Holders of “top secret” clearances draw top salaries as demands for their credentials grow in the government contract marketplace. That’s one of the findings PSC’s Executive Vice President Alan Chvotkin presented today at the unveiling of the Human Resources Association of the National Capital Area 2010 Compensation Survey, which included a section on government contractor compensation.
More than half of the survey’s government contractor respondents said that they reward cleared personnel with higher salaries than their uncleared employees. On average, top secret clearance holders earn 5-6 percent more than uncleared employees with similar job titles. Top secret/special access program (SAP) holders can earn on average of 6-8 percent more. Some with top secret clearance positions can earn almost 25 percent more than their uncleared counterparts and those with top secret/SPA clearances can earn nearly 30 percent more.
None of this should be surprising in the wake of The Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” series, which criticized the government’s reliance on contractors to perform top secret work. Although compensation for those contractors was a key point in the series, the Post reports lacked any analysis and context surrounding why contractors are more costly. In our response to the series, PSC noted that, in many cases, the government’s own demand for talent with top-secret clearances is so high, the government cannot effectively compete in the job market. The compensation survey supports that position. With government compensation rates capped, employees naturally seek work with employers who can appropriately compensate them.
More broadly, however, government contractors and government employees were on fairly even ground when it came to their 2009 compensation. When executive pay is excluded from the mix, government contractors on average earned just 1 percent more than their public-sector counterparts in 2009, compared to 3 percent in the previous year’s survey. When executive compensation, which is not capped in the private sector the way it is in the public sector, is included, that modest differential ticks up to just 2.3 percent in 2009, compared to 4.4 percent in the previous survey.
