If you typically work full-time, 40 hours per day, 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, this is pretty simple. Work 8 hours in a day, with the equivalent full-time schedule being 8 hours per day, and you worked a 1.0 FTE that single individual day as shown below. It’s easy to compare someone working 40 hours per week in the first week of the month, to someone working 40 hours per week in the second week of the month. But what if we want to compare the 40 hours worked last week to their average for the previous year? This is what using full-time equivalents lets us easily do, since comparing the total number of hours worked may be irrelevant if the periods aren’t the same length. If an employer has a 40-hour workweek, a worker scheduled for 40 hours per week is 1.0 FTE.

• If all of your pension income is covered by Social Security, you do not need to use this calculator and you can use the more straightforward Online Calculator instead.
• Just indicate how many employees work at your company, how many actual hours they work a week and for how many weeks.
• If you are not currently working, or your work is not covered by Social Security, enter the age at which you will begin to receive your Social Security benefits and use a zero for your future earnings.
• Some employers consider anything over 35 hours per week to be full-time, while others require that employees work 40 hours per week to be considered full-time.
• SHRM Members enjoy unlimited access to articles and exclusive member resources.
• For example, if a part-time employee works 20 hours per week and standard full-time hours are 40, their FTE would be 0.5.

The Significance of FTE in Business

With my Social Security, you can verify your earnings, get your Social Security Statement, and much more – all from the comfort of your home or office. In 1668, John Wilkins proposed a decimal system in which length, area, volume, and mass were linked to each other based on a pendulum that had a beat of one second as a base unit of length. Over time, trade spread from the Mediterranean area to Europe, including the northern German City States. As a result, a pound, 16 ounces of silver, or 7200 grains, became a commonly used measure in many regions. The Ascent is a Motley Fool service that rates and reviews essential products for your everyday money matters.

Helps employers track team workload

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Planning New Projects Is Easier

Calculating your FTE highlights areas for improvement when it comes to project needs or employee hours. Calculating the number of employee hours companies have provides a baseline for measuring all organizations and their workforces against one another. Just remember the basics of dividing fte meaning the number of hours worked in the period, by the total number of hours a typical full-time worker would have in the same length period. Just drop us a note or send us an email at and we’ll help you out. So, each of your part-timers count as a fraction of a full-time employee.

• Since both are considered to be full-time schedules in their respective companies, both count as 100% or 1.0 FTE.
• As for the calculation method #2, enter the number of full-time employees again and just the number of part-time employees to calculate the FTE.
• FTE value helps in indicating the number of full-time employees that a company shall employ in a year or the number and type of employees needed to complete a project.
• Essentially, it relates to the actual hours both full-time and part-time employees work during a regular workweek.
• By calculating your FTE, you’ll be able to get information on the overall productivity of all your employees (within a team, department, or entire company).
• It’s important to keep in mind that it doesn’t indicate the actual number of employees, but rather the actual hours worked.
• For example, HR departments can use FTE calculations to standardize the working hours and salaries of employees working on a part-time basis.

Step 1: Make a List of All Your Employees

But the math to calculate an FTE for a single day is still correct, and the same for any other period. In education, FTE calculations may consider instructional hours, student-teacher ratios, and classroom capacity. In healthcare, FTE calculations often revolve around patient-to-staff ratios, bed occupancy rates, and clinical workload. Each industry tailors FTE calculations to align with its unique operational needs, service demands, and regulatory requirements. With FTE, you can figure out when to hire and whether a full time employee or a part time employee is required. Such technology is already a part of many workplaces and will continue to shape the labor market and HR.

Why Should You Calculate FTE?

As such, the measurement system was only implemented in France, and in 1795, the metric system was formally defined in French law. It was not until 1799, however, that the metric system was officially adopted in France, though it was still not universally observed across the country. Although SI is used almost universally in science (including in the US), some countries such as the United States still use their own system of units. This is partly due to the substantial financial and cultural costs involved in changing a measurement system compared to the potential benefit of using a standardized system.

How to calculate FTE for one employee?

With this FTE Calculator, you can quickly calculate how many full-time equivalent employees are on your team. As it helps you work out how many manhours of work are being done, FTE calculation is an important part of business planning. The Full Time Equivalent (FTE) represents a unit of measurement standardized to equal the number of hours worked by the typical 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 a typical biweekly pay schedule, our hours worked per week denominator becomes 80 hours. Following our earlier examples applying the same math, someone working 80 hours per week in an 80-hour period is 1.0 https://www.bookstime.com/articles/trust-accounting-for-lawyers FTEs. Someone who works 64 total hours in the same period is 0.8 FTEs as shown below. FTE calculations should be updated regularly to reflect changes in employee hours, staffing levels, and business needs.

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