Headcount alone can be misleading once part-time staff are in the mix. FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) converts your actual workforce into a comparable full-time number, useful for budgeting, staffing ratios, and comparing capacity across teams with different mixes of full-time and part-time staff.
A team with 40 full-time employees and 15 part-timers working 20 hours a week has a headcount of 55, but only about 47.5 FTEs. That gap matters for budgeting labor costs, comparing productivity or output per FTE across teams, and reporting to leadership or investors who expect a standardized capacity measure rather than a raw headcount that overstates actual working hours.
Whatever your organization treats as a full workweek, commonly 40 hours, though some organizations use 37.5 or other figures. Use the same standard consistently across teams if you’re comparing FTE figures between departments.
This calculator handles a snapshot at a point in time. For employees on extended leave, you may want to exclude them from the part-time/full-time count for that period, or, for seasonal fluctuations, calculate FTE separately for each period rather than averaging across a year that includes very different staffing levels.
The core formula is consistent, but some contexts (government contracts, specific compliance thresholds) define FTE using a fixed annual hours figure (like 2,080 hours/year) rather than a weekly one. Check whether your specific reporting requirement specifies its own FTE definition before relying on this general calculation.
This calculator is built for your own employees. Whether to include contractors in an FTE count depends on your specific reporting purpose; some compliance and budgeting contexts require it, others explicitly exclude non-employee labor.
Once you know your FTE count, our Cost Per Hire Calculator can help you plan hiring budgets against it.