Full-Time Employee Calculator for ALEs

We can’t stress how important it is to get the total amount of full-time employees (FTE) and full-time equivalent employees exactly right for your ACA compliance and reporting. The IRS, among answering many questions about who qualifies as an FTE, has provided a way to determine the amount of FTEs you have:

1. First, add up the total hours of service you paid wages to employees during the year (this shouldn’t exceed more than 2,080 per employee).
2. Next, divide that total by 2,080.
3. If your result is not a whole number, round to the next lowest whole number.
4. Unless the result is less than one, then round up to one FTE.

Calculating your employees’ hours worked this way helps with circumstances where an employer may qualify for the employer shared credit even if they have fewer than 50 actual full-time employees on the payroll.

For instance, if you have 48 individuals employed part-time, they could equal out to be 24 full-time employees, qualifying you for some credits.

ExpressIRSForms includes a full-time employee calculator within the program, as do ExpressACAForms and ACAwise. We’ve included as part of our continuing promise to bring you the easiest, most convenient solution in e-filing services. Use the FTE calculator to double check your own math, or let it do the work for you!

If you need help e-filing your ACA forms, give us a call Monday-Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. EDT, at (704) 684-4751, or send us an email anytime at support@ExpressIRSForms.com.

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How to Report COBRA on ACA Forms

When you’re working on your ACA Forms 1094 and 1095, you might run into a situation where you’ll need to report COBRA coverage information for your employee and/or their spouse and dependent(s). COBRA stands for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, the federal law that provides workers with the right to continued coverage in a group health plan.

How you report this COBRA coverage will depend on whether your employee enrolls in the coverage and whether the employee was offered coverage because of termination or a reduction in hours. If the employee doesn’t enroll in COBRA coverage, that’s easy enough: you’ll report no offer of coverage beginning with the month the employment was terminated throughout the remainder of the year on Form 1095-C, Part II. In order to avoid penalties for those months, you’ll code the former employee as not a full-time employee (Code 2B).

Now, if your former employee does enroll in COBRA coverage, you’re going to have to indicate that you made an offer of coverage for all the months the employee was covered, those under the original group plan and the ones the employee enrolled in COBRA. Use the same code indicator for all of these months. Your cost of coverage should change in this section from the lowest cost employee-only premium to the COBRA single premium.

If the individual is still employed and they’ve accepted your offer of COBRA coverage as a result of a reduction in hours, you’ll still report that an offer of coverage was made for all the months under the original group plan and COBRA. Even if the ongoing employee didn’t enroll in the COBRA coverage, you’ll need to report your offer. Your indicator codes - which will be different for the months the employee’s hours were reduced - will alert the IRS as to why the COBRA single premium is listed for the months COBRA was offered.

You can e-file your 1095-C Forms (COBRA offers and all!) with ExpressIRSForms. Just log into your account and select the ACA Forms option to get started. If you have any questions, you can give us a call Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. EDT, at (704) 684-4751; or send us an email anytime at support@ExpressIRSForms.com.



Looking for something a little less hands on? Check out ExpressACAForms, our full-service ACA e-filing solution.

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Affordable Care Act Health Insurance & Compliance

When it comes to ACA compliant health insurance, a lot of new information is getting thrown around and things can get overwhelming pretty quickly. So here are a few key ACA terms to keep in mind when filing and staying compliant:

Self-Insured Coverage
For self-insured health plans - or self-funded, as they’re sometimes called - the employer assumes financial risk for providing health care benefits to employees. In other words, a self-insured employer would pay claims, usually from an earmarked fund, as they’re incurred instead of a fixed premium to an insurance carrier.

Fully Insured Coverage
Fully-insured health plans, which are the more traditional options for employers, have the employer paying a fixed premium to the insurance carrier each year based on the number of employees enrolled. In this case, the insurance carrier pays any health care claims based on the coverage terms.

Minimum Essential Coverage (MEC)
To put it plainly, MEC is the least amount of health care coverage you need to offer (and what you need to have, if you’re an individual reading this) your employees to remain ACA compliant. You can visit the IRS’s site here for more information on what types of coverage meet MEC requirements.

Minimum Value (MV)
Your employer-sponsored plan must provide the minimum value (MV) of coverage as dictated by the Affordable Care Act. The IRS states that a plan meets MV requirements if “it covers at least 60% of the total allowed cost of benefits that are expected to be incurred under the plan.”

Spouse & Dependent(s) Coverage
Under new Affordable Care Act regulations, offers of coverage to employees by ALEs must now include offers to the employee’s spouse and dependent(s), if applicable. Under ACA guidelines, a dependent is an employee’s child (including legally adopted children) who has not reached the age of 26.


Need to get started on your ACA e-filing? You can do so now at ExpressIRSForms! We’ve also created ExpressACAForms, a full-service e-filing option for Forms 1094 and 1095.

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Employee Eligibility: Determining Status Based on Hours of Service

One of the most important parts of ACA compliance is making sure you make the right offers of coverage to the employees who meet the right amount of hours as dictated by the IRS. Applicable Large Employers (ALEs) must offer at least the minimum amount of coverage as dictated by the ACA to their full-time employees, keeping in mind that the IRS considers 30+ hours a week (130+ hours/month) to be full-time.

So when counting up the hours of your employees, what hours do you need to take into consideration? Well, obviously just the hours the employee worked, right? Sort of. An employee’s hours of service include each hour for which the employee is paid and the hours for which the employee is entitled to payment but no job duties are performed. These hours can include:

• Paid Family and Medical Leave of Absence (FMLA)
• Vacation days
• Sick days
• Jury duty
• Military duty

When it comes to what not to count for hours of service, the ACA has an answer for that as well. Excluded from your total tally of hours of service are:

• Volunteer hours
• Work study program hours (performed by students, interns)
• Religious Orders
• In other words, you don’t need to count service hours for someone “subject to a vow of poverty” who is performing the duties usually required of an active member of the order.
• This exception is only used in calculating full-time status, not ALE status.
• Hours paid with foreign-source income

So when you determine the hours your employees have worked, you can do it one of three ways:

1. By calculating the actual hours of service each month for each employee (this may be more difficult for salaried employees)
2. By totalling the number of days each month the employee did eight (8) hours of work
3. By totalling the number of weeks each month the employee did 40 hours of work

ALEs can use any of these methods, but must pick one to stick to for the duration of the calendar year. You may change methods once the year is up. Methods 2 and 3 can both be used for classifying salaried employees, so long as the classifications are consistent. Methods 2 and 3 may not be used if their results understate the employee’s hours, causing them to be classified as non-full-time.

You can find more information for determining the hours of those who are difficult to identify or track (such as adjunct faculty, or those with layover or on-call hours) here.

Once you’ve determined your employees’ hours of service, it’s time to file those ACA Forms 1094 and 1095. You can do that through www.ExpressIRSForms.com. Simply create a free account to get started. If you need help or have any questions, give us a call at (704) 684-4751, Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. EDT. We’re also available 24/7 through email: support@ExpressIRSForms.com.



Looking for something a little less hands on? Try our full-service e-filing option, ExpressACAForms.

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What You Need to Know About ACA Form Corrections

While we all want to assume our ACA forms will be filed correctly - with every i dotted, t crossed, and number in its place - the first time around. But with the sheer amount of information that will go into some filers returns, it’s understandable some forms may come back rejected. If that’s the case, you’ll need to be prepared to file an ACA correction.

With ExpressIRSForms, it’s easy to file a correction for your ACA forms. When your return is rejected, our system pulls the form(s) with the error for you to fix and takes you step-by-step through the process of retransmitting.

So what might you possibly need to correct on the forms? Here’s what can be corrected on each form so you can double check before e-filing (although ExpressIRSForms does that too) to help keep your forms from being rejected.

Form 1095-C

• Employee details
• Name, address, and SSN
• Employee offer and coverage information
• Offer of Coverage code, employee share amount, and Safe Harbor code
• Covered Individuals details
• Name, SSN or date of birth, and months covered

Form 1095-B

• Responsible Individual (employee) details
• Name, SSN or date of birth, address, and Origin of the Policy code
• Employer details
• Name, EIN, and address
• Issuer details
• Name, EIN, and address
• Covered Individuals details
• Name, SSN or date of birth, and months covered

Form 1094-C

• Employer details
• Name, EIN, Address, and Designated Government Entity details (if applicable)
• ALE member information
• Total number of 1095-C forms, Aggregated ALE Group details (if applicable)

Form 1094-B
Form 1094-B has no additional information on it that would cause a return to be rejected, and therefore would not require any corrections.

Need help e-filing your ACA forms with ExpressIRSForms? Give us a call Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. EDT, at (704) 684-4751, or send us an email anytime at support@ExpressIRSForms.com.



Looking for something a little less hands on? Check out ExpressACAForms, our full-service ACA e-filing option.

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Measurement Methods for Identifying Full-time Employees for ACA Purposes

One of the most important parts in ACA compliance is identifying which full-time employees to whom you’re required to make offers of health care coverage. First things first, however, you’ll need to determine if you’re an Applicable Large Employer (ALE). In other words, determine if you have 50 or more full-time employees. And keep in mind that the IRS considers 30+ hours a week (or 130 or more hours/month) to be full-time.

There are two methods for determining full-time employee status:

• The monthly measurement method
• The employer looks at each month the employee has worked individually to see which ones exceeded 130 hours of service
• The look-back measurement method
• The employee goes through a standard measurement period, where they work their usual hours as determined by the employee and employer upon hire.
• Then, the employer determines the employee’s full-time status based on the measurement period, during what is known as a stability period.
• Employers may not use the look-back method when determining ALE status, only for an individual employee’s full-time status.

When determining an employee’s status, an hour of service is considered to be each hour the employee is paid (or should be paid) for performing his/her duties as set by the employer, including the hours the employee is entitled to payment during which no duties are performed (like vacation pay, holiday pay, sick leave, disability, layoff period, jury duty, military duty, or leave of absence). For the purpose of the employer shared responsibility provisions, this does not include these hours of service/employees:

• Volunteer employees
• Students performing work-study
• Members of religious orders
• Compensation that isn’t US source income

You can find more information about totalling hours of employees in more nuanced categories, like adjunct faculty, those who work layover hours (like airline industry employees), and on-call employees, here.

If you have any questions regarding your ACA filing, you can give us a call at the ExpressIRSForms headquarters in Rock Hill, SC. We’re available by phone Monday-Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. EDT at (704) 684-4751, and we also offer 24/7 email assistance at support@ExpressIRSForms.com.




Looking for something a little less hands on? Check out ExpressACAForms, our full-service ACA e-filing option.

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Health Care Coverage: Self-Insured v. Fully-Insured

There are two main types of health plan employers need to consider when setting up the coverage they’ll over their employees: self-insured (or self-funded) and fully-insured.

The big difference between the two is in self-insured health care coverage plans, the employer assumes financial risk for the employees’ benefits, paying the claims out of pocket rather than a fixed premium to the insurance carrier, like fully-funded plan providers do. Read on to learn a little more about the more specific differences between the two plans.

Self-Insured Plans
Rather than purchasing a fully-insured plan from an insurance carrier, employers who choose a self-insured plan are opting to operate their own health plan. These employers are generally larger ones and benefit from this type of plan because it allows them to save on the premiums insurance companies charge for fully-funded plans. It can be risky, though, because the employer will end up paying more out of pocket if more claims than are expected need to be paid.

Fully-Insured Plans
A fully-insured health plan is the more traditional option for employers, especially if you’re on the smaller end of the ALE scale. For this type of plan, the employer agrees on a fixed premium each year, paid to the insurance company based on the amount of employees the employer has enrolled. The insurance carrier will then pay any health care claims throughout the year, and employees are responsible for any deductibles or co-pays required for services.

Now that you’ve got your ACA-compliant health care coverage, do you know how you’re filing your forms? ExpressIRSForms now offers e-filing for ACA Forms 1094 and 1095, or you can check out ExpressACAForms for our full-service e-filing option.

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