How Much of Your Role Counts as QWE? Working Out Full-Time Equivalent

The SRA requires two years of qualifying work experience, full time or the equivalent. The words that do the work there are or the equivalent, and they are the reason two years in a job is not the same thing as two years of QWE.

If your role is wholly legal and full time, the two are the same and you can stop reading. If part of your week is something else, or the role is part time, or the legal work came in waves, then the calendar period and the qualifying period are different numbers, and working out the second one is the single most common thing candidates get wrong.

How the calculation actually works

It is a proportion applied to a calendar period. Take the share of your working time that was spent providing legal services, and apply it to the length of the placement.

Forty per cent of a three-year role is about fourteen and a half months of qualifying experience. Sixty per cent of four years is about twenty-nine months. Half of two years is one year. That is the whole method.

Two things follow from it that people find counter-intuitive.

It is not a bank of hours

You cannot work seventy-hour weeks and shorten the calendar. Full-time equivalence is a ceiling, not a currency: a full-time week counts as a full-time week whether you worked thirty-five hours or sixty. Long hours earn you nothing extra, and a record that tries to convert them into additional months will not be confirmed.

The same applies in reverse to leave. If a period was full time, it stays full time. Nobody deducts annual leave, bank holidays or sick days from a full-time period, and you should not either.

The proportion can change, and usually has

Most people give one figure for a whole placement. Real roles do not work like that. If you were promoted, or moved teams, or the legal element of the job grew, the honest answer is a different proportion for each period, applied to each period's length.

A candidate who was one thing for two and a half years at fifty-five per cent and another thing for eighteen months at forty-seven per cent should say so, and should not average it into a single number. Splitting it is more work and it is almost always more defensible, because it shows the figure was arrived at rather than chosen.

What "full time" means

The SRA's published guidance says, in terms, that it will not prescribe what full time or the equivalent means, and expects employers to take a common-sense view. That is genuinely all the public guidance says.

The figure of at least 32 hours a week does appear, but not where people look for it: it is on the confirmation screens inside mySRA rather than in the published guidance. That is the benchmark we work to. If you are part time at twenty hours a week, you are at roughly five-eighths of full time, and two calendar years of it is about fifteen months of QWE.

The test that catches an inflated figure

Here is the part worth taking away, because it is how we check every percentage that comes to us, and you can run it on yourself before you send anything.

Convert the percentage back into work, and see whether the work exists.

Suppose you say forty-five per cent of a five-year role was legal. Forty-five per cent of sixty months is twenty-seven months. Twenty-seven months is more than two thousand hours of qualifying legal work. Now ask how many matters that implies. At fifty hours a matter it is about forty of them, every year, for five years. If you can name twenty across the whole period, the percentage is not forty-five. It is closer to nine, and nine per cent of sixty months is about five and a half months.

That arithmetic is unforgiving and it is better that you do it than that we do. A candidate who arrives with a tested figure is in a far stronger position than one who arrives with a round number and has it taken apart.

What makes a figure defensible

Nobody expects a timesheet, and we do not ask for one. We would much rather have an estimate you can explain than a precise-looking number you cannot. What makes an estimate hold up is that it is built from something: what a normal week looked like, which recurring work you counted and which you excluded, and roughly how often a question of the kind in your evidence reached you.

If you cannot reconstruct that, say so. We have had candidates decline to invent an average rather than produce one they could not support, and that is the right answer. It tells the confirming solicitor more about the file than a confident figure would.