Salary is the number most hiring budgets are built around, but for cleared roles it’s rarely the biggest cost. Vetting delays, agency fees, and the premium cleared contractors command all add up faster than most first-time defence employers expect. This is a breakdown of where the real cost sits, using current UK figures, so you can budget a cleared hire properly rather than being surprised by it.
Vetting Time Is a Cost, Not Just a Delay
Every week a seat sits empty has a cost, whether that’s lost delivery capacity, a stalled project milestone, or overtime paid to cover the gap. Vetting timelines vary considerably depending on which level a role requires.
SC clearance typically takes 6 to 12 weeks from submission, though this depends heavily on the candidate’s residency history and current backlog at UKSV. DV clearance is a different scale of commitment entirely. Government guidance targets 95 days for the majority of DV applications, but while BPSS clearance can take weeks or less, DV can take over six months in practice, and the Institute for Government has noted that long vetting timescales are often the most significant factor in delays to people starting new roles.
If you’re hiring for a DV role and budgeting on the assumption it’ll take three months, plan the project timeline around six to nine instead. That gap between assumption and reality is where most defence hiring budgets quietly go wrong, because the cost isn’t a line item anyone approved, it’s just months of delayed delivery.
Agency Fees on a Cleared Hire
Recruitment agency fees for permanent placements typically run 15% to 25% of the candidate’s first-year salary, with specialist and technical roles landing at the upper end of that range or beyond. Defence and security roles usually count as specialist, both because of the clearance requirement and because the qualified pool is genuinely small.
On a £65,000 systems engineer role, a 20% agency fee works out at £13,000. On a £90,000 senior cyber security lead, the same 20% is £18,000. For a single urgent hire, particularly at DV level where the candidate pool is smallest, that fee is often justified by speed and screening quality. For recruiting across multiple roles a year, it adds up to a substantial recurring cost that most defence employers eventually try to reduce by building direct sourcing channels alongside agency use, rather than relying on agencies for everything.
The Contractor Day Rate Premium
Clearance status shows up most visibly in contractor day rates. Recent UK job-advert benchmarks put SC-cleared software and DevOps day rates at roughly £450 to £700 per day, commonly inside IR35 on public-sector work. That premium exists because the pool of contractors who hold active, transferable clearance is small relative to demand, and it tends to hold even when general contractor rates in the wider tech market soften.
For budgeting purposes, this means a cleared contractor engagement should be costed against the clearance-adjusted market rate, not against a general benchmark for the same discipline. Pricing a cleared systems engineer contract against a general market rate survey will consistently come in low and either extend your search or push you toward candidates who don’t actually hold active clearance.
What This Means for Budgeting a Cleared Hire
Three things tend to get underestimated when a defence employer budgets its first cleared hire: how long the seat stays empty, what a specialist agency fee actually costs on top of salary, and how much higher cleared contractor rates run compared with general market data. Building in the accurate timeline and the accurate fee structure from the start avoids the budget conversation happening halfway through a search, when the pressure to fill the role fast makes negotiating on cost much harder.
The other lever worth building into the plan is where you advertise. General job boards return volume but no way to filter by clearance level, which pushes screening costs onto your team. A board that indexes by clearance level reduces that overhead by only surfacing candidates who already hold, or are eligible for, the vetting the role requires, which shortens the funnel before an agency or your own recruiter needs to get involved at all.
Planning a cleared hire? See current salary and day rate benchmarks for defence roles, or advertise your vacancy to candidates already searching by clearance level.