for a full-time schedule. The list should include the employee’s name and the number of hours they work per week.