Security Clearance Cost

You pay nothing. A security clearance investigation is billed by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency to the federal agency or cleared contractor sponsoring you, never to the person being investigated. The Tier 5 investigation behind a top secret clearance bills at $5,890 outside the Department of Defense and $6,240 inside it. A Tier 3, behind a secret clearance, is $455.

Who actually pays

Almost everyone searching for this number is really asking whether a bill is coming. It is not. DCSA operates the investigation as a reimbursable service and charges the sponsor: the agency filling a sensitive position, or the cleared contractor that needs an employee to hold eligibility for a classified contract.

Inside DoD there is no unbundled option. DCSA notes that its adjudication-bundled products “These products are mandatory for all DOD customers.” — which is why every DoD figure in the table below is higher than its civilian-agency equivalent. The difference is the adjudicative decision, not a better investigation.

The FY2026 rate table

Standard and priority rates for the five-tier background investigation products, effective 1 October 2025. Priority service is a premium the sponsor may buy; a dash means DCSA publishes no priority rate for that product.

Reinvestigation rows are greyed because they are being retired — see the shift to continuous vetting below.

FY2027: rates held flat

DCSA published the FY2027 catalogue on 2025-08-31 in FIN 25-03, with pricing effective 1 October 2026. Every background-investigation figure is identical to FY2026 — all nine products, both columns, both customer types. In its own words: “Notably, we plan to offer continuing products and services in FY 2027 at the same rates as FY 2026.”

That was not the plan. The notice is unusually candid about it: “While we initially anticipated a 10% rate increase in FY 2027, process improvements identified by our Tiger Team review have enabled us to maintain FY 2026 rates for both Background Investigations (BI) and Continuous Vetting (CV) products and services.” So the figures above are stable through 30 September 2027, and a page quoting them is not about to go stale.

One caveat worth stating precisely, because the summary version of this gets it wrong: continuous vetting did not hold flat. The TW 1.25 and TW 1.5 subscriptions were replaced by TW 2.0 Phase 1 services, and the entry-level rate for a non-DoD national security position went from $3.35 to $6.95 a month. DCSA attributes that to scope rather than price: “Many of our FY2027 CV offerings will even feature enhanced service capabilities, and our rates reflect these improvements.” It also warns sponsors to budget for more change: “We encourage customers to anticipate the introduction of new Trusted Workforce 2.0 (TW 2.0) compliant products and services when preparing their FY 2028 budgets.”

Why the price matters to your job search

A number you never pay still shapes the market you are competing in. A contractor sponsoring one Tier 5 is committing $6,240 and months of waiting before the person can do the work. That is the whole reason job advertisements say active clearance required and why an existing clearance commands a premium.

The regulation closes the obvious workaround. Contractors are not permitted to stockpile cleared staff against future need:

“The 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 in accordance with contractual obligations and other requirements of this rule. Requests for determinations of eligibility for access to classified information will not be used to establish a cache of cleared employees.”

32 CFR § 117.10(a)(5)

So a contractor cannot build a bench of cleared people in advance, and cannot sponsor you speculatively. It must tie each request to a real need. That is why already-cleared candidates are worth so much to an employer, and why a lapsed clearance you can still document is worth putting on a resume.

You cannot buy your own clearance

There is no consumer route to a clearance at any price. The employer submits the request, and even the earliest permitted submission is fenced:

“If a potential employee requires access to classified information immediately upon commencement of employment, the contractor may submit a request for investigation prior to the date of employment, provided: (i) A written commitment for employment has been made by the contractor. (ii) The candidate has accepted the offer in writing.”

32 CFR § 117.10(f)(1)

A written commitment from the contractor and a written acceptance from you are the minimum, and even then it is the contractor filing the case. Any service offering to obtain, sponsor or expedite a clearance for a fee is selling something it has no mechanism to deliver.

From reinvestigations to a subscription

The reinvestigation rows in the table describe a model that is going away. A Tier 5 reinvestigation was a $3,230 event every few years. Continuous vetting replaced it with an ongoing subscription:

DCSA notes that the annual figure “Annual Subscription Fee assumes the subject is actively enrolled the entire year.”, and bills on presence rather than on a full month: “Customers will be billed the monthly subscription fee per each enrollee that was active at any point in the prior month.”

This is the structural reason the familiar reinvestigation cycle is disappearing. 32 CFR § 117.10(b)(5) directs contractors to follow their cognizant security agency’s guidance on reinvestigation and continuous vetting rather than a fixed interval written into the rule — so any specific number of years you find quoted online is not coming from the regulation. Our guide to interim and temporary eligibility covers the related terminology change.

A tier is a product, not a clearance level

The table above prices investigations, and it is worth being careful about what a tier number means. “Tier” is not a term of regulation: the word appears nowhere in 5 CFR § 731.106. What that regulation actually does is designate risk — “an agency head must designate the position at high, moderate, or low risk level” — and then:

“A position at the high or moderate risk level is designated as a “public trust” position.”

5 CFR § 731.106(b)

So a Tier 4 at $4,460 is a high-risk public trust investigation, and it grants no access to classified information at all. Public trust and national security are separate axes. A phrase like “Tier 3 clearance” mixes a DCSA product code with a classification level and does not describe anything real — the tier tells you which investigation was bought, not what you are cleared to see.

At the other end, Tier 1 at $197 is the low-risk suitability check that many federal and contractor roles require and that most people never think of as a clearance, because it is not one.

Retrieval note: dcsa.mil returns HTTP 403 to automated retrieval, including curl with full browser headers. Both notices were parsed from Internet Archive snapshots with pdf-parse. The primary URLs open normally in a human browser and are the citations of record.