How Many Hours Is Part Time?

The Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal wage law, never defines part-time or full-time work; the Department of Labor says so in as many words and leaves the definition to employers. What exists instead is a set of hour thresholds in other laws and statistics, each written for its own purpose, and "part time" in practice means falling below whichever of them is being discussed.

The 30-hour line of the Affordable Care Act is the one that shapes schedules. Because an employee averaging 30 hours or more must be offered coverage by a large employer, part-time schedules at retailers, restaurants and hospitals tend to be capped at 28 or 29 hours a week, and "part time" in a job posting usually means under 30. Employers that use the look-back method measure the average over a period of 3 to 12 months, so a few 35-hour weeks in a busy season do not by themselves change the status.

The yearly figure is before vacation and holidays; a 20-hour employee who takes 2 weeks off works 1,000 hours, which is below the 1,000-hour 401(k) line, while 20 hours every week of the year is 1,040 and above it. Small differences in the weekly schedule move an employee across thresholds, which is why the calculator above deducts vacation days and holidays before it reports the year. The linked weeks have their own pages with the monthly figure by calendar month.

A part-time week is defined by its total, not its shape, and the same 24 hours can be three 8-hour days, four 6-hour days or six 4-hour mornings. Shifts of 4 to 6 hours are the most common, partly because many state meal-break laws start at 5 or 6 hours: California requires a 30-minute meal period on any shift over 5 hours, New York on shifts over 6 hours that span the midday, and a 4- or 5-hour shift avoids the unpaid break and the scheduling around it. Federal law requires no breaks at all, so outside those states the shift length is purely the employer's choice.

Two 12-hour days are also a part-time week, 24 hours, and common in nursing, where schedules are written as fractions of a full-time equivalent: a 0.6 FTE position is 24 hours a week and 0.9 FTE is 36. Only the hours over 40 in a workweek attract overtime under federal law, so a part-timer who picks up extra shifts and reaches 44 hours is owed time and a half for 4 of them, even though the position is part time. In California, Alaska, Nevada and Colorado daily overtime applies above 8 or 12 hours in a day regardless of the weekly total.

Pay itself does not change with status. A part-time employee doing the same work is not owed the same hourly rate by federal law, but is owed at least the minimum wage and the overtime premium, and a growing number of state and local laws, Oregon, New York City and others, add predictable-scheduling rules that affect part-time retail and food-service workers specifically. The real differences are in benefits, and those follow the thresholds in the first table rather than the label on the job offer.

The phrase changes meaning with the setting. In college, part time refers to credit hours: a full-time undergraduate load is 12 credits a semester, half-time is 6, and federal student aid uses those lines, so a student with 9 credits is a part-time student regardless of hours spent studying. In nursing and other hospital roles, status is expressed as an FTE fraction, with 0.5 FTE meaning 20 hours a week and anything below 1.0 technically part time, though many hospitals treat 0.9 FTE, 36 hours in three 12-hour shifts, as full time for benefits. In the federal civil service, part-time career employment is a defined band of 16 to 32 hours a week, and schedules outside it are either full time or intermittent.

Large retailers define the word in their own handbooks and usually keep part time under 30 hours for the reason above; a few set full time at 32 or 35 and offer benefits from there. When a job posting says part time, the only safe reading is "fewer hours than this employer's full-time schedule", and the number to ask for in the interview is the expected weekly average, since it is that average, not the title, that decides coverage and leave.

Full-time equivalent is weekly hours divided by the employer's full-time week, usually 40: 24 hours is 0.6 FTE, 30 hours is 0.75. Hours per year are weekly hours × 52, less vacation and holidays, and hours per month for a salary or budget are weekly hours × 52 ÷ 12, so 20 hours a week is 86.67 a month and 1,040 a year. The calculator at the top does the year and the month with your own vacation and holiday count; the hourly to salary calculator turns the hours into annual pay at any rate, and the working hours in a year page has the full-time figures for comparison.