The Affordable Care Act or ACA stability period is defined as the time period for which an employer must offer health service coverages to all its employees, who, during the measurement period were determined to be full time employees. The offered coverage must be according to the entire duration of the chosen stability period and shouldn’t be based on the number of hours the employees worked during the stability period.
If an employee’s average hours during the measurement period is 30 or more hours per week, although the employee may not have worked for the entire duration, he/she must be offered coverage for 30 hours per week.
For most employers tracking variable hours can be a challenging task, as most variable hour employees do not have a fixed schedule that would meet the average requirement of 30 hours per week. Regardless it’s essential for the employers to remain consistent with the ACA. It is the employer’s task to record that the employees working with variable hours meet the full-time hour requirement i.e. minimum 30 hours per week or 130 hours per month. Monthly Measurement Method and Looked-Back Measurement Method are 2 different methods allowed by ACA to the employers to measure if their variable hour employees classify as full-time employees under the ACA dimensions. Both methods allow the employer to determine the eligibility before the coverage period which is also known as stability period.
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