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 is not just a government credential — it is a market advantage that translates directly into higher compensation in the civilian workforce. Employers in defense and intelligence routinely pay a significant premium for cleared candidates because obtaining a new clearance from scratch can take anywhere from six months to two years and cost a company tens of thousands of dollars in sponsorship and lost productivity. That bottleneck is your leverage. Across the cleared job market, salary premiums typically range from $20,000 to $60,000 or more above comparable uncleared roles, depending on the level of clearance held and the sensitivity of the work involved.
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.
One of the most important facts veterans need to understand before separating is that clearances have expiration timelines and are not indefinitely portable. A Secret clearance is subject to periodic reinvestigation every ten years; a Top Secret clearance requires reinvestigation every five years. Critically, a clearance that lapses because a service member separated and did not enter a cleared position within a reasonable window can become significantly harder and more expensive to reinstate. The practical implication: if you hold an active clearance, your transition window is a narrow, high-value period. Entering the cleared job market while your access is current and recently adjudicated puts you in the strongest negotiating position you will ever have with these employers.
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. By combining your specific clearance tier, occupational specialty, years of experience, and geographic preferences, the matcher surfaces cleared roles where you are a competitive candidate — not just a resume in a pile — along with real compensation data and targeted employer intelligence so you can approach your job search with the same precision you brought to your military assignments.