Less than 40hrs. the employer doesn’t have pay benefits also that Obamacare thing.
Beginning January 1, 2015, under the “shared responsibility” requirement, all employees working an average of 30 hours per week or more in a month must be eligible for affordable coverage or the employer may be subject to a penalty. This is because the new law considers employees who work 30 hours or more to be full-time employees.
http://www.shrm.org/templatestools/hrqa/pages/hcrandptemployees.aspx
It also had always depended on what the company defines as “full-time” for purposes of benefits and an employer doesn’t have to define full-time as 40 hours per week. When I worked for a company with a 37 ½ work week, we were considered full-time and had full-time benefits. I would think that if the majority of a company’s employees worked a standard 37 ½ work week they’d be considered full-time and eligible for benefits otherwise if subject to compliance with a qualified section 125 plan, they’d probably fail the ant-discriminatory testing and that was the case long before HCR. In fact the company I work for offers full-time benefits for workers working 30 or more hours per week and has for many years.
The challenge for us under HCR is that we have to now consider what the average number of hours an employee works so that if someone is on a 25 hour per week schedule but actually works 30 or more hours on average, we have to consider them full-time for purposes of benefit eligibility and can be penalized for not doing so. That means that for many employers like retailers who employ many part-time workers, the employer is going to make damned sure they don’t work an average of 30 hours, ever and are probably going to cut their hours far below 30 as to not have to offer benefits.