Resume Formatting: Font, Size, Margins, and Spacing That Actually Work

None of these five decisions individually make or break a resume, but get several of them wrong at once and a resume that has strong content still reads as cluttered, dated, or hard to scan. Here's the specific, defensible answer for each.

What font should a resume use?

Stick to a standard, widely available typeface — the goal is invisibility, not personality. A font choice that draws attention to itself is doing the opposite of its job.

• Safe, standard choices: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, or a template's built-in system font. All render consistently across devices and parse cleanly in applicant tracking systems.
• Avoid: anything decorative, handwriting-style, or unusual enough that a reader notices the font before the content — and avoid fonts that aren't installed on most systems, since a document opened without the font installed silently substitutes something else, sometimes breaking your layout.
• One font is enough. Using a different typeface for headings versus body text is a design choice some templates make well, but mixing fonts yourself usually looks amateur rather than intentional. If a template offers a heading/body pairing already built in, that's a safer way to get variety than picking two fonts yourself.

There's no single "best" font beyond this — Calibri and Arial are the two most common defaults for good reason: clean, legible, unremarkable, and safe everywhere.

What font size should a resume use?

• Body text: 10.5–12 points. Below 10.5 sacrifices readability to save space, which is a worse trade than cutting content instead.
• Your name: 16–20 points, the largest element on the page, since it's the first thing a reader should register.
• Section headings: 12–14 points, bold or in a slightly heavier weight, enough to break the page into scannable sections without shouting.

If your content doesn't fit at a legible size, the fix is cutting content, not shrinking the font — a cramped page at 9 points reads worse to a recruiter than one clean page at 11. Our guide on resume length covers exactly how to trim content down instead.

What margins should a resume use?

0.5 to 1 inch on all sides is the standard, safe range. Narrower than 0.5 inches starts to look cramped and can even crop content when printed or converted to PDF on a different system; wider than 1 inch wastes space that could hold real content. If you're right at the edge of fitting one page, narrowing margins slightly (down to about 0.5 inches) before shrinking font size or cutting a strong bullet is a reasonable trade — margins have more flexibility than font size does before readability suffers.

How much white space should a resume have?

White space isn't wasted space — it's what makes a dense page scannable instead of overwhelming. A resume with too little white space (tight margins, no breathing room between sections, bullets crammed together) reads as cluttered even when the content is strong; a resume with too much (a mostly empty page trying to look "full" through spacing tricks) reads as thin.

The practical target: clear visual separation between sections (a bit more space above a heading than below it), consistent spacing between bullet points, and margins that don't feel cramped. If you're unsure whether your resume has enough, the fastest check is a quick glance from a few feet away — you should be able to see the section breaks clearly without reading a word.

What date format should a resume use?

Month and year — "Jan 2023 – Mar 2026" or "01/2023 – 03/2026." Both work; pick one and use it consistently throughout the document. This isn't just a style preference:

• Applicant tracking systems parse real dates. A parser calculating your years of experience or checking employment continuity needs an actual, computable date format. Stylized alternatives like "Winter '23" or "Early 2023" often can't be parsed at all — covered in more depth in our ATS-friendly resume guide.
• Exact days aren't necessary. "March 2023," not "March 14, 2023" — the extra precision doesn't help a reader and adds visual clutter for no benefit.
• Consistency matters more than which format you pick. Switching between "Jan 2023" in one entry and "01/2023" in another looks careless even though both are individually fine.

Putting it together

None of these five decisions needs to be agonized over individually — a clean, standard font at 10.5–12 points, 0.5–1 inch margins, consistent spacing between sections, and month/year dates throughout covers all of it correctly by default. Every template in our editor has these defaults built in, so the typography decisions are handled for you unless you deliberately want to adjust them — and the live A4 preview shows exactly how any adjustment actually looks on the real page as you make it, rather than leaving you to guess.

Frequently asked questions

Does font choice affect how a resume parses in an ATS? Common, standard fonts parse identically to each other — the risk is decorative or unusual fonts rendering as odd characters in some parsers. Sticking to a standard typeface avoids this entirely; it isn't about one safe font parsing better than another safe one.

Is it ever okay to use a different font size for different sections? Yes, within the ranges above — a larger name, mid-size section headings, and consistent body text is normal hierarchy, not something to avoid. What to avoid is inconsistency within the same level, like two job titles at different sizes with no reason.

Should margins be exactly the same on all four sides? Not strictly required, but it's the safest default and what most templates use. Some designs use a slightly larger top margin for visual balance — fine, as long as it's intentional and consistent, not the result of content overflowing unevenly.

Do these rules change for a two-page resume? No — the same font, size, margin, and spacing rules apply on page two exactly as they do on page one. What changes with length is content selection, covered in our resume length guide, not the underlying typography.