What is Full-time equivalent FTE?

If you’re calculating FTE for a different purpose and consider 40 hours to be full time in your organization, you can use that as your criteria. If an organization considers full-time to be a 40-hour working week then one full-time employee will count as 100% FTE. 100% FTE can also be achieved in several other ways, for example, through two part-time employees or four employees who work 10 hours per week. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, the President’s budget office, will often place upper limits on the total number of FTE that a given agency may utilize each year. In the past, if agencies were given a ceiling on the actual number of employed workers, which was reported on a given day of the year, the agency could employ more than this number for much of the year.

In other cases, you’ll need multiple employees to fill the quota—two part-timers, four employees that only work 10 hours a week, etc. You can create various combinations, depending on your business needs. That means that you have seven employees, totaling 170 hours per week. Employers can use an average number of FTE employees for each pay period falling within a month.

How to calculate FTE for PPP?

First, you need to account for the hours of a full-time weekly schedule and the actual employee hours they would be scheduled to work. If it’s a 40 hour week, each employee that works 40 hours per week is equal to 1.0 FTE. FTE stands for full-time equivalent and is used by businesses to calculate the total number of full-time hours worked within their business among all employees.

• The ACA establishes that full-time employees are the number of employees who, for a calendar month, averages at least 30 hours per week or 130 hours of work per month.
• To calculate your FTE when applying for a PPP loan, take the average number of hours worked by employees each week for the covered period, divide by 40, and round to the nearest tenth.
• First, count the total number of employees who worked at your company at any time during the year, both full-time and part-time.
• However, you’d want to average those hours over a time period such as four months.
• An FTE 100% is a full-time employee, the one working 40-hour workweeks (also known as an FTE 1.0).

If a company has work schedule of 40 hours a week, the employees expected to work 40 hours per week are 1.0 FTEs. As evident, once you have the total number of hours per day, you’ll be able to pick whatever days/employees ratio you want to carry out the estimated workload. However, if your company employees part-time employees as well, several of them together may equal 1.0 FTE. Additionally, FTE calculations give you a better sense of your current staffing levels so that you can plan and budget accordingly. Full-time equivalent , or whole time equivalent , is a unit that indicates the workload of an employed person in a way that makes workloads or class loads comparable across various contexts. FTE is often used to measure a worker’s or student’s involvement in a project, or to track cost reductions in an organization. An FTE of 1.0 is equivalent to a full-time worker or student, while an FTE of 0.5 signals half of a full work or school load.

Start hiring globally with Ontop

Full-Time Employees generally work more than 4 days or 30 hours a week and are permanently employed, as opposed to being temporary or seasonal. In many countries, a Full-Time Employee is also entitled to health-care benefits and vacation pay among other legal employment standards. If the total is at least 50, the employer is an ALE and is required to offer health insurance to all qualifying employees. To be required to provide COBRA continuation coverage, a company must employ at least 20 full-time equivalent employees on more than half of its working days in the past year.

You can calculate FTE to determine how much a project will cost in terms of time and personnel needs. Employees who worked less than 40 hours per week on average during a specific calculation period will have their average hours worked on a weekly basis added together. Divide this total number with 40, and https://www.bookstime.com/ then round the total to the nearest tenth to get the total FTE. (For a year, that is 2,080 hours with 40-hour workweeks and 1,560 hours with 30-hour workweeks, which is considered full-time for ACA reporting). There are some exceptions when calculating FTE for the purposes of the small business tax credit.

Plan your hiring for a project or new business

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. It also doesn’t give you any insight into how those numbers break down across departments and individuals.

For a 40-hour workweek, a full-time employee that works 40 hours counts as 1 FTE. A part-time employee that works 20 hours a week counts as 0.5 FTE.

Calculating FTEs for the Small Businesses Tax Credit

A full-time employee is equal to one FTE; a part-time employee is equal to 0.5 FTE. Rather than hiring new employees, businesses can use FTE to deploy staff across various departments thereby keeping costs down. Depending on the type of work that is required, management can decide the number of full-time employees that are needed for a particular project and assign employees to those positions accordingly. For a business, specifically those with a large number of part-time workers, converting worked hours into FTEs is important in helping the company know how many full-time employees the part-time workers are equal to. Full-time equivalents is a metric that measures the total number of full-time employees you have based on hours worked rather than the exact number of employees. Each part-time employee counts as a fraction of one FTE based on how many hours they work on average.

Bear in mind that these are just simple FTE example calculations — project managers approach FTE from a different angle while federal programs use different FTE calculation methods. In the end, round this down to the nearest whole number , and add the 2 full-time employees to get the final FTE . FTE will influence how many hours employees can accrue for PTO. The actual PTO an employee can accrue may depend on several factors, including years of employment that dictate an employee hourly PTO accrual rate. These rates will depend on PTO accrual rate policies of a company, organization, or institution. We already discussed how to use work hours to calculate FTE for individual employees.

How Do You Calculate Full-Time Equivalents?

Clockify lets you track your cost rates per employee and then compare and contrast them with employee billable hourly rates. Jennifer fte meaning Hartman has more than 20 years of writing and content experience, working with small businesses and Fortune 100 companies.

• In the end, round this down to the nearest whole number , and add the 2 full-time employees to get the final FTE .
• Within this method, the employee is credited with 8 hours for each day he or she would be required to work at least 1 hour .
• Depending on how big a company is, the ERC is calculated differently.
• This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, nor should you rely on it for, legal, tax, or accounting advice in any jurisdiction.
• Small businesses are eligible for small-employer health care tax credit — they apply to employers who employ less than 50 full-time equivalent employees.
• Get this by multiplying the number of full-time employees by the number of hours in a working week .

For example, you may want to do this when you want to make an FTE offer to a new employee during a job interview. And, the actual number of hours attached to a FTE will also depend on your organization’s policy.

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.