Full Time Equivalent (FTE) & Income Conversions

INTRODUCTION

Sometimes you know total Wage & Salary Employment (W&S). Sometimes you know Full Time Equivalent Employment (FTE). Both work in IMPLAN.

IN THE EVENTS - THE EASY WAY

The Industry Impact Analysis (Detailed) or IIA Event Type is pure magic. Right inside of it you can toggle between values for Wage & Salary (W&S) and Full Time Equivalent (FTE) Employment. You can also toggle between a value for fully loaded Employee Compensation (EC) or the base Wage & Salary Income (W&S). You can even mix and match by entering a value for FTE and EC or W&S Employment and Wage & Salary Income by just toggling that button to the desired field.

IN THE SPREADSHEET - THE HARD WAY

IMPLAN jobs include all full-time, part time, and temporary positions (with the exception of the 1985 database). When Employment is counted this way, one cannot tell from the data the number of hours worked or the proportion that is full- or part-time. You may want to convert IMPLAN's Employment estimates into full-time equivalents (FTE) for reporting purposes, or, conversely, you may need to convert your FTE figures into Employment before inputting into IMPLAN for analysis. You can do both fairly easily using the Excel sheet named Employment/FTE and W&S/Employee Compensation Conversion. This spreadsheet will also allow you to estimate wage and salary Income from Employee Compensation (EC) or vice versa.

An FTE is assumed to work 2,080 hours in a standard year. The ratios in this spreadsheet are based on national averages from the BEA. You may notice that some of the ratios are the same across similar IMPLAN Industries - this is due to the fact that IMPLAN has more Industry detail than the BEA data used to calculate the ratios. If you want to work with more localized values than those provided in this spreadsheet, contact your local employment security office to determine if they have their own statewide estimates. Local data should be reported by the number of hours worked in each NAICS code. Match the NAICS codes to the related IMPLAN Code, and divide the number of hours worked by the standard year - 2080 hours. This is your local vector of FTE conversions and can be used as described below.

The first use of the spreadsheet is to convert Wage & Salary data to Employee Compensation or full-time equivalent (FTE) number to  Employment. Simply find the IMPLAN Industry in Column A and enter your Wage & Salary number in Column E or your full-time equivalent number in Column K. Results will automatically populate in Column F (Employee Compensation) or Column L (Employment), respectively.

If I am told the company in Industry 4 - Fruit Farming has an FTE of 25. Before entering that figure in IMPLAN, it must be converted to an Employment value. In cell K5 (corresponding to Industry 4), enter 25 as the FTE. This yields an Employment value of 29.17 by taking the 25 / 0.856966708. The value 29.17 can be analyzed in IMPLAN.

The spreadsheet can also be used to convert Employee Compensation data into Wage & Salary or IMPLAN Employment value into FTE. Find the IMPLAN Industry in Column A and enter your Employee Compensation number in Column G or your Employment number in Column I. Results will automatically populate in Column H (Wage & Salary) or Column J (FTE), respectively.

DOWNLOADS

Written November 30, 2023

Updated April 7, 2026