Best font for a resume: type, size and spacing

Picking a resume font should take about ten minutes. Choose a familiar one, set it at a size people can read, leave some room around it, and stop thinking about typography. Most resumes that look wrong look wrong for one of four reasons: the text is too small, the lines are crowded, too many styles are competing, or the file changed on its way to the reader.

This guide shows real samples of the fonts people use most, gives size and spacing ranges you can start from, and covers what goes wrong when the file is sent: missing fonts, Word files that reflow, and PDFs that turn text into pictures. If you are also wondering how much to put on the page, how long a resume should be covers that side of the layout.

The short answer

Choose one familiar font, set the body text between 10 and 12 points, leave room around it and use it everywhere on the page. Arial, Calibri, Georgia, Garamond, Cambria and Times New Roman all do the job. After that, readability and consistency decide whether the page looks professional, and the name of the font has very little to do with it.

The advice below is built on rules of thumb that career guides have repeated for years. No standard sets these numbers, and published guides vary by a point or two on almost every one. Treat each range as a place to start and adjust with your eyes.

Fonts that work, with samples

These are the fonts that show up most often on clean resumes. Each sample is set in the font as your own device has it. If your device lacks one, your browser shows a close substitute, which is also a useful preview of what happens when a reader opens a file without the font you chose.

Here is the same information side by side, with a body size to try for each one.

The sizes are starting points. Fonts are drawn on different grids, so the same point size looks different from one to the next, and your own page will tell you more than any table.

If you cannot decide

Calibri at 11 points or Arial at 10.5 points will not draw a comment from anyone. If your field leans traditional, such as law, finance, publishing or academia, Georgia or Garamond fits the document habits of those places. If you will send a Word file by email, stay with fonts that ship with the operating system on both Windows and Mac: Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, Verdana and Trebuchet. Calibri and Cambria come with Microsoft Office, so a reader without it may see a substitute. A PDF removes the problem.

Serif or sans serif

Serif fonts have small strokes on the ends of the letters. Sans serif fonts do not. The usual rule of thumb is that sans serif reads cleanly at small sizes on a screen, and serif suits print and traditional fields. Both are accepted on resumes, and a well-set serif beats a badly set sans serif.

Mixing the two on purpose is fine, and a short section further down shows how.

Font size, with rules of thumb

These ranges come up again and again in career guides, and they hold up because of how people read a resume: on a laptop, on a phone, or on a printed copy at an interview table.

Below 10 points the page gets hard to read for anyone with tired eyes or a small screen, and a reader who has to squint stops reading closely. Above 12 for body text, a resume starts to look padded, and it fills up before you have said much. The font matters here. A 10-point Verdana looks about the size of an 11-point Times New Roman, so compare on the page.

A quick way to test any size:

1. Export the PDF.
2. Open it at 100 percent zoom on a laptop, and read a paragraph without leaning in.
3. Open it on a phone and check that you can read a bullet without zooming.
4. If you can, print one page and hold it at arm's length.

If any of those reads as a strain, the size is too small or the lines are too crowded.

You can also test fonts with your own words instead of a sample line. Paste five of your real bullets into a blank document, set them in three candidate fonts at their starting sizes, and compare. Pay attention to how many lines each one needs and whether your numbers and dates look even. Two minutes of this tells you more than a month of reading font rankings, and the fonts you drop will usually be the ones that wrapped awkwardly.

Margins, line spacing and white space

Type size is half of the readability of a page. The other half is what surrounds it.

Header

Maya Torres

Summary

Skills

Experience

Experience

Education

• 1Margins: roughly 0.5 to 1 inch on every side. Keep them equal, and keep the top no smaller than the bottom.
• 2Line spacing: single to about 1.15 inside a bullet, with a little extra space above each job so the groups are visible.
• 3Bullets: one or two lines each. A bullet that wraps to a third line is usually two ideas, and it works better split or trimmed.

The principle is proximity. Things that belong together sit close, and things that are separate get more room. A job title, its dates and its bullets form a group. The space above the next job title should be visibly larger than the space between two bullets. That is what lets a reader find the second job without reading the first one again.

Some details that save a lot of trouble:

• Use the same spacing everywhere. If one section heading has 8 points above it, every section heading does.
• Right-align dates with a tab stop rather than a row of spaces. Spaces fall apart the moment the font changes.
• Use one style of bullet, aligned in a column.
• Keep your name and contact details in the body of the page and out of the word processor's header area. Some systems read page headers poorly, and a reader who cannot find your phone number may not go looking for it.
• Do not push margins to 0.3 inches to fit a job on. If you need that to fit, the page has too much on it.

Set the font with styles

In Word, Google Docs and Pages, the font belongs to a style that applies to every line using it. Change the Normal or body style once, then set the heading style once, and the whole document follows. This matters because a resume edited over several months collects strays: a bullet pasted from a posting in another font, a job pasted from an old file at 12 points. Selecting everything and applying one font fixes that moment only, and the next paste brings the strays back.

After editing, run a quick pass. Click into a handful of bullets from different sections and read the font and size box. If the numbers change, you have a stray.

The squint test

Step back from the screen, or hold the printout at arm's length, and squint until the words blur. You should still see your name at the top, then a clear sequence of section headings, then job titles as the next-darkest marks, then lighter body text in tidy groups. If a heading disappears, or two levels look the same, the hierarchy is too flat. If one thing shouts, something is over-emphasized. It takes ten seconds and it finds problems that reading the words never will.

Bold, italics, capitals and color

A resume has about six jobs for formatting to do. Give each one a single, consistent treatment and use it everywhere.

A few rules go with the table.

• Use italics sparingly, for a single element such as dates or a publication title. A whole block in italics is tiring to read.
• Capitals work for short section headings. A full line of capitals slows reading, because the word shapes disappear.
• Skip underlining. On a screen it looks like a link that does not work.
• Keep body text black or a very dark gray. A single dark accent color for the name or the heading rules is fine, and it should still read clearly on a black and white printout.
• Avoid light gray for dates or contact details. It looks neat on your monitor and disappears when printed or on a phone in sunlight.

Using more than one font

One family is the simplest answer. Use regular and bold weights, vary the size, and you have all the hierarchy a one or two page resume needs.

If you want a second font, use it for one job only: the name and section headings in one font and everything else in another. Cambria headings with Calibri body is a long-standing Microsoft Office pairing. Georgia headings with Arial body also works. Choose a serif and a sans serif so they are visibly different, because two similar fonts side by side look like a mistake.

The test for a second font is whether a reader can tell why it is there. If you cannot say what it does, remove it.

How the file travels: fonts, PDF and Word

The font you see on your screen is only the font the reader sees if it comes with the file or is installed on their machine. That is where most surprises happen.

1. 1

   Set one font

   Apply it to the whole document, including bullets and the contact line.
2. 2

   Export to PDF

   Use Save as PDF or Print to PDF so the font is stored inside the file.
3. 3

   Open it elsewhere

   Check it on a phone and on another computer. Look for shifted lines and odd spacing.
4. 4

   Copy a paragraph

   Select text in the PDF and paste it into a plain notes app. It should come out as real words.

A PDF generally embeds the fonts it uses, so what you export is what the reader sees. A Word file carries only the name of the font. If the reader's machine lacks it, the program quietly uses another one, and the spacing, line breaks and page count can all change. That is why a resume that fit on one page for you arrives with a stray line on page two.

Two other risks are worth knowing about. Some design tools export text as outlines or as part of an image, which looks fine on screen and leaves nothing for a system to read or for you to copy. The copy and paste test in step four catches that. And a PDF made by printing a screenshot or scanning a page is a picture of text, which is the same problem. For the longer version of this test, see how to check your resume for ATS problems, and for the wider rules on formatting, see ATS-friendly resume: the formatting rules that matter.

If you want background on why a system is reading the file at all, what is an ATS explains it. The short version for fonts is that a standard font in a normal text PDF is not what these systems struggle with.

Bullets, symbols and accented letters

Characters are part of the font too. A phone or envelope icon from a symbol font such as Wingdings is really a letter drawn as a picture, and a system that reads the file may see the letter, or a box, instead of the icon. Plain text labels such as "Phone" and "Email" are safe, and so is the ordinary round bullet your word processor provides. A decorative arrow or a checkmark bullet adds nothing a reader needs.

If you write your resume in a language with accented letters, such as Polish, German, French, Spanish or Serbian, check that the font draws every character you use: ł, ä, é, ñ, š, ž. The common fonts in this guide generally cover them. Decorative fonts often do not, and a missing glyph shows up as a gap or a box in the middle of your own name. How to make a resume in Spanish, German, French, Polish or Serbian covers the rest of the language side.

Fonts to avoid

They share three problems. They are harder to read, especially at small sizes and on a phone. They carry a tone you did not choose, a playful or ornamental one that does not match a line like "Supervised a 12-person shift." And they are less likely to exist on the reader's machine, so what arrives is something else.

There is one exception. If you work in a field where visual design is the job, such as graphic design, fashion, or a print studio, a distinctive typeface on your resume can show your taste. Even then, the body text should be plain and readable, and the portfolio does the talking.

Which font for which kind of job

Fonts do not decide who is hired in any field. These are habits you can borrow if you want a starting point, and each is a choice among fonts that work.

A worked example: five typography fixes

Here are five problems that appear on real resumes all the time, with the fix for each. They come from a made-up resume for a pharmacy technician, and none of the changes touch a word of content.

When the resume spills over by a few lines

You finish a resume and the last three lines land on a second page. The tempting fix is to shrink the font. Fix it in this order instead, because each step changes less about how the page reads than the one after it.

1. 1

   Trim words

   Shorten the longest bullets so they end a few words earlier. A bullet that wraps to a lone word wastes a whole line.

2. 2

   Cut the weakest bullet

   Look at your oldest or least relevant job and drop the bullet that proves least.

3. 3

   Tighten the gaps

   Reduce space above headings by a point or two, evenly across the document.

4. 4

   Nudge the margins

   Take a tenth of an inch off, but stay within the 0.5 to 1 inch range.

5. 5

   Reduce the size last

   No more than half a point, and never below 10 for body text.

If you work through all five and the page still will not fit, the answer is more cutting. How long should a resume be shows what to take out and in which order.

Mistakes to avoid and a final checklist

The mistakes

The checklist

Before you send it

• One font family, or two at most with a clear job for each
• Body text between 10 and 12 points and comfortable to read at 100 percent zoom
• Name largest, then section headings, then job titles, then body
• Margins even and between 0.5 and 1 inch
• Same spacing above every section heading and every job
• Dates aligned with a tab stop, in one format throughout
• Contact details in the body of the page, in dark text
• Exported as a PDF with real text, and a pasted paragraph reads correctly
• Opened on a second device with no shifted lines or missing letters

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Where SnugCV fits

In SnugCV, the font and layout are settings you choose once. You can pick the Classic template, a compact single column, or Modern, which has bolder headings and more white space. The font options are Inter, Arial and Times New Roman, and the choice carries through to the preview and to the PDF you download. Each tailored resume follows your saved preferences, and you can change the font or template on a single document from its edit screen.

The settings and what each one does are covered in how to choose your resume template, font and section order, and how to edit your tailored resume and download it as a PDF walks through the editor.

Keep going

Once the type is settled, the next thing a reader notices is the structure of the page. Resume formats: chronological, functional or combination compares the three layouts, and resume bullet points covers the writing inside them. If you want the rules that matter when a system reads your file, start with ATS-friendly resume: the formatting rules that matter.