A signed offer is not yet a billable seat

The fastest 90% of first-time Secret clearances for contractor employees closed in 138 days end to end in April 2025, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) reported to the National Industrial Security Program Policy Advisory Committee. Top Secret ran 243 days. That is four and a half to eight months between a countersigned offer and the first hour a new hire can touch classified work and put labor on the contract. The seat is filled on paper. It is not billing. The lever that closes most of that gap is temporary eligibility, the step the workforce still calls an interim, and a temporary Secret has historically been granted in about a week. Set that against the 138-day final and the interim secret clearance timeline, not the headline investigation number, is what a controller should be modeling.

When can a new cleared hire actually start billing?

Short answer: Three paths, three very different clocks. A crossover hire who already holds eligibility bills on day one through reciprocity. A clean new hire can start under a temporary (interim) eligibility in roughly a week. Everyone else waits for the full investigation and adjudication, which ran months in 2025.

The distinction that decides a start date is not the clearance level. It is which of these three doors the candidate walks through, because each door has a different primary-source clock behind it. Price the seat on the wrong door and the transition-in schedule slips a quarter.

What does a temporary (interim) clearance actually authorize?

Short answer: Under 32 CFR 117.10(l), the security agency may grant temporary eligibility for Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret access before the investigation closes, but only when there is no evidence of adverse information. It lets the hire work classified at the granted level. It does not do everything a final clearance does.

The temporary determination is deliberately narrow. A temporary Secret or Confidential is valid for access at the level granted, but access to Restricted Data, COMSEC material, and NATO information still requires a final Secret determination. If the billet touches any of those, the interim does not make that scope of work billable. The determination also expires. It cannot exceed one year unless the security agency extends it in the system of record, and non-U.S. citizens are not eligible for temporary access at all.

There is a floor beneath all of it. A contractor can only put an employee into process when the work is tied to a classified contract, the person has a genuine need to know, a favorable government eligibility determination, and a signed non-disclosure agreement, per 32 CFR 117.10(a). A firm cannot sponsor a third party or a subcontractor’s employee. No sponsoring facility clearance, no interim, no billable seat. The candidate-side companion to this article, on what an interim security clearance is and how long it takes, walks the same mechanism from the applicant’s chair, and the FSO requirements piece covers who actually submits the request that starts the clock.

How long is the wait if you hold out for a final clearance?

Short answer: Long, but shrinking. DCSA reported the fastest 90% of initial Secret cases finished in 138 days in April 2025, and initial Top Secret in 243 days. Those are end-to-end figures across initiate, investigate, and adjudicate, not medians. The slowest tenth runs well beyond them.

The 138-day Secret figure breaks into 18 days to initiate the case, 73 to investigate, and 47 to adjudicate. Top Secret’s 243 days is almost all investigation: 19 to initiate, 215 to investigate, and just 9 to adjudicate. The end-to-end Secret number has moved between 138 and 168 days across the five quarters through April 2025, so a program plan that pins a fixed start date to a final clearance is planning on sand.

Most of the recent Secret slowdown traces to one bottleneck. DCSA attributes it to delays in FBI Name Checks; for cases that were not caught in that queue, investigation timeliness held at 78 to 93 days across FY24 and early FY25. That is the queue the interim path sidesteps, because a temporary eligibility is a separate, faster decision made before the investigation runs its course.

The backdrop is improving. DCSA cut its background-investigation inventory from 290,000 cases in September 2024 to 222,000 in May 2025, and reported April 2025 timeliness improved 10%. Contractor-specific pending investigations fell too, with Tier 3 (Secret) dropping from 18.5K to 14.3K cases and Tier 5 (Top Secret) from 21.1K to 18.9K. Waiting is less punishing than it was two years ago. It is still months, not days. Read the underlying data before you commit a date to a customer; the NISPPAC committee report of May 28, 2025 carries the DCSA timeliness charts in full.

What is the dollar logic of requesting the interim at offer signature?

Short answer: Every day a cleared billet sits vacant is a day the labor line does not bill. Subtract the roughly 7-day interim from the 138-day final Secret and you recover about 131 days of billable time per seat. On a fully loaded wrap rate, that gap is the whole argument for making the interim request a condition of the offer.

Run the arithmetic as a calculation from two DCSA numbers, not a published statistic. The final Secret clock (138 days, fastest 90%, April 2025) minus the historical interim (about 7 days, DCSA 2022) leaves roughly 131 days. At a typical contractor wrap rate, those are 131 days of unrecovered direct labor and fee on a seat you already committed to fill in your bid. Multiply it across a hiring class and the interim stops reading as a compliance checkbox and starts reading as working capital.

The cheapest seat of all is the one that never needs a new investigation. A candidate who already holds a current clearance, or is mid-process with another employer or agency, moves by reciprocity under SEAD 7, which 32 CFR 117.10(a)(6) makes mandatory. The gaining contractor verifies the eligibility of record and the person can bill from the first morning. This clearance crossover path, not any right-of-first-refusal rule, is the real incumbent-capture lever on a recompete. The nondisplacement executive order that once gave incumbents a guaranteed first look was revoked in early 2025, and its implementing regulations were rescinded effective December 22, 2025, so do not build a staffing plan on a mandate that no longer runs. Weigh the transfer instead against the cost of sponsoring a clearance from scratch.

What can un-bill a seat after the hire starts?

Short answer: A temporary eligibility is revocable. If derogatory information surfaces before the investigation closes, the security agency can withdraw it and the contractor must pull the person from access. In the worst case, adverse findings trigger a Statement of Reasons and a due-process fight that can end the hire’s ability to bill.

The interim can be pulled the moment it stops being clean. Section 117.10(l) lets the security agency withdraw a temporary eligibility when derogatory information develops, pending completion of the full determination, at which point the contractor must remove the individual from classified access. A seat that was billing on Monday can stop on Friday. That risk is one more reason to enroll interim holders in continuous vetting exactly as the rules require, so nothing surfaces later that a proper submission would have caught early.

If the government moves to deny or revoke, the contractor employee receives a Statement of Reasons (SOR). Under DoD Directive 5220.6, the applicant has 20 days from receipt to answer, and must be notified at least 15 days before any hearing. The Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals (DOHA) runs that process for DoD contractors and the contractors of 32 other federal departments and agencies, and now conducts more than 85% of its hearings virtually. It is uncommon. When it happens, it can strand a billet for months, which is why verifying eligibility of record early is worth more than any optimistic start date on a spreadsheet.

The single highest-impact change a cleared-services firm can make in 2026 is procedural, not financial: fire the interim request the day the offer is countersigned, not the day the FSO gets to it. On a Secret seat, that one habit converts roughly four months of dead payroll into billable labor, and on a recompete it lets a verified crossover hire bill from the first morning. The investigation queue is DCSA’s problem. The start date is yours.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does an interim Secret clearance take?

Historically about a week. DCSA’s most recent published figure put temporary (interim) determinations for industry at roughly 7 days on average, reported in 2022. The agency’s 2025 timeliness deck did not restate an interim number, so treat 7 days as a proxy, not a promise. It is still far faster than the 138-day final Secret it stands in front of.

Can a new hire with an interim Secret work on any Secret task?

No. A temporary Secret covers classified access at the granted level, but it excludes Restricted Data, COMSEC, and NATO information, which require a final Secret determination. If the billet touches any of those, the interim does not make that scope of work billable, so confirm what the contract actually requires before you count the seat as fully productive.

Can a non-U.S. citizen get an interim clearance?

No. 32 CFR 117.10(l) states plainly that non-U.S. citizens are not eligible for access to classified information on a temporary basis. There is no interim path for a foreign national; they must wait for a final determination, which is a scheduling fact worth knowing before you extend the offer.

Does an interim cover Top Secret work?

The security agency may grant temporary eligibility at the Top Secret level, but the underlying Top Secret investigation is the longest in the system, running 243 days end to end for the fastest 90% of industry cases in April 2025. The interim lets the work begin; it does not shorten the investigation sitting behind it.

How long does an interim stay valid?

It cannot exceed one year unless the security agency approves an extension in the system of record. In practice it is a bridge to the final determination, not a standing status. If derogatory information develops it can be withdrawn earlier, and if the final determination is denied, the interim ends with it.