FTE Calculator
Convert a mix of full time, part time and contract staff into full time equivalents, calculate FTE from total hours, and check thresholds such as the ACA fifty employee mark.
Last reviewed by the Radiatus Cloud team
Want this done for your business?
Radiatus delivers cloud, security & automation for growing teams.
Headcount and FTE are different numbers
Twenty people working half time is twenty in headcount and ten in full time equivalents. Which figure applies depends entirely on what is being asked: office space and management span follow headcount, budget and capacity follow FTE, and statutory thresholds follow whichever definition the regulation specifies. Using the wrong one produces plans that are wrong by a factor that can approach two in a business with a lot of part time staff.
Definitions vary by purpose
One FTE is a full time schedule, but a full time schedule is 40 hours a week in the United States, 35 in France, and often 37.5 in the United Kingdom. The Affordable Care Act defines full time as 30 hours a week for its own threshold calculation, which is deliberately lower than most employers' internal definition and produces a higher FTE count. Grant funding, headcount caps and reporting requirements each specify their own basis, so an FTE number quoted without its definition is not usable.
Where FTE actually helps
Capacity planning is the main use. A team of eight with two people at sixty percent has 7.2 FTE of capacity, and planning a sprint against eight is planning to miss it. The same applies to budgeting, where a salary line built on headcount overstates cost for part time staff and understates it once employer contributions are loaded. The calculator reports both figures side by side along with the annual hours, so the gap between them is visible rather than assumed away.
Related tools
- Incident Impact Calculator — Estimate the cost of a security incident from severity, affected users and downtime hours, with a compliance and trust rating and the response actions each severity level demands.
- Third-Party Risk Assessor — Assess vendor risk based on data access and type.
- Data Breach Cost Estimator — Estimate what a data breach would cost from records exposed, cost per record, days to detect and hours of downtime, split into direct and indirect costs.
- SaaS Risk Heatmap — Pick the SaaS apps your company runs, add your own, and get a heatmap ranking each by data criticality times access scope, with the risk each carries.
Frequently Asked Questions
What counts as one FTE?
One person working a full time schedule for your organisation. That is commonly 40 hours a week in the United States, 37.5 in the United Kingdom and 35 in France. The tool lets you set the basis because the answer changes with it.
How does the ACA definition differ?
For the Affordable Care Act employer mandate, an employee working 30 or more hours a week counts as full time, and part time hours are aggregated at 120 hours a month per FTE. That produces a higher count than an internal 40 hour basis, which is why the 50 employee threshold catches employers who thought they were below it.
Should contractors count toward FTE?
For capacity planning, yes, if they are doing the work. For statutory thresholds, usually not, though misclassification rules mean a contractor working like an employee may count anyway. Keep them in a separate group so both views are available.
How do I calculate FTE from total hours?
Divide the total hours worked in a period by the full time hours for that period. Two thousand hours in a quarter against a 40 hour week over 13 weeks is 2000 divided by 520, which is 3.85 FTE.
Why does my budget not match my headcount?
Because part time staff cost less than a full salary and every employee costs more than their salary once employer contributions are added. Budget follows FTE times fully loaded cost, not headcount times salary.
Privacy & Security
Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
How to Use
Add staff groups with their weekly hours to get the total FTE and the headcount it represents.
Disclaimer: This tool is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind. Results are for educational and utility purposes.
Related Tools
Incident Impact Calculator
BusinessEstimate the cost of a security incident from severity, affected users and downtime hours, with a compliance and trust rating and the response actions each severity level demands.
Third-Party Risk Assessor
BusinessAssess vendor risk based on data access and type.
Data Breach Cost Estimator
BusinessEstimate what a data breach would cost from records exposed, cost per record, days to detect and hours of downtime, split into direct and indirect costs.