How to Calculate FTE: Full-Time Equivalent Formulas & More

It is a loan program that originated from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The program allows for more time to spend the funds and makes it easier to receive loan forgiveness for small businesses based on the average FTE employee reduction and other requirements. The program is also extended to qualified sole proprietorships, independent contractors, and self-employed individuals.

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. For the purposes of calculating FTE, most employers consider a full-time employee one who works between hours a week. Although the DOL doesn’t define what a full-time employee is (it leaves that definition up to the employer), the IRS does, so make sure that as work roles change, you keep up-to-date records of your FTE employees.

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FTEs are calculated in different ways for different accounting uses or for calculating eligibility for different federal programs. The term “full-time equivalent” is often used to calculate government employees. However, the number of FTEs in a government agency will depend on the project’s requirements that are being carried out, its timeframe, and budget allocations or restrictions. FTE is used in teaching and learning contexts to measure the total time spent on education or training.

Do you want help with the management of your company’s key figures, helping your team make the right decisions, and implementing the right measures in personnel planning? Just indicate how many employees work at your company, how many hours they work a week, and for how many weeks. Our model will then instantly calculate the Full Time Equivalent for you. A business is required to follow employment laws that depend on the number of employees and respectively FTE.

How is FTE used in finance?

Full Time Equivalent (FTE) refers to the unit of measurement equivalent to an individual – worker or student – one unit of a work or school day, applicable in a variety of contexts. In most cases, full time equivalents measure an employee or student and/or their workload. The first step in calculating FTE is to make a complete list of all employees. Also, do not include yourself as the business owner, unless you are paid a salary and receive a W-2. FTE is a very specific term used to calculate whether a company is required to provide benefits under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), for example. Employers can also monitor workloads for future budgeting and staffing with FTE.

To do this, multiply the number of weeks in a year with the number of hours for a full-time position. The full-time employees work 40 hours per week and 52 weeks out of the year, meaning that the number of full-time hours worked on an annualized basis is 104,000 hours. If you fall under the criteria for an applicable large employer, you’re required to offer health insurance to your employees.

How to Calculate Full Time Equivalent (FTE)?

Streamline onboarding, manage employee profiles & simplify HR document sharing with Workable’s new features. Stay on top of FTE trends and leverage HRIS tools to master this essential workforce metric. Trends in this ratio can show which teams are operating efficiently and which may be over or understaffed relative to output. Sudden changes or churn in FTE numbers can serve as an early warning for HR of underlying staffing problems or challenges. Let’s run through the steps to calculate the FTEs that need to be replaced. Now that we’ve got that out of the way let’s look at how to calculate FTE.

• Comparing the full-time equivalent to these other methods helps understand when one metric can be better than another.
• – 5 p.m.” If employees take a one-hour lunch, then the available hours per workweek is 40 hours (eight hours a day x five days a week).
• This is useful for budgeting, scheduling, and understanding the overall resource commitment for labor in an organization.
• 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.
• Project managers can use it to calculate various crucial elements in a project.
• With a headcount, each employee counts as one, regardless of how many hours they work.
• Small companies can benefit from small business healthcare tax credits if the company doesn’t have more than 10 FTEs whose salaries are not more than $25,400 a year.

It acts as a compliance monitor and control mechanism which in turn bridges the company statistics with study them in line with various laws or benefits from applicable programs offered by the government. By comparing that figure with industry averages the company can analyze fte meaning finance its current productivity. When you calculate FTE, you can find the costs of time, personnel, and money to determine staffing decisions. It’s used by businesses to figure out how many full-time or part-time employees are in a company and for organizing projects.

However, you’d want to average those hours over a time period such as four months. This ensures that you’re not getting a skewed result based on a higher or lower number of hours worked in a week than typical. 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). The total hours worked is the sum of the number https://www.bookstime.com/ of hours worked by part-time and full-time employees, whereas the number of available full-time hours in a year is most frequently 2,080. FTE is calculated by adding up the total number of hours worked by all employees and dividing that total by the number of hours in a full-time work week, which is typically 40 hours. As you can see, the part-time employees are converted into the performance of a full-time employee.

• A contractor doesn’t enjoy the benefits of a permanent employee such as a bonus or company’s subsidies and discounts.
• Companies may also need to calculate the full-time equivalent for a specific program.
• This will depend on your industry and the type of projects you embark on.
• In those cases, companies must consider those criteria and calculate them accordingly.

Outside the business environment, this unit of measure is also used to measure a student’s class load or involvement in a school project. 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 IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service has an Employer Shared Responsibility Provision (ESRP) Estimator to help you determine FTEs and see if you qualify as an ALE. It applies the following procedure, which we explain through an example for a hypothetical company.

On the other hand, FTE is used for complex and intensive projects that may require different or reinvented frameworks, methodology,, and processes. These tasks will demand more focus and commitment, and hence, full-time employees are best placed to provide the solutions. Your FTE calculations must be accurate for IRS and Department of Labor (DOL) reporting. At 50 FTEs, you’re required by the ACA to provide health insurance to your employees and by the FMLA to allow employees to take up to 12 weeks of leave for qualifying conditions. The list should include the employee’s name and the number of hours they work per week. FTE, an abbreviation for “full time equivalent”, counts the approximate number of full-time employees employed by a specific company, but with the inclusion of part-time employees.

• Keep reading to find out everything you need to know about calculating FTEs and how to use them.
• It’s a simple calculation to make and you just need to know your employee details and go from there.
• You can also calculate a full-time equivalent for both hours and salary.
• It is the hours worked weekly for teachers, while for students, it concerns enrollment.
• If you fall under the criteria for an applicable large employer, you’re required to offer health insurance to your employees.