FTE Calculator

What this calculator does

Imagine two teams. One has four people, all working full weeks. The other has eight people, all working half weeks. On paper the second team is twice the size. In practice, both do the same amount of work. Counting heads misses that completely. Counting full-time equivalents captures it.

This calculator turns a mixed team of full-time and part-time workers into a single number: the full-time equivalent, or FTE. It is the number of full-time workers your total hours actually add up to. You enter how many full-time and part-time people you have and the hours they work, and it tells you the team's true size in full-time terms.

Headcount counts people, FTE counts full-time workloads

These two numbers answer different questions, and confusing them is where planning goes wrong. Headcount is a simple tally of bodies on the payroll. Every person is one, whether they work seventy hours a week or seven. FTE ignores bodies and measures workload instead. It asks: if I added up all the hours my team works and repackaged them into full-time roles, how many full-timers would that make?

The gap between the two is often large. A business with ten people on the books, five of them full-time and five working half weeks, has a headcount of ten but an FTE of seven and a half. Those two and a half "missing" people are not missing at all. They are the part-timers, each counted as the fraction of a full-time load they actually carry. Headcount tells you how many names are on the list. FTE tells you how much work the list can deliver, which is usually the number you actually need for budgeting, planning, and staffing.

How to use it

The calculator splits your team into two groups.

1. Full-time. The number of full-time employees, and the hours a full-timer works, per day, week, or month. This second figure is important: it is the yardstick everything else is measured against.
2. Part-time. The number of part-time employees, and the hours they work, on the same per-day, per-week, or per-month basis.

Press Calculate for the total FTE, or Reset to clear the fields. The full-time hours must be greater than the part-time hours, since a full-time schedule is by definition the longer one.

How the number is built

The logic is refreshingly plain once you see it. A full-time employee counts as exactly one FTE, the whole point of reference. A part-time employee counts as a fraction: their hours divided by a full-timer's hours. Someone working half a full-time week is 0.5 FTE. Someone working three-quarters of it is 0.75.

The calculator adds up all the hours everyone works, full-timers and part-timers together, and divides that total by one full-time schedule:

FTE = Total hours worked by everyone ÷ Hours in one full-time schedule

Because your full-timers each contribute exactly one, the result is really your full-time headcount plus the fractional value of all your part-timers. Whether you enter hours per day, week, or month makes no difference to the answer, as long as you are consistent, because both the top and bottom of that division are measured the same way.

A worked example you can check

Say you have 5 full-time employees working 40 hours a week, and 5 part-time employees working 20 hours a week. Let us run it.

• Full-time hours in total: 5 × 40 = 200
• Part-time hours in total: 5 × 20 = 100
• One full-time schedule: 40 hours
• FTE: (200 + 100) ÷ 40 = 7.5

So ten people work out to 7.5 FTE. Each full-timer counts as one, making five, and each part-timer works half a full week, adding half an FTE apiece, making another two and a half. The headcount is ten, but the workload is that of seven and a half full-timers. That 7.5 is the number you would plan a budget or a workload around, not the ten.

Where FTE actually gets used

FTE is not just a tidy way to describe a team. It is the figure a lot of real decisions and rules hang on, which is why it is worth getting right.

In everyday management, it drives budgeting and capacity planning, because labour cost and how much work can be done both track full-time hours far better than they track headcount. In funding and grants, applications often ask for staffing in FTE rather than a raw employee count, so that a team of part-timers is compared fairly against a team of full-timers. And in regulation, thresholds are frequently set in FTE. In the United States, for instance, a business that averages 50 or more full-time and full-time-equivalent employees is treated as a large employer under the Affordable Care Act, with obligations to offer health coverage. A company could be under 50 by headcount of full-timers alone, and yet cross the line once its part-timers are converted to FTE and added in. That is precisely the sort of moment when the difference between counting people and counting workloads stops being academic and starts having consequences.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between FTE and headcount?

Headcount is the number of people employed, each counted as one. FTE is the number of full-time workers those people's total hours add up to, with part-timers counted as fractions. Ten part-time people can be far fewer than ten FTE.

How is a part-timer counted?

As a fraction equal to their hours divided by a full-timer's hours. Someone working half a full-time week is 0.5 FTE. Add all these fractions to your full-timers to get the total.

Does it matter if I enter hours per day, week, or month?

No, as long as you use the same basis for full-time and part-time. The calculation is a ratio, so consistent units on both sides give the same FTE.

Why would I need my FTE figure?

For budgeting and capacity planning, for grant and funding applications that ask for it, and for compliance thresholds, some of which, like the ACA large-employer rule, are defined in FTE rather than headcount.

References

The definition of a full-time equivalent as a combination of employees whose hours together equal one full-time employee, and the 50-FTE threshold that makes a US business an applicable large employer under the Affordable Care Act, follow the Internal Revenue Service.

1. Internal Revenue Service, Determining if an employer is an applicable large employer. https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/determining-if-an-employer-is-an-applicable-large-employer