When the Affordable Care Act (ACA) went into effect, it required Applicable Large Employers to offer their employees health insurance. To keep it simple, if you have 50 or more Full-Time Equivalent Employees, you are an Applicable Large Employer. Affordable Care Act. But what counts as a Full-Time Equivalent Employee (FTE)? Information from the IRS can sometimes be difficult to decipher, so we’ve tried to break things down a bit here to give you a better idea if your business will qualify.
For the purpose of determining your status as an applicable large employer, a standard full-time employee is anyone working an average of at least 30 or more hours per week OR worked 130 or more hours in one month. Each person, regardless of how many actual hours they worked, are counted as one Full-Time Equivalent Employee (FTE). That is simple enough.
To get the number of ‘full-time equivalent’ employees that you had for part-time employees, you will combine the hours of service from all of the non-full-time employees for the month. Then divide those hours by 120.
| Employee Name | March – Hours Worked |
|---|---|
| John Smith | 48 |
| Danny Trejo | 92 |
| Margerie Cummings | 68 |
| Billy Zane | 24 |
| Total Hours | 232 |
In the above example, you have 232 hours. We will divide 232 total hours by 120. This gives us a total number of ‘Full-Time Equivalent’ employees of 1.93. You would then add this to your count of the standard full-time employees to get your total FTE count for that month.
You will need to do this calculation for each calendar month of the prior year to determine if you are an ALE.
Each month you will count the standard full-time employees and then count the FTE employees based on the hours worked of your part-time employees. Add the FTE from part-time and the standard full-time employees together to get your actual FTE employee count for that month.
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | ….. | |
| Full-Time Employees | 38 | 36 | 32 | 25 | ….. |
| FTEs (based on Part-time employees) | 12.8 | 8.5 | 18.4 | 16.8 | ….. |
| Total FTE’s | 50.8 | 44.5 | 50.4 | 41.8 | ….. |
Make sure to do this for each month of last year. We add the total FTE count for each month together and divide by the number of months in a year (12) to get our total average FTE employees for last year. If that number is 50 or more, you are an Applicable Large Employer.
Yes, they do. However, there is an exception for seasonal workers that can reduce your FTE count average.
It is very important to understand that this definition and exception only applies when determining if you qualify as an applicable large employer. I’ll explain how this works:
A seasonal worker is a worker who performs hours of service for your company during certain times of the year, that are roughly the same each year. For example, when FedEx hires extra workers in November & December as more packages are being sent out. Or when a florist hires extra workers to handle the demand in February for Valentine’s day.
Employers are allowed to exclude seasonal workers from their full-time equivalent count, but only if they have more than 50 full-time equivalent employees for 120 days or less per year.
Again, this exception is only valid when counting your employees to determine if you are an ALE.
Let’s look at an example of Halloween store that’s open year round.
Each month they would have an average of 41 employees, except for September & October, which would have an average of 101 employees for those two months. When counting the average for the year, they would have 51 full-time equivalent employees and qualify as an ALE.
However, since they didn’t exceed 50 or more FTE employees for more than 120 days (just September & October), AND those employees that were over the 50 threshold were all seasonal, that can exclude the Seasonal employees bringing their total FTE count from 51 down to 41 and they aren’t actually an ALE.
Companies that have a common owner, or companies that are related to one another in another manner under the rules of section 414 of the Internal Revenue Code, are typically combined and then treated as a single employer for the purposes of determining whether you are an applicable large employer. For example, if you have two different companies, and one has 28 FTE employees and another has 30 FTE employees, each entity would be considered an ALE.
The IRS wanted to ensure that there wasn’t a loophole where companies could simply split themselves into separate entities to avoid being an ALE and subject to the new rules and regulations. As you can imagine, many companies that are right over 50 employees might like to figure out how to avoid being considered an ALE. To prevent that, they introduced common ownership rules.
Even if you split a large company into 4 or 5 separate entities with less than 50 employees, they would be combined when determining the total employee count and if they are an ALE. This also means that if you own 3 completely separate companies that have nothing to do with each other, they would still be combined when determining your employee count.
Many times a company will be owned by a group of people and there isn’t one single owner who has the majority share or majority control. You could have 4 people that each own 25% of a company. If that group of people also have controlling ownership as a group in another company, that company would be combined when determining the employee count.
| Company A | Company B | Company C | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owner 1 | 80% | 5% | 15% |
| Owner 2 | 15% | 80% | 5% |
| Owner 3 | 5% | 15% | 80% |
If a group of people each owned a different percentage of different companies, but as a group still had control of those different companies, they would be considered a “Controlled Group” and would again be combined in determining the employee count.
The IRS will always lean towards combing a group of owners as a controlled group rather than separate entities for the employee count. This isn’t an area that you want to try and manipulate an attempt to not qualify as an ALE.
Those who are considered an ALE are subject to both the employer shared responsibility provisions and the employer information reporting provisions.
Of course, there may be changes to your business and the number of employees that you have from one year to the next. This is why it is essential to reevaluate whether you are an applicable large employer or not. The results of the reevaluation will be based on the results of the average size of your workforce over the prior year.
Resources:
Employers are not required to provide health benefits for part-time employees, yet many still choose to offer healthcare plans as part of a benefits package.
Whether as a way to provide an incentive to part-time employees or to help meet minimum signup requirements with their insurance carrier, many employers elect to provide these benefits to those who are eligible.
Health benefits are not required for part-time employees, but all eligible part-time employees have access to health benefits if their employer offers health benefits to eligible part-time employees.
In other words, employers must be consistent with benefit plan offerings to all eligible employees. If they offer health insurance to full-time employees, all full-time equivalent employees must be offered health insurance.
The same is true when offering health benefits to part-time employees. If certain part-time employees have access to health benefits, then all who meet eligibility requirements must have access to the same benefits.
Certain eligibility requirements, such as what amount of hours constitutes a part-time employee, are out of an employer’s hands.
However, employers have some control over eligibility when it comes to part-time employees. For example, employers may be able to decide what amount of hours worked per week or per month makes an employee eligible for benefits.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) helped establish guidelines for healthcare, and this includes healthcare plans offered to full- and part-time employees. Employers must follow guidelines set forth by the ACA when it comes to offering healthcare coverage.
This means part-time employees are those who work less than 30 hours per week. Employers may want to offer benefits to those part-time employees who work close to 30 hours per week, but not for those who work only a few hours per week.
For these reasons, it’s important that employers establish their own regulations regarding who can qualify for benefits. Some examples of such regulations include setting:
It’s important that any employer considering offering health benefits to part-time employees first reach out to their current insurance carrier to ensure the provider will allow it. Not all insurance carriers will provide part-time benefits, and some may impose strict stipulations.
However, many health insurance companies require that businesses offering healthcare plans meet a certain percentage for enrollment. It may actually help employers to offer health insurance benefits to part-time employees in order to ensure this minimum requirement is met.
Navigating the world of health insurance benefits can be daunting, especially for employers considering offering benefits to part-time employees. A broker can help evaluate your current benefits program and select a health insurance company that matches your specific needs.
Sources:
HealthCare.gov — How the Affordable Care Act affects small business
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