ACA Full-Time: What is it and Why Does it Matter?
What constitutes a full-time employee under the Affordable Care Act? The answer is not as simple as it seems.
And getting your full-time employee count right matters because it determines ALE status, a necessary requirement for complying with the ACA. If your organization is classified as an ALE, or Applicable Large Employer, you will be subject to the ACA’s Employer Mandate. This requires employers to offer Minimum Essential Coverage (MEC) to at least 95% of their full-time workforce (and their dependents) whereby such coverage meets Minimum Value (MV) and is Affordable for the employee or be subject to Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 4980H penalties. An ALE is an organization that employs at least 50 full-time employees, including full-time equivalent employees, for more than 120 days during the preceding calendar year, according to the IRS.
An ACA full-time employee is defined as someone who works 30 hours a week or 130 hours a month. For example, If Tommy Joe’s Restaurant employs 60 people and 40 of them are employees that work at least 30 hours a week or 130 hours a month, those 40 workers are considered full-time employees under the ACA.
Full-time employee equivalents are trickier to determine. To capture full-time equivalent employees, part-time employees’ hours must be added together on a monthly basis. Here’s an example.
Start by taking the total number of part-time employees and add their total hours of service for a particular month together. Next, divide the total by 120. The result is your full-time equivalent count for the month. Add these to your full-time employee count to determine ALE status for the month. Note that this process will need to be conducted on a monthly basis and averaged over the preceding year in order to determine ALE status for the current year.
You can learn more about determining ALE status by visiting this IRS link.
How does this apply to Tommy Joe’s Restaurant? Tommy Joe’s has 20 full-time designated employees under the ACA. In addition, the restaurant has 40 part-time employees who cumulatively worked a total of 4,000 hours for the month of August. Divide 4,000 by 120, and the result is 33.33. Twenty full-time employees plus 33.33 full-time equivalent employees equal 53.33 employees for the month of August.
In this case, Tommy Joe’s restaurant for the month of August has more than 50 full-time and full-time equivalent employees, making Tommy Joe’s an ALE.
Tommy Joe’s Restaurant also employed a number of seasonal workers during that summer. Seasonal workers are workers that perform labor or services on a seasonal basis for purposes of determining whether or not an organization is an ALE. In Tommy Joe’s situation, they employed 25 catering chefs for 90 days. Even though these employees worked on average a total of 150 hours a month, because they were employed for less than 120 days – they are not factored into the ALE determination.
To make sure your employees are classified correctly as either full-time or part-time, you must use one of two IRS-approved measurement methods. These methods let employers identify their full-time workers to whom they need to extend an offer of coverage and when that offer needs to be made.
The two different IRS-approved measurement methods for determining ACA full-time employees are the Look-Back Measurement Method and the Monthly Measurement Method.
The Look-Back Measurement Method typically works best for variable-hour workforces that have a mix of full-time and part-time employees. The Look-Back Measurement Method allows employers to monitor and track their employee’s hours of service to determine if they are full-time or part-time under the ACA before extending an offer of coverage.
In the case of Tommy Joe’s Restaurant, the employer would measure their employees’ hours of service over a predetermined amount of time. This is called the measurement period. Tommy Joe’s would use the hours of service tracked during the measurement period to categorize their employees as either full-time or part-time.
After the measurement period was complete, Tommy Joe’s would analyze the employee hours data to determine which employees it was required to extend offers of coverage. This is called the administrative period.
Finally, Tommy Joe’s can extend offers of coverage over a predetermined amount of time without worrying about variable fluctuations in an individual employee’s monthly hours. This is called the stability period. Since Tommy Joe’s has a workforce consisting mainly of high variable-hour workers, the Look-Back is ideal because it captures the average hours of service and applies them over a subsequent predetermined time frame.
The Monthly Measurement Method is designed for organizations that have primarily full-time workforces. An employee’s status is taken at face value, based on whether or not they provided a minimum of 130 hours of service a month or 30 hours a week.
In Tommy Joe’s case, the Monthly Measurement method would be difficult to use since the majority of their workforce consists of variable-hour employees and on any given week an employee’s hours of service can fluctuate between part-time and full-time.
Bottom line, determining ACA full-time status is critical and organizations need to do it right if they want to minimize their potential penalty exposure from the IRS.
For information on ACA penalty amounts, affordability percentages, important filing deadlines, steps for responding to penalty notices, and best practices for minimizing IRS penalty risk, download the ACA 101 Toolkit.
