The formula
How to calculate full-time equivalent
Full-time equivalent converts a mixed workforce into a single comparable number. Eleven people working various patterns might represent 8.6 FTE, and that is the figure budgets, funding formulas and productivity measures use.
Divide total hours by the full-time standard for your organisation, which is typically 35, 37.5 or 40 hours a week. Grant applications and public sector reporting usually specify which figure to use.
The inputs, one by one:
- Total hours worked per week by the team (hours)
- Full-time hours per week (hours)
- Number of people
Results appear immediately — there is nothing to submit. Changing a field rewrites the link, so you can share the exact scenario you are looking at.
The order the fields are filled in makes no difference to the result — the calculator recomputes the whole formula from whatever is currently in every field, not step by step. That means it is safe to adjust one number, watch the result change, and adjust it back, without worrying about resetting anything first.
Why full-time equivalent matters
The formula behind full-time equivalent is standard and has not changed in decades; what changes is the situation it gets applied to. Two households can run the identical calculation and land on very different conclusions once their own numbers — income, rate, term, balance — are dropped in, which is why a generic textbook example is less useful than a calculator you can adjust to match your own circumstances.
Beyond a one-off check, the same calculation is worth revisiting whenever the underlying numbers change — a new interest rate, a change in income, a different term. Because the figures live in the page's own web address, coming back to update just one field and compare the new result against the old one takes seconds rather than starting again from a blank page.
This kind of calculation rarely stands entirely alone. A full-time equivalent figure usually feeds into a wider decision — how it compares with a competing offer, whether it fits inside a monthly budget, what it does to a longer-term plan — and the value of having it as an exact number rather than a rough guess is that those follow-on comparisons stop being guesswork too. Once one figure in a decision is precise, it is worth making the effort to get the others precise as well, rather than mixing an exact calculation with several estimates and treating the result as equally reliable.
In practice, most people arrive at a page like this one having already tried a version of the calculation by hand or in a spreadsheet, and use the calculator here to confirm it rather than replace it. That is a reasonable way to use it — the two should agree to the last decimal place if the same inputs and the same formula are used, and if they do not, the formula shown above is the one to check your own working against first.
Worked example
A concrete run-through, using the values already in the fields:
- Total hours worked per week by the team: 322.5 hours
- Full-time hours per week: 37.5 hours
- Number of people: 11
That gives:
- Full-time equivalent: 8.6 FTE
- Average FTE per person: 0.78 ×
- Headcount above FTE: 2.4
These figures are only the calculator's own starting values, included so the working is visible rather than hidden inside the tool above. Replace them with your own numbers and the same arithmetic applies — nothing about the method changes, only the inputs feeding it.
Reading the result
The gap between headcount and FTE measures how part-time your workforce is. A large gap has real implications: more people means more management overhead and more coordination for the same capacity.
Where this goes wrong. Using FTE for anything that does not scale with hours. Desk space, training days, induction cost and holiday coordination all follow headcount, not FTE.
A useful check on any unfamiliar result is to compare it against a rough mental estimate first — round the inputs to convenient numbers and see whether the calculator's answer lands in roughly the same territory. A wildly different figure usually means one of the fields was entered in the wrong unit, most often a percentage typed as a whole number where a decimal was expected, or the reverse.
Someone working 60% of full-time hours — three days a week where full-time is five, or 22.5 hours where full-time is 37.5.
Usually not. FTE is normally calculated on contracted hours, since it is a measure of establishment rather than of actual output. Grant reporting sometimes requires actual hours, so check the definition being asked for.
The headline figure is full-time equivalent. With 322.5 hours total hours worked per week by the team, 37.5 hours full-time hours per week and 11 number of people, that comes to 8.6 FTE. Change any field and the figure moves with it.
Whenever one of the underlying figures changes — a new interest rate, a different balance, an updated term — since the result only reflects what is currently in the fields. There is no need to keep a separate record of past results; the web address for a filled-in version already carries the figures used to produce it.
Not unless a tax rate or a fee is explicitly one of the inputs above. Where it is not, the figure shown is a gross calculation, and any tax due depends on your personal circumstances and current tax rules, which are worth checking separately.
The arithmetic itself is exact — the calculator applies the formula shown above precisely, with no rounding until the final figure is displayed. The uncertainty, where it exists, is entirely in the inputs: an estimated rate or an approximate balance carries that same approximation through to the result.