The Security, Suitability, and Credentialing Performance Accountability Council put the government-wide end-to-end time for a Secret clearance at 104 days in its FY2026 Q1 progress report. Three months later its FY2026 Q2 report and the matching legacy-metrics supplement print 92 days for that same quarter. Every other plotted quarter matches, and Top Secret is unchanged at 205. Neither document mentions the revision.

Twelve days will not break a hiring plan. It is the smallest problem here, and it is the tell. There is no such thing as the DCSA processing time. There are five clocks, they measure different spans of the same process, and the agency and its oversight council restate them without reconciling any of it.

Which clock is your hiring manager actually asking about?

Almost always the one nobody publishes: when can this person sit down and do the work. The five clocks below answer narrower questions, and one case can honestly be called 57 days or 205 days. The tier names are the council’s, not your req’s: High Risk sits behind a Top Secret, Moderate Risk behind a Secret, and the same risk tiers cover public trust positions with no classified access.

Why doesn’t a 44-day investigation mean a 44-day hire?

Because the investigation is one phase of three. The government-wide phase breakout for FY2025 Q4 shows where the months sit: initiation 12 days against a 5-day goal, investigation 168 against 45, adjudication 40 against 15, end-to-end 220 against 75. The phases sum to the published total, our arithmetic on the council’s figures, and 168 of those 220 days are investigation, roughly 76 percent.

Do not mix that 168 with the 57 above it. The 57 is DCSA’s own table, covering cases DCSA processes; the 168 is the government-wide breakout across every agency and provider. For FY2025 Q4, DCSA’s table says 157 where the breakout says 168.

Adjudication is the phase employers forget, and a faster investigation does not shorten it: “While adjudications are significantly behind, the investigation process remains the greatest factor.” Against end-to-end targets of 75 and 40 days, the last reported quarter, FY2026 Q1, sits 130 and 52 days above.

Two more traps. The FY2026 Q2 end-to-end chart runs a quarter past the data as a dotted line, ending at 148 days for High Risk and 85 for Moderate; those are projections, and the supplement’s chart has no FY2026 Q2 point. And every end-to-end and investigation figure here is a fastest-90-percent number, dropping the slowest tenth of cases: if your candidate sits in that tenth, no number here describes them, and none says how far outside they are. The statutory 60-day deadline your manager may remember was repealed in 2023; see the FAQ.

What actually lets a new hire start work?

Not the final determination. A preliminary determination averaged 23 days for High Risk and 8 for Moderate Risk in FY2026 Q2, figures the council labels “expected to fluctuate as reporting and adoption expands.” The FY2026 Q1 Moderate value was published as 13 in one report and 26 in the next; FY2025 Q4 High moved from 26 to 23. The 8 is the lowest point in the eight quarters charted, lands straight after that 26, and the council attributes the quarter to “improved reporting” plus “a spike following the government shutdown.” An outlier on an unstable series, not an onboarding date.

The council says “most workers undergoing vetting (approximately 80% based on available data) do not have to wait for a final determination to onboard.” Treat that as directional: preliminary data “must be collected from agencies individually” with no central repository, about 50 percent of agencies responded last quarter, and the council calls the methodologies inconsistent.

The seam does not run where you would guess. The 23 and the 8 are split by case tier, not by employer: the supplement says the report “segregates data on preliminary determination by case tier,” and both figures pool federal and contractor personnel. A contractor-versus-federal split is published, but only for preliminary onboarding decisions, only in a supplemental deck, and only as an unlabelled chart with no printed values, on which the contractor bar sits below the ten-day gridline in all ten quarters charted, the federal bar above. No source gives a day count for the instrument governing a cleared industry hire: temporary eligibility, previously called interim, granted by the Cognizant Security Agency under 32 CFR 117.10(l) and SEAD 8. Quote 23 days at an interim on a cleared industry req and you are quoting one decision’s clock at another.

The regulation is short and mostly limits. 32 CFR 117.10(l) permits temporary eligibility “only … if there is no evidence of adverse information that calls into question an individual’s eligibility,” caps it at one year “unless approved by the applicable CSA in the system of record,” and excludes non-U.S. citizens. Its six numbered conditions decide whether your manager’s workaround holds:

• (l)(1): temporary Secret or Confidential is valid at the level granted, but Restricted Data, COMSEC and NATO information require a final Secret determination.
• (l)(2): a temporary Top Secret is valid for Top Secret information, and reaches RD, NATO and COMSEC at the Secret or Confidential level only if the holder also has a final Secret determination “based on a previously completed investigation.” Without that, it does not reach that material.
• (l)(3): SCI and SAP access on a temporary determination is a decision for the granting authority.
• (l)(4) and (l)(5): if derogatory information later develops the CSA may withdraw the temporary eligibility; and where the person’s eligibility underpins the facility clearance, the contractor must remove them from access and from any KMP position requiring PCL eligibility, “or the temporary entity eligibility determination will also be withdrawn.”
• (l)(6): “Withdrawal of a temporary eligibility determination is not a denial, termination, or revocation of eligibility under this rule and may not be appealed.”

Those last two are what the “just get them an interim” pitch cuts. Temporary eligibility can evaporate with no hearing and no appeal, and on a small contractor it can take the company’s own entity eligibility with it.

For an SCI or SAP billet, stop using these numbers. 32 CFR 117.10(a)(8) puts SCI, SAP, Formerly Restricted Data and Restricted Data with the applicable U.S. Government granting authority for each category. No published figure measures those decisions.

How much should you trust any of these numbers?

Less than their precision suggests. GAO reported on 11 December 2025 that 36 of the 42 timeliness statistics it analysed were inaccurate, a third by 20 percent or more. That is 86 percent, but of a deliberately nongeneralizable sample from seven selected agencies for one quarter, FY2024 Q3; GAO does not offer it as a government-wide error rate. What is government-wide is the calculation error underneath it, affecting the timeliness measurement of 95 percent of clearances completed across the government.

One finding in GAO-26-107100 lands on contractor hiring: “due to DCSA’s calculation error, ODNI determined that DOD had met a timeliness goal for contractor personnel that it had not met.” A second moves the starting line. ODNI dates initiation from the day the individual submits the application, so days spent completing it, and any spent correcting and resubmitting, fall outside the measure, as many as 15 by GAO’s count. Do not simply add those to the 92 or the 205: GAO’s next sentence says ODNI “recognized this gap” and folded that time into a new initiation measure “planned to take effect in fiscal year 2026.” No source says whether the FY2026 figures here already contain it. The council’s own footnote starts the clock earlier still, at “agency initiation of information collection,” so the two definitions of day one disagree.

Two qualifications belong beside the numbers. Agencies told GAO they fixed the calculation for data collected from FY2025 onward, so the FY2026 figures here post-date the fix. GAO also found ODNI still has no process for assessing the reliability of what agencies send it. These are the only public numbers there are, better than they were, and the government’s own auditor calls the collection untrustworthy.

The published series move under you as well. Every overlapping quarter of the DCSA pending-inventory chart was restated downward between the two reports, by 8,000 to 32,000 cases, with no explanation offered. Inventory closed the quarter flat at 100,696 cases against a roughly 80,000 year-end target.

The trend is not uniformly good. The council upgraded its “Get People to Work Faster” goal from Poor to Fair this quarter and downgraded its risk-management goal from Fair to Poor. The statute replacing the repealed IRTPA standard, 50 U.S.C. 3352h(b)(2), requires the quarterly report to disaggregate data “to the greatest extent practicable … between Government and contractor personnel.” The main report splits none of its headline timeliness figures that way.

When is the fastest answer not to sponsor at all?

Often. DCSA “continues to report an average of a single day for authorizing Transfers of Trust decisions within the Department of War,” sustained across sixteen consecutive quarters, against 205 days end-to-end for a new initial Top Secret.

Read the scope first. The metric covers the Department of War, the report’s name for DoD, not the government, and the council says it widens to the executive branch only once NBIS allows “more reliable, complete, and accurate collection of data.”

The arithmetic points somewhere uncomfortable for us. We run ClearedJobs.NET, and the strongest advice this data supports for an urgent req is often to stop sponsoring and pursue someone already cleared, which does not play to a job board’s inventory. Crossover recruiting beats a fresh submission by a margin no FY2026 reform closes, and so do channels that are not us, from an incumbent’s subcontractor to the government customer’s own security office.

Hedging by submitting extra candidates is closed off too. 32 CFR 117.10(a)(5) requires contractors to limit eligibility requests “to the minimum number of employees and consultants necessary for operational efficiency,” and says they “will not be used to establish a cache of cleared employees.”

What should you actually tell the hiring manager?

Give a range with its basis named out loud: for a new Secret, 92 days end-to-end at the last reported quarter, FY2026 Q1, a figure the council itself revised down from 104, and 44 days for the DCSA investigation phase alone in FY2026 Q2. If the hire is a contractor employee, what gets them working sooner is temporary eligibility under 32 CFR 117.10(l), and no source publishes a day count for it. Ask your FSO what your own last five submissions took. Then spend the conversation on what you control: the initiation rejection loop costs an average of 12.5 days per case, on causes the council names as “incomplete packages, missing fingerprints, or incorrect investigation levels.” That is your submission packet, not DCSA’s queue. Put the backup plan for the candidate in the same conversation, and route any adverse issue to your FSO and your counsel.

One warning about the next report. The council is revising its “fastest 90% of cases” basis to cover 100 percent of cases from the FY2026 Q3 report, and says this “will decrease reported timeliness.” The supplement is blunter: “timeliness will be hurt.” An employer quoting 44 days in July 2026 should expect the next figure to be higher, and say so in advance. Say why carefully: the council commits only to the effect of the counting change, and nothing in either document promises that underlying performance holds. The same report shows inventory flat and a second goal downgraded to Poor. If the FY2026 Q3 figure jumps while inventory has stopped falling, part of the rise is real, and you will already have told your hiring manager it was arithmetic.

Frequently Asked Questions

So how long does a DCSA clearance actually take in 2026?

The question needs a basis first. Investigation phase alone, fastest 90 percent, FY2026 Q2: 44 days for Secret, 57 for Top Secret. End to end, the last reported quarter is FY2026 Q1, at 92 days for Secret and 205 for Top Secret, and that 92 was published as 104 three months earlier. Both bases drop the slowest tenth.

Is the 60-day legal deadline still in force?

No. The 2004 IRTPA standard at subsection (g) of 50 U.S.C. 3341 was struck out by Public Law 118-31 on 22 December 2023. The popular version was a misquote anyway: it opened “To the extent practical,” bound a plan rather than any individual case, and closed with subparagraph (B), requiring determinations missing 60 days to be made “without delay,” with no date attached. Its replacement, 50 U.S.C. 3352h, fixes no number of days.

Can we start someone on an interim while the investigation runs?

Often, with conditions the pitch omits. Temporary eligibility under 32 CFR 117.10(l) requires no evidence of adverse information, lasts no more than one year without CSA approval in the system of record, and is unavailable to non-U.S. citizens. It does not reach Restricted Data, COMSEC or NATO information without a final Secret determination, whether granted at Secret or Top Secret level. It may be withdrawn with no appeal under (l)(6), and under (l)(5) that withdrawal can pull your facility clearance if the person held a KMP role. SCI and SAP access belongs to the granting authority.

Do these figures apply to a cleared contractor employee specifically?

Only partly. The headline end-to-end and investigation figures are not split between government and contractor personnel. The one published split covers preliminary onboarding decisions, sits in a supplemental deck as an unlabelled chart with no printed values, and shows the contractor bar below the ten-day gridline in every quarter charted. It does not measure temporary eligibility under 32 CFR 117.10(l).