Your clearance is worth $20K–$60K+ in salary premium, but only if you know where to look. Get a personalized match of cleared roles, real salary data, companies actively hiring your profile, and negotiation intel.
A security clearance can be relevant to defense, intelligence, federal-contractor, and national-security roles, but compensation varies by role, location, employer, labor market, and clearance level. Treat salary ranges as planning estimates unless they are tied to a named current source and date.
Clearance level matters enormously to that premium. A Confidential clearance provides a baseline advantage in roles with limited access requirements, while a Secret clearance, the most common level held by transitioning veterans, opens the door to a wide range of defense contracting and federal support positions. Top Secret (TS) clearances command substantially higher salaries, particularly in roles requiring access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI). At the top of the market, a TS/SCI with a Full Scope Polygraph (FSP), required for many NSA, CIA, and intelligence community contractor roles, can add $40,000 to $80,000 or more over an equivalent uncleared position. Knowing exactly where your clearance sits on that spectrum is the first step toward negotiating what you are actually worth.
Defense contracting is the largest single employer of cleared veterans, with firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, Leidos, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies, and Lockheed Martin collectively maintaining tens of thousands of cleared positions at any given time. Beyond the traditional primes, the intelligence community, including support contractors to the NSA, DIA, NGA, and CIA, maintains consistent demand for cleared professionals with military intelligence, signals, and cyber backgrounds. The cybersecurity sector is a rapidly growing source of cleared roles, driven by federal mandates and the persistent shortage of cleared security professionals; companies supporting CYBERCOM, the service cyber components, and federal civilian agencies routinely recruit veterans with any MOS that touched communications, intelligence, or IT systems. Federal agencies themselves, including the FBI, DHS, CBP, and DOE, hire cleared veterans directly into law enforcement, analyst, and technical specialist roles.
Clearance portability and personnel vetting rules change over time. Current DCSA guidance uses continuous vetting, and DCSA announced in 2026 that periodic reinvestigations are no longer conducted for NISP contractor national-security personnel while updated personnel-vetting questionnaires are submitted every five years. Verify current status with DCSA, your security office, or the sponsoring employer before relying on any timeline.
This tool is built specifically to close the gap between your clearance level, your MOS background, and the employers actively hiring for your exact profile. The matcher uses voluntarily supplied clearance level, MOS background, experience, and location preferences to suggest job-search directions. It does not predict adjudicative outcomes, determine whether you will receive or retain a clearance, or advise you to conceal reportable information.