Full Time Equivalent FTE Definition, How to Calculate, Importance

It can also do the same for a full-time employee who hasn’t completed a whole year of work yet. No, people who own the organization or company cannot be counted in the FTE and average annual wage calculation. One of the most common yet often perplexing compliance concerns HR teams encounter is calculating FTE, or full-time equivalency. From what it is and why it’s used to how to calculate the number, find out everything you need to know about how to calculate FTEs. With so many employment intricacies, it’s crucial you clearly distinguish between each type of employee, especially if you’re managing a large global team. Globalization Partners’ global employment platform streamlines worker classification and ensures your company is compliant in key areas like employment contact generation and payroll. At G-P, our industry leading Global Employment Platform™ helps companies unlock their full potential by building highly skilled global teams in days instead of months.

Three full-time employees would have an FTE of 3.0 and the part-time FTE is 0.875. Company A considers 40 hours per week as a full-time position. 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. The IRS taxpayer advocate service has created an estimator that can help with this calculation. If you increase your opening hours and are open every day of the week, then you have a 0.875 FTE. If the trucks open at the same time, then you require two different people to run them. Employers can use FTE to guide their hiring strategy and plan for a project, while governments often use the metric to determine program eligibility.

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A full-time equivalent assists in tallying work hours, salaries, employee productivity, and company’s or workplace’s productivity, as well as calculating how much time an assignment or a project will take. If a company bills clients, or pays out overtime, identifying teammates’ full-time equivalency helps identify and track organizational costs. To find the equivalent of a full-time day, divide the total number of hours by 8. If you fail to meet the mandate for one full year but have met other requirements, you will owe an amount equal to the number of full-time employees you employed during that year, minus up to 30 employees. This provision also requires employers to give employees 1095-Cs for tax purposes and to determine whether the ALE owes further payments or penalties. Use online estimator tools to examine what penalties or payments you might be held accountable for.

• 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.
• To determine this amount, ask yourself, what do you expect a full-time employee to work in terms of hours per week?
• Consequently, the FTE for a part-time employee working 20 hours a week would be 0.5.
• If you have at least 50 FTEs employees, you are an ALE for the year, which means you are subject to specific reporting requirements and share responsibilities under the ACA.
• The amount they are liable to pay the IRS for an employer shared responsibility payment.
• To identify the FTE of part-time employees, divide the total hours worked by part-time employees by the annual hours worked by one full-time employee (i.e., 2,080 hours).
• You can adjust and diversify the calculations based on the project’s scope and requirements, scaling up or down as necessary.

There are several tools online called “employment calculators” to get an estimate about your overall costs for employees in different countries. Let’s say that you need to calculate the total amount of hours, time, and money required for your business to run successfully.. FTE is the answer, full time equivalent will help you do this.

Example FTE Calculation

Full-time equivalents is a metric used to show you what your total labor hours equates to in full-time employees. Similarly, if an employee works 20 hours a week, then there should be two such employees to complete the full-time schedule. These two part-time employees will be considered one full-time employee. If a part-timer completes 10 hours a week, then four such part-timers will constitute one full-time employee. Now add the total number of hours worked by full-time employees to that of part-time employees to get the total number of hours for all employees.

For example, if Jane works 35 hours a week, or 140 hours in a month, she would be considered a full-time employee. Full-time equivalency is a metric that quantifies the number of full-time employees at an organization based on hours worked, and quantifies how many part-time employees add up to a full-time employee. For example, if your organization’s work week is 40 hours, two part-time employees who each work 20 hours in a week would equal one FTE. In the last step, just divide the total number of hours of full-time employees and part-time employees by the number of regular full-time hours to generate the full time equivalent for a certain period of time. Headcount is the total number of employees working in your company, including part-time and full-time workers.

FTE calculator for project managers

Jean Murray, MBA, Ph.D., is an experienced business writer and teacher who has been writing for The Balance on U.S. business law and taxes since 2008. The FTE is used to determine how much paid time off employees can take, and different organizations have different policies regarding PTO.

This is for ease of calculating the cost — in time, money, and personnel — of a project, since it standardizes the measurements. In most cases, employers fall below the threshold required to be an ALE and are, fte meaning therefore, not subject to the employer shared responsibility provisions. Several federal programs in the United States—such as the Paycheck Protection Program —use FTE to determine employer eligibility.

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The Paycheck Protection Program is a Small Business Administration program to help employers retain employees during the public health and economic crisis. The number of full-time equivalent employees is used to determine the amount of loan forgiveness for borrowers. One whole FTE unit is 1.0, which can be made up of a single person or multiple employees. Let’s say a full-time measurement for your company is 40 hours per workweek.

To calculate FTE, find your employees’ total amount of working hours, divide it by 40 hours, and round up to two decimals. You can apply different methods for different classifications of employees, as long as you apply the method consistently within each classification. Once you have a total number of hours, divide by 2,080 and round down for your FTE. You typically would not include hours that owners or partners work within this calculation, but you can do so for your own accounting purposes if you want to include labor from ownership as part of your evaluation. A part-time worker who works half-time would be equivalent to 0.5 FTE.

It is a unit of measurement that represents an employee’s work hours on a weekly full-time basis. FTE counts the approximate number of full-time employees employed by a specific company, but with the inclusion of part-time employees.