How to Fill Out the TSA SF-86: Sections, Releases, and Vetting

If you’ve been told to complete the TSA SF-86 form, a sponsoring official at TSA will email you a link and credentials to the NBIS eApp portal at eapp.nbis.mil, where you’ll fill in a continuous ten-year history of where you’ve lived, worked, and studied, disclose financial and legal issues, sign several releases, and transmit the completed questionnaire to TSA’s personnel security office for investigation. The form itself is the Questionnaire for National Security Positions, run by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security.¹

Who at TSA Uses the SF-86

Not every TSA hire fills out this form. Frontline Transportation Security Officers typically complete the shorter SF-85P for public trust positions. The SF-86 is reserved for roles that require a Secret clearance or higher, which generally means management, intelligence, or law-enforcement positions.¹ If TSA human resources or a security office representative has directed you to the SF-86, your position has been designated national security sensitive.

Getting Into the Portal

You can’t start the questionnaire on your own. A sponsoring official at TSA, usually someone in the personnel security office, initiates your case and emails you a link with login credentials. That link points to the NBIS eApp portal, which replaced the older e-QIP system in October 2023 and is administered by DCSA.² Older instructions may still reference e-QIP; the underlying questionnaire is the same SF-86, but the portal address and interface have changed.³

If you get locked out or lose your username, contact your TSA sponsor’s security office first. Your sponsor manages account access for individual applicants.

What to Pull Together Before You Log In

The SF-86 asks for a continuous, gap-free record going back ten years. Reconstructing this inside the portal is painful. Assemble the following first:

Every residential address for the past ten years, with a full street address (no P.O. boxes) and the name and phone number of someone who can verify you lived there — a landlord, roommate, or neighbor.⁴
Every job for the past ten years, including short-term work, unpaid internships, and under-the-table jobs. For each, you need a supervisor’s name and phone number and the employer’s physical address. Periods of unemployment go on the timeline too, with a verifier.⁴
Every school attended in the past ten years (excluding certificate programs), plus any degrees earned before that window, with each school’s physical address and a contact who knew you there.⁴
Three personal references who collectively cover the past seven years. They can’t be relatives or coworkers you don’t socialize with outside work, and they shouldn’t duplicate anyone already listed on the form.⁴
Every trip outside the United States in the past seven years, including day trips to Canada or Mexico. Official government travel is excluded; personal and non-government work travel is not.⁴
Financial records covering the past seven years: bankruptcies, tax liens, judgments, defaults, collection accounts, garnishments, or debts over 120 days delinquent. Pull a current credit report so nothing surprises you.¹
Court records with dates, charges, and outcomes for any encounter with law enforcement, including matters later sealed, expunged, or dismissed.

If you completed a previous background investigation, log in and clean out old data before you start. Delete residences and jobs beyond the ten-year window and fix any errors carried forward from earlier submissions.

Working Through the Sections

The portal is organized into numbered sections. You don’t have to complete them in order, progress saves as you go, and everything must be finished before you can submit. A few sections cause most of the trouble.

Residence and Employment Timelines (Sections 11 and 13)

No gaps. The portal flags any break in your timeline and blocks submission until you account for it. If you were unemployed for three months between jobs, enter that period as unemployment and list someone who can confirm what you were doing. Don’t stretch a start or end date to paper over a gap; investigators compare your entries against employer records and catch the mismatch.⁴ Use physical addresses for residences. If you lived in campus housing, list the specific building and room number for each academic year separately.

Financial History (Section 26)

Section 26 is broader than most applicants expect. Within the past seven years, you must report whether you have:

Filed for bankruptcy
Failed to file or pay federal, state, or local taxes
Had a lien placed against your property
Had a judgment entered against you
Defaulted on a loan
Had wages garnished
Had debts sent to collections or accounts charged off
Been over 120 days delinquent on any debt
Been evicted for nonpayment

The form also asks whether you are currently delinquent on any federal debt and whether you have ever had financial problems from gambling.¹ Report every item that applies, even if the debt has been resolved, is in dispute, or was on an account where you were only a cosigner. Investigators pull your credit report and compare it against your answers; an omission looks worse than the debt itself.⁴

Police Records (Section 22)

List every arrest, charge, or citation regardless of outcome. That includes charges that were dismissed, expunged, or sealed. The SF-86 explicitly overrides state sealing and expungement laws for purposes of this questionnaire.⁴ Provide the date, the law enforcement agency, the charge, and the court where it was resolved.

Foreign Contacts (Section 19)

Report ongoing relationships with foreign nationals, including name, nationality, how you met, and how often you communicate. If you’re missing some details about a contact, list what you know and note what’s unknown. Leaving someone off because you can’t remember their address creates a bigger problem than an incomplete entry.⁴

Drug Use (Section 23)

Marijuana use must be disclosed even if it happened in a state where recreational or medical use is legal. Marijuana remains a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law, and SEAD 4, the directive that governs security clearance adjudication, makes no exception for state-legal use.⁵ Disclosure is not an automatic disqualifier. Adjudicators look at whether use was long ago, infrequent, or unlikely to recur, and whether you’ve shown a pattern of abstinence. Concealing use and getting caught is treated as a deliberate false statement, which is far harder to mitigate than the use itself.

Psychological and Emotional Health (Section 21)

The scope here is narrower than many applicants fear. You answer “yes” only if a court or administrative body declared you mentally incompetent, if you were hospitalized for a psychological condition, if treatment was ordered by a court or employer, or if you were diagnosed with a condition that could affect your ability to safeguard classified information. Routine counseling for grief, marital or family issues, adjustment after military deployment, or recovery from sexual assault does not need to be reported.⁶ If you do answer “yes,” you’ll also sign a HIPAA authorization allowing investigators to obtain the medical records tied to that treatment.¹

Signing the Releases and Submitting

Once every section is complete, the portal runs a validation check that flags missing fields, date conflicts, and timeline gaps. You can’t submit until every error is resolved. This is your last chance to catch mistakes before the form reaches investigators.

After validation, the portal presents authorization pages for electronic signature:

The Authorization for Release of Information lets investigators contact your employers, schools, landlords, credit bureaus, and other sources.
The Fair Credit Reporting Disclosure authorizes the government to pull consumer credit reports under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
The HIPAA Medical Release is required only if you answered “yes” to Section 21.

Each page carries a certification that everything you provided is true and complete. Read the certification carefully. Deliberately falsifying or concealing information on the SF-86 is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, punishable by up to five years in prison.⁷ Honest mistakes aren’t prosecuted; a pattern of omissions that looks intentional will sink your candidacy.

After signing, click the release button to transmit the package to TSA’s security office. Once released, you can no longer edit the form. Save or print a copy first. You’ll want it as a reference if an investigator asks about specific dates or entries weeks later.

After You Submit

Your SF-86 goes first to TSA’s personnel security office, which reviews it for obvious problems and then forwards it to DCSA for investigation. Investigators verify your information by contacting employers, neighbors, references, schools, courts, and financial institutions.⁸ Fingerprints collected during hiring are checked against FBI databases.

Most applicants will sit down with a background investigator for an in-person interview. The investigator’s job is to verify, expand, and clarify what you wrote.⁸ Expect questions about specific dates, financial issues, foreign travel, and any entries that look incomplete. If the investigator finds something you didn’t list, acknowledge it and provide the details. Don’t get defensive or change your story.

Timelines vary. As of mid-2025, the average end-to-end processing time for all background investigations was roughly 243 days, including initiation, investigation, and adjudication. Tier 3 investigations, used for Secret clearances, averaged about 138 days total. Applicants with extensive foreign travel, financial issues, or many residences take longer because investigators have more leads to run down. Communication from TSA during this period is minimal unless investigators need more information. If you move, change jobs, or have a significant life event while the investigation is pending, notify your TSA security point of contact.

Continuous Vetting Once You Have the Clearance

Getting the clearance isn’t the end. Under the Trusted Workforce 2.0 framework, the federal government has replaced periodic reinvestigations with continuous vetting: automated checks against criminal, terrorism, financial, and public-records databases that run on an ongoing basis.⁹ The national security workforce was enrolled by the end of 2022.¹⁰

When an alert fires — a new arrest, a tax lien, unusual foreign travel — DCSA decides whether to investigate further. Some alerts lead nowhere; others prompt a conversation with you and your security officer. In serious cases, a clearance can be suspended or revoked. Self-report any potentially derogatory event to your security officer promptly. Agencies treat voluntary self-reporting far more favorably than a discovery through an automated database hit.

If Your Clearance Is Denied

An unfavorable determination usually doesn’t arrive without warning. If adjudicators identify concerns, you may receive a Statement of Reasons, a formal letter listing the allegations under the adjudicative guidelines (financial considerations, personal conduct, foreign influence, and so on) and the factual basis for each. The letter shifts the burden to you. You must respond to each allegation individually, either admitting or denying it and providing evidence that mitigates the concern.

After responding in writing, you can request a hearing before a judge at the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals, where you can present documents, testimony, and context that the written record may not capture.¹¹ If you receive a Statement of Reasons, consult a security clearance attorney before responding. The deadlines are firm and the format of your response matters.

1
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. SF-86 Questionnaire for National Security Positions
2
Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. National Background Investigation Services (NBIS)
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Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing (e-QIP)
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Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. DCSA SF-86 Guide
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Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Security Executive Agent Directive 4 Adjudicative Guidelines
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Military Health System. Security Clearances and Psychological Health Care
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Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 1001 – Statements or Entries Generally
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Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. Investigations and Clearance Process
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Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. Continuous Vetting
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Performance.gov. Trusted Workforce 2.0 Transition Report
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Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals. DOHA Appeal Board