Full Time Equivalent FTE Benefits, Calculation, Example

If your employees put in 40 hours a week, it means they are employed full-time. 2,080 hours are worked by a full-time employee who works 52 weeks a year. The annual working hours of your workforce can be added up and divided by 2,080 to determine FTE. Full-time equivalents (FTEs) 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.

• In the context of research and development, FTE is a unit of measurement for determining how many hours a researcher has been employed to work on a project.
• However, depending on the program, such as medical or legal, and the level, for example, undergraduate or not, the student will need to have a certain number of credits to graduate.
• 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.
• Alternative measures of FTE that incorporate these additional assumptions can place the number of hours for one FTE as low as 1,680 hours per year.

An organization can make the best use of its resources and workers by calculating FTE which will result in an increase in efficiency. Also, it can help find places where work isn’t being done as efficiently as it could be. If you want to calculate the hours worked per year, you should multiply the hours by the weeks in a year, which is 52.

What Is The Purpose Of Calculating FTEs?

The expected length of a full-time schedule has changed a lot throughout history — full-time employees now work about 20 or 30 hours per week less than they did in the 19th century. Next, you need to divide the total hours worked by all employees (1150) by the number of hours in a full-time work week (40). For example, if you had seven full-time employees working 40 hours per week, you would have 14,560 full-time employee hours. To calculate FTEs, add together the number of hours worked by all part-time employees and divide that total by the number of hours worked by full-time employees. 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 (who each work 20 hours per week) or four employees who work 10 hours per week.

• This will depend on the specific needs of the firm and the requirements of the task.
• With Clockify, you can easily track your cost rates per employee and then compare and contrast them with employee billable hourly rates.
• Read our employer’s guide to find out more about how to hire employees in Europe, Asia, Africa, or elsewhere.
• Rather than hiring new employees, businesses can use FTE to deploy staff across various departments thereby keeping costs down.
• In general terms, full-time equivalent (or FTE) is a unit of measure that plays an important role in calculations used in businesses, project management, or federal programs for eligibility purposes.
• When determining FTE (full-time equivalent) for a business that employs seasonal workers, the number of hours worked by those employees during the season, as well as the number of weeks they are employed, must be considered.
• After a few weeks of business, one of your part-time workers quits, citing another opportunity.

The full-time equivalent measure can also be applied to a student’s classes. For example, if the establishment requires 30-hour classwork per week and https://www.bookstime.com/ the student only completes 15, this will account for 0.5 FTE. Do you want to calculate how much hiring an employee abroad will actually cost you?

Define the number of hours for a full-time position

In other words, it is calculated that it corresponds to 2,625 full-time employees. 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. For example, if an employee’s salary was $30 per hour and the individual worked 40 hours per week, their salary would be $1,200 per month. However, if the employee worked 30 hours and was paid $30 per hour per this wage agreement, they would only make $900 because their hourly rate doesn’t change. The FTE also provides real-time data to managers and allows decision-makers to stay compliant with the rules.

Use our AI-driven, automated, fully compliant global employment platform powered by our in-house worldwide HR experts. 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. Our team of reviewers are established professionals with years of experience in areas of personal finance and climate.

Calculating FTE for the Small Business Tax Credit

Yearly, a company generally considers an FTE to be valued at 2,080 hours. Many companies adjust their staffing levels throughout the year depending on expected demand. For example, retail companies typically see higher sales in December but may have fewer people in the store over autumn. Some people prefer not to calculate overtime for FTE, in which case 1.0 is the highest an employee can ever be. That’s not good when you need 6 FTE, so it may be better to fire a few people and increase hours for others.

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. 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. FTE represents a unit of measurement to measure employees or students in a way that makes them comparable, even if they are working or studying a different number of hours per week. A full-time equivalent (FTE) — also known as a whole-time equivalent or WTE — represents the sum of all full-time hours employees work in a certain company. Along with counting the hours worked, FTEs show how many full-time employees a particular company employs within a fiscal year or needs to employ to carry out a project.

Company

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 is a metric to determine the total number of full-time hours completed by a full- or part-time employee. This metric can help companies in project management and federal programs, among other things. However, they must consider specific instructions provided by programs as well, if any. An understanding of FTE also helps employers decide when to hire staff for short-term projects.

• You can also use an FTE calculation to determine the appropriate pay for part-time workers.
• A full-time worker is generally in a more advantageous position when compared to a fixed-term contractor.
• In practice, FTE is measured by companies to estimate the number of full-time employees employed within a specific time frame.
• Two of these employees worked full-time (40 hours per week), employee three worked 20 hours per week, and employee four worked 15 hours per week.
• This will give you with the amount of FTEs for the company during the open months.

As you can see, because the project only took 100 hours, you have one FTE left over. This tells you that, when allocating resources for future projects, you can reduce the number of FTEs by one and still have enough workforce to complete the project. In this example, imagine you are tasked with reallocating resources within your department.

Step 3: Calculate Annual Hours Worked

It also gives a clear idea of balancing the permanent and temporary workforce, whether an increase or a decrease is necessary to complete a project within a timeframe. The PPP is an SBA program (Small Business Administration) that helps preserve a business in times of crisis. https://www.bookstime.com/articles/full-time-equivalent The total FTEs number is used to calculate the loan that borrowers are eligible for. To calculate the FTE metric, find the average number of FTEs per month from two different time periods (February 15, 2019, to June 30, 2019, or January 1, 2020, to February 29, 2020).

It could require 15 full-time employees (600 hours/40 hours) five days to complete, 30 part-time employees five days to complete, one full-time employee 15 weeks to complete, or a combination of these. Once companies specify the full-time hours, they can use it to calculate the full-time equivalent. This process requires establishing the hours every employee is scheduled to work. Subsequently, companies must divide the actual scheduled hours by the number of full-time hours. To identify the FTE for part-time positions, divide the total number of part-time hours worked by the number of hours worked by one full-time worker. In our example, we will divide the total hours worked by Employees D and E by the number of hours worked by Employees A.

Hiring Considerations

You can usually get the same amount of work hours at a lower cost by hiring more employees, though this can get tricky if you’re close to the 50 FTE cutoff for medical benefits and don’t want to go over that line. Here are some common questions that people have about full-time equivalent calculations. In some cases, FTE can also help you better understand how quickly you can accomplish specific tasks.