Full-quarter employment is not a point-in-time concept. Full-quarter accession refers to the quarter in which an individual first attains full-quarter employment status at a given employer.

Full-quarter employment refers to an estimate of the number of employees who were employed at a given employer during the entire quarter. An accession to full-quarter employment, then, involves two additional conditions that are not relevant for ordinary accessions.

First, the individual (PIK) must still be employed at the end of the quarter at the same employer (SEIN) for which the ordinary accession is defined. At this point (the end of the quarter where the accession occurred and the beginning of the next quarter) the individual has acceded to continuing-quarter status. An accession to continuing-quarter status means that the individual acceded in the current quarter and is end-of-quarter employed.

Next, the QWI system must check for the possibility that the individual becomes a full-quarter employee in the subsequent quarter. An accession to full-quarter status occurs if the individual acceded in the previous quarter, and is employed at both the beginning and end of the current quarter.