Generally, employers are free to decide how many hours an employee needs to work to qualify as “full time.”

Many employers choose to make 40 hours per week their standard for full-time employment, but 35 and 32 hours per week are fairly common as well. Full-time and part-time are simply qualifications you can use to designate who will receive certain benefits that you offer voluntarily. Even then, you don’t have to strictly adhere to providing all voluntary benefits for “full-time” employees. For instance, you could define full time as 32 hours per week and make that the qualification for mostvoluntary benefits while still requiring that employees work 40 hours per week to qualify for tuition reimbursement or a sabbatical.