Issue 03
Every other Tuesday, the ClearMatch agent reports what it saw in the Cleared GovCon job market: total volume, who's hiring, what skills are in demand, where the work sits. Anonymized aggregate intelligence built from the same daily scan the agent runs for every Cleared candidate on the platform. No promotional fluff.
Issue 02 tracked 10,333 Cleared roles across 128 employer career pages. This fortnight: 15,768 across 181 — the single biggest coverage jump since the memo started. Read the headline carefully, though: the Cleared market did not grow 50% in two weeks. We added 53 employers to the scan and it now reaches deeper into the largest ones, so we can simply see more of a market that was always this big. What the wider net shows is below.
// Scan Volume
In the last 14 days, the agent scanned 55,925 GovCon contractor postings across 181 vetted employer careers pages.
Of those, 15,768 explicitly required Secret-or-above clearance. Roles surfaced to cleared candidates after scoring: 379.
Every count and share in this memo reflects the GovCon employer career pages the agent tracks — a large and growing sample, not the entire Cleared market. Figures like “share of demand” are of that tracked set.
// Clearance Mix
Of the 15,768 cleared roles:
| Tier | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Secret | 8,058 | 51.1% |
| TS | 2,162 | 13.7% |
| TS/SCI | 3,140 | 19.9% |
| TS/SCI + CI Poly | 548 | 3.5% |
| TS/SCI + Full Scope Poly | 1,860 | 11.8% |
Secret is just over half the Cleared market again (51.1%, 8,058 roles) — the commodity tier, steady fortnight to fortnight. The top of the stack is where the new coverage shows: TS/SCI + Full Scope Poly grew to 1,860 roles (still 11.8% of the cleared pool, since the wider net pulled in a lot of Secret-heavy work alongside it), with TS/SCI proper at 19.9% and another 3.5% at TS/SCI + CI Poly. Roughly one in three Cleared roles this fortnight sits at TS/SCI or above — the continuous IC mission-systems demand, unchanged in shape even as the volume around it grew.
Confidential-tier roles excluded from totals above (20 in window — functionally rare in modern GovCon).
// Top Hiring Contractors
GovCon employers with the most cleared (Secret+) postings:
| # | Contractor | Cleared | Most common tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lockheed Martin | 2,714 | Secret |
| 2 | Peraton | 1,315 | TS/SCI |
| 3 | CACI | 643 | TS/SCI + FSP |
| 4 | GDIT (General Dynamics IT) | 605 | TS/SCI + FSP |
| 5 | L3Harris | 483 | Secret |
| 6 | GD Mission Systems | 408 | Secret |
| 7 | Accenture Federal Services | 396 | TS/SCI |
| 8 | Anduril Industries | 357 | Secret |
| 9 | RTX (Raytheon / Collins / Pratt & Whitney) | 290 | Secret |
| 10 | Northrop Grumman | 273 | Secret |
Lockheed Martin is back on top at 2,714 Cleared roles — about 17% of the entire Cleared market on its own, and the scan is now reading its full listing depth again. The shift worth noting is concentration: the top 10 contractors account for just under half (~47%) of Cleared demand this fortnight, down from ~55% in Issue 02. That's the wider net working — demand is spreading across more names a candidate's agent can match against.
Peraton lands at #2 (1,315 Cleared, modal TS/SCI) — IC-heavy and DC-centered. CACI (#3) and GDIT (#4) both still show TS/SCI + Full Scope Poly as their most common Cleared tier, hiring unusually high up the stack rather than the Secret-heavy mix of the defense industrials. Anduril holds at #8, the defense-tech entrant among primes that have been hiring Cleared for decades. Northrop Grumman appears at #10 — one of this issue's new additions to the scan, in the top 10 on arrival.
This is the issue's story. Coverage went from 128 employer career pages to 181 — 53 net new sources since Issue 02. The additions skew toward two frontiers and a deeper bench: new-space and space-ISR builders (Blue Origin, York Space Systems, Stratolaunch, Ursa Major, LeoLabs, Slingshot Aerospace); the defense-tech and AI wave (Scale AI, Two Six Technologies, Skydio, Govini, CHAOS Industries, Hermeus); and a thicker services and ANC layer, including a major prime (Northrop Grumman) plus Akima, GovCIO, Chenega, Arcfield, Noblis, and RAND.
Not all of it lands as Cleared volume — several of the new-space names post hundreds of roles but name an explicit clearance on only a handful, so they add more to the scan's denominator than to the cleared count. A few major primes still aren't in the scan, and we keep adding sources each issue, so the true Cleared market is larger than the numbers here.
// Geographic Concentration
Where the cleared roles are based:
| Region | Cleared roles | Share |
|---|---|---|
| DC Metro | 4,429 | 40.4% |
| Los Angeles Metro | 423 | 3.9% |
| Huntsville | 385 | 3.5% |
| Massachusetts | 276 | 2.5% |
| Tampa | 257 | 2.3% |
| Colorado Springs | 203 | 1.9% |
| Remote-eligible | 198 | 1.8% |
| Overseas | 159 | 1.5% |
| Denver Metro | 108 | 1.0% |
| San Antonio | 87 | 0.8% |
| Hawaii / INDOPACOM | 88 | 0.8% |
| Tucson | 74 | 0.7% |
| St. Louis | 54 | 0.5% |
| Augusta | 29 | 0.3% |
| Other (distributed) | 4,189 | 38.2% |
DC Metro leads at 40.4% (4,429 roles), up from 34.7% last issue — the wider net pulled in more inside-the-Beltway services work. Beyond it, the new coverage lit up the rest of the constellation: Huntsville at 3.5% (Redstone, missile defense), Los Angeles Metro at 3.9% (the SoCal aerospace cluster), Massachusetts at 2.5%, Tampa at 2.3% (CENTCOM/SOCOM), and Colorado Springs at 1.9% — the Space Force / SPACECOM hub the new space-ISR employers feed directly. Smaller named hubs now register too: San Antonio, St. Louis (NGA), Tucson, and Hawaii / INDOPACOM. Cleared work is more geographically spread than the DMV-only view suggests.
The 38.2% "Other" is the defense industrial base outside the named hubs — Fort Worth, Marietta, Melbourne, Manchester, Orlando. No single site dominates; collectively they're a large share of where Cleared work actually happens.
Locations are drawn from the postings themselves where available. About 30% of Cleared roles this fortnight carried no structured location and are excluded from the regional breakdown — that share ticked up as the newly-added space and defense-tech employers tend to carry less structured location data than the legacy primes. It shrinks as our coverage of those sources matures.
// Top Skills In Demand
Most frequently required across the cleared role pool:
| # | Skill | Cleared roles requiring |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Python | 2,219 |
| 2 | AWS | 1,146 |
| 3 | C++ | 1,031 |
| 4 | Docker | 870 |
| 5 | Kubernetes | 864 |
Python is the most-required skill by a wide margin (2,219 Cleared roles) — every clearance tier wants it. AWS climbs to #2 this fortnight (1,146 roles), pushing C++ to #3 (1,031); the cloud-modernization pull is showing up alongside the heavier Cleared coverage, and the new defense-tech employers run cloud-native. C++ at #3 is still the defense-industrial tell — Lockheed, RTX, and L3Harris run heavy C++ shops for mission systems and avionics. Docker and Kubernetes together (870 and 864) round out the ongoing DoD modernization push on the Cleared side.
Skill demand is measured across a set of in-demand GovCon skills we track, refreshed each quarter as the market shifts.
// Adjacent Market: Public Trust
Public Trust isn’t a security clearance — it’s the federal suitability tier for civilian fed work (CISA, IRS, VA, USDA, HHS) handling sensitive-but-unclassified information. Included separately because many cleared candidates dual-purpose this pool between cleared engagements, and the demand signal is its own market.
In the last 14 days: 1,214 Public Trust-eligible postings.
Top hiring contractors
| Contractor | Count |
|---|---|
| Guidehouse | 115 |
| Peraton | 114 |
| Steampunk | 80 |
| CACI | 72 |
| GovCIO | 71 |
| ICF International | 66 |
| Akima | 63 |
| Bowhead Family of Companies (UIC) | 49 |
| GDIT (General Dynamics IT) | 49 |
| TekSynap | 45 |
Top regions
| Region | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Other (distributed) | 473 | 39.0% |
| DC Metro | 427 | 35.2% |
| Remote-eligible | 80 | 6.6% |
| San Antonio | 24 | 2.0% |
| Los Angeles Metro | 8 | 0.7% |
| Colorado Springs | 4 | 0.3% |
| Massachusetts | 3 | 0.2% |
| Denver Metro | 3 | 0.2% |
| Overseas | 3 | 0.2% |
| Tucson | 2 | 0.2% |
| Huntsville | 2 | 0.2% |
| Hawaii / INDOPACOM | 2 | 0.2% |
| St. Louis | 1 | 0.1% |
Public Trust nearly doubled to 1,214 roles — almost entirely the new coverage, as the services and ANC firms we added (GovCIO, Steampunk, Akima) do heavy civilian-fed work. Guidehouse still leads, with Peraton, Steampunk, and CACI close behind. Public Trust skews more remote-friendly than Cleared work: different security posture, fewer SCIF dependencies.
Public Trust counts reflect JD postings that explicitly name "Public Trust," "MBI," or "Tier 1/2/4." Many civilian fed contractor roles are PT-eligible in practice but don't use that language in the listing — the agency runs the suitability investigation post-hire. Actual PT-eligible volume is materially higher than the explicit count shown here.
// Founder Note
The honest read on this issue: the numbers got bigger because the scan got bigger. We widened it from 128 employer career pages to 181 and it now reaches the full depth of the largest employers, so the 15,768 figure is the Cleared market coming into sharper focus — not a market that grew by half in a fortnight.
That widening is the point. A cleared candidate's agent is now matching against the new-space builders, the defense-tech and AI firms, and the services bench — not just the legacy primes everyone already knows to apply to. The frontier of where Cleared work is being created is exactly the part a static job board is slowest to index, and it's the part we spent this fortnight pulling into view.
We'll keep adding sources. Every one we add makes the picture sharper for the Cleared people reading this.
— Rahul Pandhi Founder, ClearMatch