Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) employment is a measure that counts employed persons in a way that makes them comparable although they may work a different number of hours.
To obtain the measure, each employee's average number of hours worked is first divided by the average number of hours worked by a full-time worker. A full-time worker is therefore counted as one FTE unit, whereas a part-time worker gets a score in proportion to the hours she or he works. For example, a part-time worker working 20 hours a week where full-time work consists of 40 hours is counted as 0.5 FTE units (we can also say that this worker's full-time equivalent is 0.5, that is, this worker is considered equivalent to one-half of a full-time worker).
The full-time equivalents of all workers in the workforce of an entity (such as an enterprise, activity, or country) are added up to obtain the FTE employment of this entity. Thus FTE employment is the answer to the following question: If all employees worked full time, how many employees would be required to deliver the same number of working hours as actually delivered by the current workforce (where some people work part time)?
The FTE employment rate for a given entity is defined as the FTE employment of that entity divided by the relevant total population. In this dataset, the reference population consists of all individuals aged 15 or over.
Available flags:
| b | break in time series | c | confidential |
| d | definition differs, see metadata | e | estimated |
| f | forecast | i | see metadata |
| m | imputed | n | not significant |
| p | provisional | r | revised |
| s | Eurostat estimate | u | low reliability |
| x | dropped due to insufficient sample size | y | unreliable due to small sample size |
| z | not applicable |