Collar grade insignia are worn by a Navy Chief Warrant Officer 3 only with the short-sleeve shirt of the Service Khaki uniform, while a Coast Guard CWO3 wears them with both the Winter Dress Blue uniform and the Service Dress Blue in an office environment where permission is given to removed the Service Dress Jacket. (Collar insignia are also worn with the Dress and Ceremonial USCG Band uniforms.) Unlike Line officers, CWOs wear their insignia of grade on only one collar point (the right), with the other collar point reserved for their CWO specialty mark. Similarly, a CWO3 wears the same insignia of grade on the right side of the Garrison Cap in both the Navy and Coast Guard, with the specialty insignia worn on the left.
The design of the CWO3 collar grade insignia—a single silver bar on a blue enamel background—can be slightly confusing when compared to the one worn by a CWO2, which sorts two gold bars…why go to a fewer number of bars when advancing in rank? The answer has to do with the design of the insignia designed for the now-discontinued rank of Warrant Officer 1. It featured a single gold bar, and when placed alongside its higher-ranking CWO insignia, the system becomes much more clear:
| WO1 | 1 Gold Bar |
| CWO2 | 2 Gold Bars |
| CWO3 | 1 Silver Bar |
| CWO4 | 2 Silver Bars |
For reasons that escape civilians (and too complicated to explain here), the color silver is associated with higher rank than gold. By using this system of junior/senior colors, the Navy was able to avoid having a small collar insignia with four bars crammed onto it.