FTE Calculator

FTE is total hours worked divided by the hours of one full-time week.

FTE = full-time employees + (part-time hours per week ÷ full-time hours per week)

Each full-time employee counts as 1. A part-timer counts as their share of a full-time week, so someone on 20 hours against a 40-hour standard is 0.5 FTE. The standard is yours to set. The calculator starts at 40 because federal overtime pay starts after 40 hours in a workweek; a company that runs 37.5-hour weeks should enter 37.5, or every part-timer will come out slightly small. Over a year, one FTE at 40 hours a week for 52 weeks is 2,080 hours.

Twenty full-timers and ten part-timers come to 25.5 FTE.

Those are the numbers the calculator opens with. An invented clinic employs 20 people at 40 hours a week, 6 receptionists at 20 hours each and 4 assistants at 25 hours each.

• Full-time: 20 × 1 = 20 FTE
• Receptionists: 6 × 20 = 120 hours a week, and 120 ÷ 40 = 3 FTE
• Assistants: 4 × 25 = 100 hours a week, and 100 ÷ 40 = 2.5 FTE
• Total: 20 + 3 + 2.5 = 25.5 FTE, from a headcount of 30

The clinic has 30 people covering 25.5 people's worth of scheduled hours, which is 85% of its headcount. At 2,080 hours per FTE that is 25.5 × 2,080 = 53,040 scheduled hours a year, the figure a budget or a staffing plan actually needs.

The Affordable Care Act counts full-time equivalent employees with its own rules.

The IRS uses full-time equivalent employees for one job: deciding whether an employer is an applicable large employer, which brings the employer shared responsibility and information reporting provisions. The rules come from two IRS pages, identifying full-time employees and determining if an employer is an applicable large employer.

• A full-time employee, for a calendar month, averages at least 30 hours of service a week, or has at least 130 hours of service in the month.
• For everyone else, add their hours of service for the month, counting no more than 120 per employee, and divide the total by 120. That is the month's number of full-time equivalent employees, fraction included.
• Add the full-time and full-time equivalent employees for each month of the prior calendar year and divide by 12. In the IRS's own example, a result that is not a whole number is rounded down to the next lowest whole number.
• At least 50 on average makes the employer an applicable large employer for the current year. Fewer than 50 does not.

The calculator applies those rules to one month and assumes every month of the year looks the same, so the 12-month average equals that month. It turns weekly hours into monthly hours by multiplying by 52 and dividing by 12. That conversion is the calculator's own, not an IRS figure, and it lines up with the IRS's two definitions: 30 hours a week × 52 ÷ 12 is exactly 130 hours a month.

For the clinic, the 20 full-timers are full-time employees. A 20-hour week is 86.7 hours a month and a 25-hour week is 108.3, so the part-timers add 6 × 86.7 + 4 × 108.3 = 953.3 hours. Divided by 120 that is 7.94 full-time equivalent employees, for a total of 27.94, rounded down to 27 and below the 50 line. The ACA count comes out higher than the 25.5 FTE because it divides part-time hours by 120 a month, about 27.7 hours a week, instead of by a 40-hour week.

The 120-hour cap matters most for schedules just under 30 hours. A 28-hour week works out to 121.3 hours a month, but only 120 count, so that person adds exactly one full-time equivalent. At 30 hours they stop adding hours altogether and count as a full-time employee.

Full-time starts at 30, 35 or 40 hours depending on who is counting.

Three lines for full-time work sit in three different places, and each one is right for its own purpose.

• 30 hours: the Affordable Care Act count above, an average of at least 30 hours of service a week.
• 35 hours: the BLS household survey says “Part-time workers are those who usually work fewer than 35 hours per week.”
• 40 hours: federal overtime pay starts after 40 hours in a workweek, and 40 is this calculator's default full-time standard for FTE.

A 32-hour, four-day schedule shows the difference. It is full-time for the ACA count, part-time in the BLS survey, and 0.8 FTE against a 40-hour standard. Enter those people as a part-time group at 32 hours and the calculator does both at once: 0.8 FTE each in the first card, and full-time employees in the ACA card.

Use FTE for capacity and cost, and headcount for turnover.

FTE answers how much work your schedule covers. Headcount answers how many people you employ. Turnover and retention rates divide by headcount, because people leave, not hours: when one of the clinic's 20-hour receptionists resigns, that is one whole leaver in the turnover rate and 0.5 FTE of lost capacity. The headcount entry in the HR glossary explains average headcount, and the turnover rate calculator runs the formula with it. Mixing FTE into one side of that formula and headcount into the other quietly distorts the rate, as the attrition rate guide explains.

When you price a departure, the turnover cost calculator works from salary, so a part-time role goes in at its part-time pay. For a shift-based team, plan cover in FTE and report losses in people.

Every FTE you lose starts as one person deciding to leave.

An FTE count tells you how many hours the team covers today. It says nothing about who is likely to leave next month, and a half-time specialist who resigns leaves the same hole in the rota whether or not anyone saw it coming. TeamPredict works on that part, reading public LinkedIn signals to flag resignation risk early, so a gap in your FTE plan shows up as a warning while there is still time to talk, rather than as a notice period you have to staff around.