DCSA’s published price for a Tier 5 background investigation in fiscal 2026 is $5,890 on the non-DoD schedule, $6,240 on the DoD one that bundles adjudication. Your company will never see either invoice; it goes to the agency that ordered the investigation. What lands on your books is the number nobody publishes: the revenue a funded seat does not earn while it sits empty.

Where does the 90-day number come from?

From the industry, not a statistical agency. No federal figure says a cleared req sits open for 90 days. The government clocks measure something adjacent: how long vetting takes after a package is submitted. Time-to-fill starts when the req opens; the vetting clock starts later, and often never starts. The nearest cleared-specific number is our competitor’s. ClearanceJobs’ 2021 recruiting survey puts filling a cleared IT role at 41 to 60 days: one job family, five years old, self-reported, and still the only published measurement of the thing itself. Well short of 90.

Our reading, and not a measured one: most cleared reqs never touch the clock, because the candidate arrives already cleared and transfers on an existing investigation. Nobody publishes the split between already-cleared and sponsored hires, and a survey by sponsorship status would settle it either way.

How long does government vetting actually take?

In FY2026 Q1 mean end-to-end vetting ran 205 days for High Risk cases and 104 for Moderate Risk, against mandated targets of 75 and 40. That is 130 and 64 days over, and the Performance Accountability Council rates its own progress “Poor.” Three caveats belong with those figures.

High Risk and Moderate Risk are risk tiers, not clearance levels. The Trusted Workforce 2.0 quarterly progress report never maps them onto clearances. The regulation maps them one way only: 32 CFR 117.10(b)(1) puts Top Secret and SCI positions in the high-risk tier, so a Top Secret case is a High Risk case. The reverse does not follow, because that tier also holds public-trust work with no classified access. Read 205 days as diluted by those cases, not irrelevant to a Top Secret req.

The data underneath is documented as unreliable by the government’s own auditor. GAO-26-107100, published 11 December 2025, reviewed third-quarter FY2024 data at seven agencies and found 86 percent of the timeliness statistics it analyzed inaccurate, affecting 95 percent of clearances completed government-wide. GAO gives the severity on two denominators: a third of the 42 timeliness statistics were off by 20 percent or more, and those same 14 are the nearly-half share of the 30 hit by DCSA’s sampling error. Two things follow, in opposite directions. DCSA says it corrected the method from FY2025, so the figures here sit past the reviewed period. But the old error ran one way, with published averages that “systematically underestimated the time” agencies took, which argues for budgeting conservatively.

And a mean here is narrower than it sounds. ODNI’s guidance tells agencies to drop the slowest 10 percent of cases before averaging, so these describe the fastest nine cases in ten, with the tail that wrecks a promised start date excluded by design. The QPR never states its basis, and that fastest-90-percent calculation is exactly the one GAO found DCSA doing wrong. The rest is mixed populations, collected a quarter in arrears, with old cases clearing the queue pulling the mean up. A case you start this month is not an average one.

The PAC names the bottleneck: while adjudications are significantly behind, the investigation process remains the greatest factor. Behind is not innocent. In FY2025 Q4 Moderate Risk adjudication ran 37 days against a 10-day goal, so chase both phases, not just the one called worst. Our piece on DCSA processing times turns that into a start-date conversation.

Why is the investigation fee the wrong number to budget against?

Because it is not your fee. DCSA funds its products through reimbursable customer orders via its Working Capital Fund, so the ordering agency pays and the sponsoring contractor never sees the invoice. The FY2026 rates, effective 1 October 2025, are published in DCSA Federal Investigations Notice 24-01. For non-DoD customers on standard service, Tier 3 is $455 and Tier 5 is $5,890; DoD customers use a separate table bundling adjudication, mandatory for them, where a Tier 5 is $6,240. The difference is that bundle.

Continuous vetting is billed separately again, and its Table 2.1 carries four rates, not one. The $3.35 per enrollee per month, $40.20 a year, that circulates as the CV price is the TW 1.25 rate for non-sensitive public trust positions and for non-DoD national security positions. It is the cheapest of the four. A cleared employee on a DoD contract sits in the last row: TW 1.5 CVA Interim for DoD, $7.65 a month, $91.80 a year. Quote the wrong row and the published price more than doubles. It is still the ordering agency’s fee, not yours. Each annual figure assumes full-year enrolment, and the ordering terms cut the other way: DCSA bills the full monthly fee for any enrollee active at any point in the prior month, with no refund for a partial month. We break that side apart in what sponsoring a clearance actually costs a company.

What is an empty cleared seat worth per day?

Per day, less than the fee itself; the length of the wait is what turns a small daily number into roughly thirty times the fee. Every input below is an assumption.

Take a cleared seat billing at $150 an hour: a round number chosen to make the arithmetic legible, not a published rate. No public bill rate for a cleared labor category was obtainable here. GSA’s CALC tool, the obvious place to look, has moved to buy.gsa.gov rather than closing, and it prices labor categories, not clearances. Assume an 8-hour billable day, giving $1,200 of daily revenue, and a 10 percent gross margin, also illustrative, since real margin varies by contract type. Convert calendar days to business days at five sevenths, truncated, which ignores holidays and leave and so overstates billable days.

One assumption is structural rather than numeric. The table charges the whole wait to a seat earning nothing, presuming neither temporary eligibility nor a preliminary determination let the person start early. Where either applies, the real loss is a fraction of this.

Illustrative arithmetic on an assumed $150 rate, 8-hour day and 10 percent margin, assuming no temporary eligibility or preliminary determination let the hire start earlier. Not published figures.

Set the $5,890 Tier 5 fee against the $175,200 that seat did not bill over the same span and the fee is about 3 percent of it, or near 4 percent against the DoD schedule’s $6,240. Substitute your own rate and the shape holds. The point is the ratio, not the total, and the two are paid by different parties. Our companion piece on time-to-billing on a cleared hire takes the same seat to its first billable hour, and what a cleared hire really costs puts agency fees beside this arithmetic.

Which levers actually compress the clock?

Four, and all four live in the NISPOM rule at 32 CFR 117.10. None is a sourcing tactic.

Reciprocity, 117.10(h). A current eligibility determination based on an investigation whose scope meets or exceeds that needed for the required access provides the basis for a new determination, and the prior investigation is used without further investigation or adjudication. Two conditions bind: the determination must be current, and the scope must meet or exceed what the new access requires, so a current Secret does not reciprocate into a Top Secret req. There is an escape clause: the prior investigation is used unless the CSA becomes aware of significant derogatory information not previously adjudicated. And reciprocity of collateral eligibility does not carry SCI or SAP. Under 117.10(a)(8) access to those, and to RD and FRD, is a separate determination by the granting authority, and 117.10(b)(3) lets an agency whose policy authorizes it require a polygraph. See moving a clearance to a new contractor and verifying a clearance before the offer.

Temporary eligibility, 117.10(l). Formerly called interim. A CSA may grant temporary eligibility for Top Secret, Secret and Confidential access, only where there is no evidence of adverse information calling eligibility into question. The verb is permissive: the CSA grants it at its discretion, for no more than a year without CSA approval, and non-U.S. citizens are ineligible on a temporary basis. Five of the subsection’s six paragraphs cut against relying on it. Under (l)(1) a temporary Secret or Confidential determination does not reach Restricted Data, COMSEC or NATO information, all of which require a final Secret determination. Under (l)(3), SCI and SAP access on a temporary determination is the granting authority’s decision, not an automatic consequence. Under (l)(4) and (l)(5), later derogatory information lets the CSA withdraw the eligibility, and the contractor must then pull the person off classified access and any KMP position requiring it. Under (l)(6), that withdrawal may not be appealed.

Break in access, 117.10(i). Where a contractor administratively terminated access solely because there was no current requirement, access may be restored without further investigation, based on CSA guidance. Four conditions stack, and dropping any one turns a narrow allowance into a rule it is not: termination solely for want of a requirement, continuous employment, continued eligibility on a current investigation of sufficient scope, and no new derogatory information known. The subsection does not end there. Adverse information from or about the employee must continue to be reported for as long as they hold eligibility, even while access is administratively terminated.

Pre-employment submission, 117.10(f). The only one you control alone. Where a potential employee needs access immediately upon commencement of employment, the contractor may submit the investigation request before the date of employment, provided a written commitment for employment has been made and the candidate has accepted in writing. Its deadline has a trigger that is easy to misread: the commitment must indicate employment will commence within 45 days of the employee being granted eligibility at a level that allows the work. Forty-five days from the grant, not the offer.

The anti-lever is your own paperwork. Rejected packages, from omitted information, missing fingerprints or the wrong investigation level, force a resubmission the PAC says can take weeks. That rate was 3.7 percent in FY2025 Q4 and 4.0 percent in FY2026 Q1, moving the wrong way against a target of under 1 percent by the end of FY2028.

One clarification, because these get conflated. Federal preliminary determinations, more than 144,000 across thirteen agencies over the year at an estimated average saving of 132 days per case, are an agency onboarding mechanism, not the NISP temporary eligibility your security officer relies on. Whether contractor personnel are covered the report does not say, so ask your government customer rather than assume you are outside it.

Where does the data cut against this argument?

Three places, and they belong in the same article as the argument. Preliminary determination timeliness for High Risk cases is trending the wrong way, from 20 days in FY2024 Q2 to 28 days in FY2026 Q1; the report attributes that to growing adoption, which is plausible and unproven. The submission rejection rate rose rather than fell. And the obvious response to a long clock, sponsoring a surplus early, is forbidden: 117.10(a)(5) requires contractors to limit eligibility requests to the minimum necessary for operational efficiency, and states that requests will not be used to establish a cache of cleared employees.

Does posting the req somewhere better actually help?

For the case that hurts most, barely, and we would rather say so than sell you something. Where a req requires sponsoring an uncleared candidate, no job board compresses a 205-day government clock, ours included; a board only finds the candidate faster, shortening the pre-clock half of the calendar. It earns its keep on the reciprocity case, where the 205 days collapses to a verification and a crossover. Unless the billet is SCI or SAP, where the granting authority’s separate determination, and any required polygraph, still stand between crossover and badge. Even then a board is often the weaker channel: referrals out of your own cleared staff reach people who never look at one, targeted crossover recruiting reaches passive holders, and on a recompete incumbent capture beats every external channel. A board is right for reach into a population you do not already touch, wrong when you know whose badge you want.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does a cleared req really take 90 days to fill?

No federal statistic says so; it is industry shorthand for req-open to first billable hour. The government clocks run 205 days end-to-end for High Risk and 104 for Moderate Risk in FY2026 Q1, counted after submission and averaged over the fastest 90 percent of cases. ClearanceJobs’ 2021 survey gives the only cleared-specific figure: 41 to 60 days for a cleared IT role.

Who pays for a security clearance investigation?

The agency that orders it, through reimbursable customer orders against DCSA’s Working Capital Fund. The FY2026 rates, $455 for a Tier 3 and $5,890 for a Tier 5 on the non-DoD schedule and $6,240 on the schedule mandatory for DoD customers, go to that agency. Contractors never see the invoice; their cost is the unbilled seat plus recruiting and onboarding.

Is there a published cost-per-hire figure for cleared roles?

Not in the federal record. DCSA publishes investigation fees, the PAC publishes timeliness, BLS publishes openings and hires, and none measures what filling a cleared seat costs a contractor. The nearest industry attempt is ClearanceJobs’ cleared recruiting metrics whitepaper, which says it covers cost to hire but gates the number behind a download. The most-quoted benchmark, SHRM’s $4,129, reflects fiscal 2015 data from a 2,048-member sampling frame; SHRM never published how many answered the cost question, or what it counted.

Can we start someone on a temporary clearance while the investigation runs?

Sometimes, at the CSA’s discretion, subject to the limits above: no evidence of adverse information, a year at most without CSA approval, no Restricted Data, COMSEC or NATO material without a final Secret, SCI and SAP at the granting authority’s call, and no appeal from a withdrawal.

What to do before the next quarterly report lands

Instrument the thing nobody publishes. Log, per req, the date it opened, the date a candidate accepted, the date the package went in, the date access was granted and the date the seat first billed. Multiply the gap by your own loaded rate. Within two or three quarters you hold the cleared cost-per-hire figure the federal record does not contain, plus the rejection rate you can move alone.