In the third quarter of FY2025, a Top Secret background investigation took an average of 163 days. Three quarters later it took 57. That figure comes from the Security, Suitability, and Credentialing Performance Accountability Council’s Trusted Workforce 2.0 report for FY2026 Q2. Most cleared-hiring budgets written before 2026 price a delay that no longer exists.

A cleared hire’s cost is not one number. It is a stack: the investigation fee, recruiting spend, salary and its benefits load, the cost of a seat that cannot bill yet, and a subscription charging every year the person stays cleared. Some lines are published to the dollar. Others nowhere.

What actually goes into the cost of a cleared hire?

Short answer: six lines. The DCSA investigation fee, recruiting spend, salary plus benefits load, the unbillable stretch before work can start, a recurring continuous-vetting subscription, and internal security overhead. Only the fees and the subscription carry published prices.

Two are knowable in advance, because DCSA publishes a rate card. The rest depend on your contract, your customer, and the candidate in front of you, which is why cleared hiring gets budgeted badly.

Sponsorship has its own arithmetic, covered in what sponsoring a clearance actually costs a company. Internal overhead is the line most models omit: someone must hold the Facility Security Officer role regardless of hiring volume. Your wrap rate turns that salary into what the customer is billed.

What does the government charge for the investigation itself?

Short answer: in FY2026, $455 for a Tier 3 (Secret) and $5,890 for a Tier 5 (Top Secret) outside DoD. DoD components buy bundled products at $735 and $6,240. Investigation rates rose 10 percent this year; continuous vetting rose 3, and data record checks did not move.

DCSA publishes its prices in a Federal Investigations Notice. FIN 24-01, issued 30 August 2024, carries both years’ tables, and its cover notice explains the rise: “After 6 years of maintaining or lowering rates to return cash to customers and reduce cash reserves,” DCSA began a multi-year move to full-cost-recovery pricing. A Tier 5 that billed $5,355 last year bills $5,890 now.

Read the right table. Table 1.2 covers DoD components, where investigation and adjudication sell together and “are mandatory for all DOD customers.” Surcharges land on exactly the candidates you most want. International coverage adds $990 and a triggered enhanced subject interview adds $1,056. A Secret-level candidate with foreign relatives therefore carries $455 plus $990.

Continuous vetting is the forgotten line, because it recurs, billing monthly per enrolled head at $3.35 for TW 1.25, $6.70 for TW 1.5 outside DoD, and $7.65 for the DoD TW 1.5 CVA product. Customers are billed “per each enrollee that was active at any point in the prior month,” with no refunds for partial months.

What does the wait actually cost?

Short answer: nobody publishes a figure, so any number you see is somebody’s arithmetic. Here is that arithmetic with its assumptions stated. The inputs are sourced; the ratio is not a finding.

The clock is sourced precisely. In FY2026 Q2 the PAC reported investigations “processed in an average of 44 days for Secret-level cases and 57 days for Top Secret-level cases,” the closest to that pace since FY2012. The four-quarter Top Secret trend runs 163, 157, 108, 57. Both tiers still miss their goals of 15 days for Secret and 45 for Top Secret.

One caveat governs all of it. These measure the fastest 90 percent of cases, so the slowest tenth is excluded, and a req involving foreign contacts or overseas residence sits disproportionately there. Investigation is also one phase. End-to-end timeliness, from an agency starting collection through to adjudication being recorded, ran 92 days for Moderate Risk and 205 for High Risk at the last reported actuals in FY2026 Q1, against targets of 40 and 75.

A worked example, assumptions stated. BLS puts the annual mean wage for information security analysts in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro at $150,230 as of May 2025. That is occupation-wide and includes uncleared workers, since BLS publishes no clearance-segmented wage; treat it as a baseline, not “the cleared salary,” with the clearance pay premium sourced separately. Apply the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation ratio for March 2026, where wages are 69.9 percent of what a private employer pays, and $150,230 implies roughly $215,000 in total employer cost for a full year.

Now divide, assuming the employer carries the person from day one. A 57-day Top Secret investigation burns about a sixth of that loaded year. The FY2025 Q3 wait of 163 days burned closer to half of it. The 205-day High Risk end-to-end actual burns well over half. The input that dominates the cost stack fell by roughly two-thirds in nine months.

The lever that shortens it is the preliminary determination, which lets a worker start before the investigation closes. In FY2026 Q2 those resolved in 8 days for Moderate Risk and 23 for High Risk, though the PAC cautions the numbers “are expected to fluctuate as reporting and adoption expands.” An interim clearance does similar work, and time-to-billing on a cleared hire covers when work can begin. On a recompete re-badging dozens at once, every day multiplies by headcount.

What does a recruiting agency charge for a cleared placement?

Short answer: a percentage of first-year compensation. The only percentage in a primary filing is roughly one-third, and that is retained executive search, a different market from a cleared engineering req. No primary source publishes contingency rates.

Here is the honest position. A search for a published survey of contingency fee percentages returns recruiting vendors writing about recruiting. Those are marketing documents, and a figure appearing only in them is not a statistic. The commonly repeated “20 to 25 percent” has no verifiable source.

What is documented sits in a securities filing. Heidrick & Struggles’ Form 10-K for fiscal 2024, filed 3 March 2025, describes its market: “Typically, retained executive search firms are paid a retainer for their services equal to approximately one-third of the estimated first year compensation for the position to be filled… In contrast, contingency search firms are compensated only upon successfully placing a recommended candidate.” Applied to the $150,230 baseline, that structure prices the retainer at a third of the salary. That is retained executive search pricing carried to a number it was never quoted against, not a claim about a cleared engineering placement.

The structural point survives the missing percentage: a search fee is indexed to salary. Raise the offer to win a scarce candidate and you raise the fee on the same req. A posting does not move when the salary does.

Where is a job board the weaker choice?

Short answer: whenever offloading the risk of a failed search is what you are actually buying. A contingency firm is paid only if it places someone. A posting is paid whether or not anyone qualified applies.

We run ClearedJobs.NET, so read this as an interested party naming its own weaknesses. The first is outcome risk. The Heidrick filing is exact: contingency firms are “compensated only upon successfully placing a recommended candidate.” If the search dies, the employer owes nothing. Advertising inverts that. You pay for reach, and reach is not a hire, which puts the weight on which sourcing channels actually reach a clearance holder. On a niche req with a tiny qualified population, an agency working an existing network is the better buy.

The second is price transparency. Our employer page is a quote request, not a rate card, so no dollar figure for a posting can honestly be set against a fee. Anyone showing you otherwise invented a number.

SHRM’s 2025 Benchmarking Report puts cost per hire at $5,475 for nonexecutive roles and $35,879 for executive ones, all-industry rather than defense-specific, and notes only 20 percent of organizations track quality of hire.

Can you avoid the cost by keeping a bench of cleared people?

Short answer: no. The NISPOM forbids it. Sponsorship is capped at the minimum headcount operationally necessary, and stockpiling clearances is named as a prohibited use.

The rule sits in 32 CFR § 117.10, the section governing clearances for contractor employees. A contractor “will limit requests for determinations of eligibility for access to classified information to the minimum number of employees and consultants necessary for operational efficiency,” and such requests “will not be used to establish a cache of cleared employees.” The obvious workaround to a long queue is illegal, which is why already-cleared candidates carry a premium.

One section earlier, § 117.9 sets the precondition above every figure here: “A contractor or prospective contractor cannot apply for its own entity eligibility determination.” Sponsorship flows from a government contracting activity or an already-cleared prime. No facility clearance, no personnel clearances, no cost stack at all. The mechanics are in can a company sponsor a security clearance, the wider rule set in NISPOM in 2026.

Since clearances cannot be banked, the cheapest candidate already holds eligibility, and that pool is bigger than most assume. As of FY2025 Q1 the PAC reported 5,489,000 people in the DoD population with eligibility: 2,477,000 in access, 3,012,000 holding eligibility without current access. The second group grew 43 percent from the FY2013 baseline while the in-access population fell 1 percent. Those figures are 18 months old, and who stays hireable runs on a 24-month clock.

One compliance detail employers get backwards: § 117.9 bars using “its favorable entity eligibility determination for advertising or promotional purposes,” but adds this “does not prohibit the contractor from advertising employee positions that require a PCL in connection with the position.” Advertise the cleared job, not the facility clearance.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a Top Secret clearance investigation cost in 2026?

DCSA bills $5,890 for a standard Tier 5 and $6,361 at the priority rate for agencies outside DoD in FY2026. DoD components buy the bundled Tier 5 with adjudication at $6,240 standard and $6,739 priority. Rates took effect 1 October 2025 and include a 10 percent increase.

Does the employer or the government pay for a clearance?

The rates in FIN 24-01 are what DCSA bills its government customers, an agency or a DoD component. A contractor does not receive a DCSA invoice for an employee’s clearance. Its real costs sit either side of that fee: recruiting spend, salary, and unbillable time.

How long does a cleared hire take in 2026?

Two clocks, answering different questions. Investigation alone averaged 44 days for Secret and 57 for Top Secret in FY2026 Q2. End-to-end vetting, at the last reported actuals from FY2026 Q1, ran 92 days for Moderate Risk and 205 for High Risk.

What ongoing costs follow a cleared hire?

Continuous vetting is the recurring one. In FY2026 the per-head subscription runs $40.20 a year for TW 1.25, $80.40 for TW 1.5 outside DoD, and $91.80 for the DoD TW 1.5 CVA product. Billing triggers on any active enrollment during the prior month, with no refunds for partial months.

What should you budget for in FY2027?

On fees, flat. NIH’s personnel security office, republishing DCSA’s FIN 25-03, reports that DCSA “is able to maintain FY 2026 rates for both Background Investigations (BI) and Continuous Vetting (CV) products and services.” That is a .gov summary rather than the notice itself, so treat it as directional.

On timeliness, expect the published numbers to worsen while the queue keeps improving. The PAC has announced that its standard, “based on the ‘fastest 90% of cases’ established by Congress in 2004,” is being revised “to cover 100% of cases,” a change that “will decrease reported timeliness but allow agency leaders to have a better understanding of performance by including outliers.” Phase-in begins with the FY2026 Q3 report. Pending inventory closed the quarter at 100,696 cases, down from 246K seven quarters earlier.

So the day-counts you budget against in late 2026 will rise even though nothing slowed down, because the measure will finally include the tail your hardest req lands in. Rebuild the wait-cost line the week the FY2026 Q3 report publishes, against the 100-percent figure, not the last chart you saved.