Full-quarter employment is not a point-in-time concept. Full-quarter separation occurs in the last full-quarter that an individual worked for a given employer.

As previously noted, 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.

Full-quarter separation works much the same way. One must be careful about the timing, however. If an individual separates in the current quarter, then the QWI system looks at the preceding quarter to determine if the individual was employed at the beginning of the current quarter. An individual who separates in a quarter in which that person was employed at the beginning of the quarter is a separation from continuing-quarter status in the current quarter.

Finally, the QWI system checks to see if the individual was a full-quarter employee in the preceding quarter. An individual who was a full quarter employee in the previous quarter is treated as a full-quarter separation in the quarter in which that person actually separates. Note, therefore, that the definition of full-quarter separation preserves the timing of the actual separation (current quarter) but restricts the estimate to those individuals who were full-quarter status in the preceding quarter.