With the passage of the United States’ Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2010, all employers with more than 50 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees are required to provide minimum essential insurance coverage to all associates and their dependents.
The law has forced businesses throughout the trucking industry to make, or at least consider, wholesale changes to their benefits packages.
Employers with less than 50 full-time equivalent employees can still provide health insurance but are not required to do so.
What is a full-time employee?
The Affordable Care Act defines a full-time employee as anyone working more than 30 hours a week or 130 hours per month. Full-time equivalents are determined by adding up all of the part-time hours in a month (up to 120 hours/ employee) and dividing by 120. For example, if six employees work 20 hours/week, the employer would have four FTEs.
What is a part-time employee?
Part-time employees are categorized as anyone working less than 30 hours per week, and are included in a staff total on a sliding scale. An employer can find its number of part-time employees by taking the number of part-time hours it assigns in a month and dividing that by 120. That number plus the number of full-time employees equals the total number of employees for ACA regulations. For example, a business with 40 full-time employees and 20 part timers accumulating 2,000 total hours has nearly 57 employees under ACA rules.
