Work out how many full-time equivalents (FTE) your shift plan really needs — and how many people that means in practice.
Enter each recurring shift with the minimum number of qualified employees who must be working. If your needs differ by day, time, role or location, simply add more rows.
The paid hours per week a full-time employee works in your organisation.
Used to convert leave and training days into hours.
Used to estimate how many people you actually need — especially if some of your team work part-time.
Nobody works 52 weeks a year. Enter the paid time when your employees are not available to cover shifts.
The average leave entitlement per employee.
Only add them if they are not already counted in annual leave.
Your own historical sickness rate works best here.
Mandatory training and other paid development time.
Things like recurring meetings, admin work or special leave — anything that is paid but does not cover a shift.
Extra capacity for unexpected demand or operational surprises.
Don’t put leave or normal sickness in here — they are already counted above.
That’s roughly 3 people on an average contract of 36 hours per week.
One full-time employee is available for about 82% of their contracted hours (32.9 of 40 h per week).
First, the calculator adds up all the hours when someone has to be at work:
Then it estimates how many hours a full-time employee can realistically work once you subtract leave, public holidays, sickness and training.
From that, the staffing requirement follows:
Finally, it estimates how many people that is, based on the average weekly contract in your team.
One position staffed around the clock means:
With 40-hour contracts, the theoretical minimum would be:
But that assumes nobody ever takes leave, gets sick or attends training. If each employee is realistically available for 85% of their hours:
A safety buffer pushes the number up further. And since you can’t hire half a person, the final headcount is usually rounded up.
FTE measures working capacity; headcount counts people one by one. A few examples:
That’s why the calculator shows both: FTE and the estimated number of people.
No. Having enough hours on paper doesn’t mean you can turn them into a workable rota. In practice it can still fall apart because of:
The calculator tells you how much capacity you need. Whether real people can actually be scheduled into real shifts is a job for a scheduling tool.
Knowing you need 5.4 FTE is just the start. The real question is whether your actual people can cover the shifts — with their availability, leave, skills and rest periods. That’s exactly what Shift Scheduler does: it turns your staffing requirement into a rota that works.