FTE Calculator

Ten part-timers are ten people and five FTE

Ten people working 20 hours a week are a headcount of ten and 5.0 full-time equivalents. Both numbers describe the same team, and both are right. They answer different questions, and the trouble starts when you use one to answer the other's.

Headcount is about people. Ten people need ten one-on-ones, ten laptops, ten onboardings and ten seats. FTE is about capacity and cost: those ten people deliver five full weeks of work and cost roughly what five full-time salaries cost. Plan a schedule from the FTE figure and you end up with half the calendar you needed. Budget from headcount and you book twice the salary you'll actually pay.

Almost every rule you'll run into picks one of the two on purpose. Grant reports and capacity models want FTE. Apprenticeship and disability quotas in Brazil, union thresholds and most reporting obligations count people. The US employer mandate uses a hybrid of its own, and that hybrid takes up half this page. Read the rule first, then pick the number.

The FTE divisor is a choice, so keep it on screen

FTE is a division. The numerator is the hours a person worked. The denominator is what your organization calls a full schedule for the same window, and that's where all the judgment sits.

• United States: 40 hours a week, 2,080 hours a year.
• Brazil: 44 hours a week under the CLT, 2,288 hours a year.
• France: 35 hours a week since the Aubry laws, about 1,820 a year.
• United Kingdom: commonly 37.5 contracted hours a week.
• The ACA: 30 hours a week, or 130 in a month. Nobody works that as a standard week. It's just the line above which the statute calls someone full time.

The same payroll of 400 weekly hours is 10.0 FTE against a 40-hour divisor, 9.09 against 44 and 11.43 against 35. That's a swing of more than two full positions on identical facts. A calculator with 40 hardcoded doesn't fail when you're outside the US. It answers confidently with the wrong country's assumption, which is worse.

Watch the monthly conversion too. A month is 52 divided by 12, or 4.33 weeks, so a 40-hour week is 173.33 hours a month and not 160. Treat a month as four weeks and you understate every part-timer by about 8 percent, which quietly moves anyone near a threshold to the wrong side of it.

Overtime does not create 1.2 of a person in FTE

Someone who works 50 hours in a 40-hour week is 1.0 FTE. Not 1.25. FTE counts how many full-time positions the payroll fills, and one person fills one position however many hours they put in.

This is the most common way a total comes out too high. Sum the hours of a busy month, divide by the full-time figure, and every overtime hour turns into a fraction of a colleague who doesn't exist. On a team of forty where a third of the staff run five hours over, that's 13 people and 65 extra hours, or about 1.6 phantom FTE. That's enough to cross a reporting line or justify a hiring freeze nobody needed.

The cap is on by default in this tool, and the result panel shows what overtime would have added if it had counted. The uncapped number has one honest use: capacity planning, where you want to know how much work was actually delivered and not how many positions exist. For anything that triggers an obligation, cap at 1.0.

The ACA 50-FTE test is a different calculation

Under section 4980H, an employer with 50 or more full-time employees including full-time equivalents is an Applicable Large Employer and must offer affordable health coverage the following year. That count isn't the FTE figure at the top of this page. It has its own procedure, with four steps people skip.

1. Work one calendar month at a time. That's twelve separate calculations, one per month of the prior calendar year.
2. Count full-time employees as one each. Anyone with 130 hours of service or more in that month is one employee. 130 hours and 260 hours both count as exactly one.
3. Convert everyone else, with a ceiling. Add up the hours of service of all non-full-time employees for that month, counting no more than 120 hours for any single person, then divide the total by 120.
4. Average the twelve monthly totals and round down. The fraction is dropped, never rounded to the nearest whole number. An average of 49.99 is 49, and 49 is not an Applicable Large Employer.

Look at what that 120 divisor does. A full month at a 40-hour week is 173.33 hours, so dividing part-time hours by 120 credits them as if a full month were only 120 hours, around 27.7 hours a week. The ACA figure therefore runs higher than a true FTE for the same people. Press "fill every month from the roster" above and the eleven-person default team reads 6.75 by the ordinary calculation and 8.78 by the ACA one. You can't compare the two, and neither is wrong. The statute asks for the second and a budget needs the first.

Pin down two more details. Hours of service include hours for which payment is due, so paid holiday, paid leave and paid vacation count even though nobody worked them. And there's a seasonal exception: if you went over the threshold for 120 days or fewer in the year and the excess was seasonal workers, you are not an Applicable Large Employer, whatever the arithmetic says.

The rule also creates a dead zone between 120 and 130 hours. An employee at 129 hours in a month isn't full time, and their hours still get trimmed to 120. Nine hours count for nothing on either side of the line.

A worked ACA example where the shortcut changes who is covered

The shortcut is to sum the year's part-time hours and divide once by 1,440, which is 120 times twelve. Averaging is linear, so the shortcut matches the monthly method exactly as long as nobody goes over 120 hours in a month. The monthly ceiling is the only thing that separates them, and when it bites, it decides the outcome.

Take an employer with 42 full-time employees all year and a summer crew of 20 people who each work 200 hours in June, July and August and nothing in the other nine months.

The whole gap is the ceiling. Under the rule each summer worker contributes 120 hours a month, not the 200 they worked, so 600 hours of individual work enter the formula as 360. Only three of every five of those seasonal hours count. The shortcut keeps them all, crosses 50, and tells an employer with no obligation that it must offer coverage to everyone. That's the panel loaded by default in the calculator above. Clear it and enter your own months.

One last wrinkle in the same example. Three individual months land at 62, well over the threshold, while the year averages 47. Monthly peaks don't create the obligation. The average of the twelve decides, which is also why the seasonal exception exists.

Half an FTE is half a fully loaded cost, not half a salary

Once a budget is written in FTE, a role shown as 0.5 is half of everything that role costs the organization. Half the number on the offer letter undershoots it. Employer taxes, insurance, retirement contributions, equipment and software licenses all scale with the fraction.

They don't all scale cleanly, and that's where fractional budgets go wrong. Payroll taxes and benefits generally do scale. A laptop, a desk and most per-seat software licenses don't: a 0.5 FTE analyst uses a whole seat of the analytics tool. Halve a salary and forget the fixed per-person costs, and the budget comes in low every time. The gap is widest on expensive senior roles, where the load is heaviest.

The cost field above takes the fully loaded annual cost of one full-time equivalent and multiplies it by your total FTE. Enter a bare salary and you get a bare-salary answer, usually 25 to 40 percent under the real figure in the US and more than that in countries with heavier statutory charges.

Where FTE numbers quietly go wrong

• Contractors and agency staff use capacity but usually sit outside the employee count. Whether they belong in your FTE depends on whether you're answering a capacity question or a legal one. Mix the two in one spreadsheet and the number can't be defended.
• Employees on leave. Someone on unpaid leave adds to headcount but few or no hours of service, so their FTE falls to nearly zero while they very much still work for you. Paid leave is the reverse: full hours, no output.
• Hires and departures mid-period. A person who starts on the 20th is one headcount and a fraction of an FTE for that period. Counting them whole is the second most common cause of an inflated total, after overtime.
• Different definitions for different programs. The ACA test, PPP loan forgiveness, federal grant reporting and your own capacity model all use different divisors and different caps. An FTE figure without the rule behind it is a rumor.
• Ratios per FTE. Revenue per FTE and cases per FTE only compare between organizations that use the same divisor. Put a 44-hour country against a 35-hour one on revenue per FTE and the shorter week looks about a quarter better before anyone does any work.

What this FTE calculator does, and what it does not

It takes a list instead of a single total, because FTE only matters when schedules differ, and a pre-summed total is exactly where the per-person cap disappears. It shows headcount and FTE with equal weight. It puts the divisor on screen, with presets for the common national weeks, and lets you count in hours per week, hours in a period or hours in a year. It applies the 1.0 cap by default and tells you what overtime would have added. It runs the ACA test the way the regulation describes it, month by month, and prints the annual shortcut next to the correct answer so any disagreement is out in the open.

It doesn't know your jurisdiction, your collective agreements or your plan year, and it does arithmetic, not legal or tax advice. Every figure stays in your browser. Nothing is uploaded or stored and there's no account, which matters when the input is a staff list with hours attached.