Resume Fonts: What to Use and Why

Font choice on a resume matters for two practical reasons and no aesthetic ones. Understanding the two reasons tells you everything you need to decide in a minute.

Reason one: it must be available on their machine

If you send a Word document and the recipient does not have your font, their software substitutes another. The replacement has different letter widths, so your line breaks move, and a comfortable one-page resume can spill a line onto page two.

Two defences, and you should use both.

Use a widely available font. Anything shipped with common operating systems and office software.

Send a PDF, exported properly using the application’s own route, which Microsoft documents for saving or converting to PDF. A PDF embeds the font, so the layout is fixed regardless of what the recipient has installed.

With a PDF the availability problem largely disappears, which is the strongest argument for sending one.

Reason two: it must be readable

Not “look nice”. Readable when tired, at small size, on a phone, and possibly printed on a bad photocopier.

That rules out script fonts, condensed faces at small sizes, anything with unusual letterforms, and light or thin weights, which lose definition in print.

It also raises contrast, which matters more than typeface. Light grey text at 40% opacity looks refined on a bright monitor and becomes hard work anywhere else. The contrast ratios in the WCAG standards are a reasonable benchmark, and the practical rule is near-black for body text.

The safe list

Any of these is fine and none is better than the others.

Sans serif: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Tahoma, Lato, Source Sans.

Serif: Georgia, Garamond, Cambria, Times New Roman, Book Antiqua.

Two notes. Verdana and Tahoma are wide, so they take more space, which matters if you are fighting for a page. Garamond is narrow and small on the body, so it usually needs a point size larger than you expect.

Times New Roman is sometimes called dated. It is not a problem, and choosing it will not cost you an interview.

Sizes that work

• Name: 18 to 22 point, bold.
• Section headings: 12 to 14 point, bold.
• Job titles: body size, bold.
• Body text: 10 to 12 point.
• Nothing below 10 point.

That last rule is the one people break. If you need 9 point to fit, you have a content problem, and the fix is cutting rather than shrinking. See the one-page resume template guide.

Line spacing at single, with a small space after paragraphs rather than empty lines. See Word resume formatting.

One font, or two at most

One font throughout is the safest and looks deliberate.

If you want two, use one for headings and one for body, and pick a pairing with an obvious contrast, such as a sans serif heading over a serif body. Do not use two similar sans serifs, which reads as an accident.

The commonest real-world font error is unintentional: a section pasted in from another document arrives in a different face, and nobody notices because it is similar. Select all and set the font once as a final step. See Word resume troubleshooting.

The genuine parsing risks

Not the choice between Calibri and Arial. Three specific things.

Icon and symbol fonts. A phone icon rendered from an icon font extracts as a meaningless character or nothing at all. Use words.

Text converted to outlines, which some design tool exports do. It looks identical and contains no characters, so it extracts as blank and a screen reader reads nothing. This is the same failure Section508.gov addresses for accessible PDFs. See the Canva resume guide.

Unusual ligatures, occasionally, where a font’s joined character pairs extract as an unmapped glyph. Rare, and worth checking.

The test for all three: open your PDF, select all the text, copy it, and paste it into a plain text editor. If it comes out clean, your font is fine.

Bold, italic and capitals

Bold for one element type only: job titles, or employers, or section headings. Pick one and hold it. Bold used on everything emphasises nothing.

Italic sparingly, for a publication title or a company descriptor. It is harder to read at small sizes.

Full capitals for section headings if you like, never for body text or a whole line of a job title.

Underline never. It reads as a hyperlink that does not work.

A two-minute pass

1. Select all and set one font.
2. Set body to 10 to 12 point, headings a step larger, name 18 to 22.
3. Set body colour to near-black.
4. Check bold is used on one element type only.
5. Export to PDF and do the copy-paste test.

Related

For the layout around it, see basic resume templates and the resume templates guide. For fitting the page, see the one-page resume template guide. For the mechanics in Word, see Word resume formatting.

Browse the simple templates or build one free.