The Cover Letter Signature: What to Use and When

Most people spend an hour on the opening line of a cover letter and about four seconds on the bottom. That is backwards. The closing block is the last thing a hiring manager reads before they decide whether to open your CV, and it is the part that most often looks sloppy, dated, or copied from a 2009 template.

Here is what actually belongs at the foot of a cover letter now, and what you can drop.

The sign-off phrase: what is safe in 2026

Your cover letter signature starts with the sign-off line, the short phrase above your name. Keep it short and neutral. The safe set:

• Kind regards - the default. Works in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and increasingly in the US. Warm without being chummy.
• Best regards - slightly more formal, fine anywhere.
• Sincerely - the standard US close. Neutral and correct.
• Yours sincerely - correct in British English when you know the recipient's name.
• Yours faithfully - correct in British English when you do not know the name and opened with "Dear Sir or Madam".

That last pair is the named-versus-unnamed rule, and it still trips people up. If you wrote "Dear Ms Okafor", you close with "Yours sincerely". If you wrote "Dear Hiring Manager" or "Dear Sir or Madam", you close with "Yours faithfully". Mixing them signals you did not proofread.

Honestly, the cleanest fix is to find the recipient's name. "Yours faithfully" now reads as stiff and slightly archaic to a lot of readers, and it advertises that you did not do thirty seconds of research.

Avoid: "Yours truly", "Respectfully yours", "Warmly", "Cheers", "Thanks in advance", and anything with an exclamation mark. Also skip "I look forward to hearing from you" as your sign-off phrase - it is a fine closing sentence in the last paragraph, but it is not a sign-off.

Do you still need a handwritten signature?

Short answer: usually no, and nobody rejects a candidate for not having one.

A scanned or drawn signature genuinely helps in a few situations:

• Public administration and civil service applications, where the file may be printed and archived.
• Law, banking, insurance, notarial work, healthcare administration - sectors where signed paper is still part of the culture.
• Printed or posted applications, which still exist for some institutions and grants.
• Applications sent to French or Spanish employers, where a signed letter is more strongly expected than in the US or UK.

It looks fussy or slightly try-hard when you are emailing a PDF to a twelve-person startup, applying through Workday or Greenhouse, or pasting text into a form. In those cases a typed name is the signature.

How to make a clean digital signature

If you want a digital signature on your cover letter, make it look deliberate, not like a fax artifact.

1. Sign your name on plain white unlined paper with a black fine-liner or gel pen. Write it at normal size, not huge.
2. Photograph it in daylight, straight on, or scan at 300 dpi.
3. Crop tight to the signature. Remove the background - a free background remover or the "Set Transparent Color" tool in most editors will do it.
4. Save as PNG with transparency.
5. Insert it in your document at roughly 4-5 cm wide and 1.5 cm tall. It should be about the height of two lines of text, never more.
6. Export the finished letter as PDF so the image is embedded and cannot shift.

Then type your full name underneath it. Always. The image is decoration; the typed name is the data.

What the closing block should look like

A correct English closing block reads, line by line: Kind regards, then a blank line, then your scanned signature image if you are using one, then Amara Okonjo typed in full, then +44 7700 900312, then amara.okonjo@email.com, then linkedin.com/in/amaraokonjo.

That is it. Sign-off, optional signature image, typed full name, then a compact contact line or two. No address block unless the employer asked for one - nobody is posting you a letter.

Keep the contact details identical to the ones on your CV. A different phone number on each document creates real problems when someone tries to call you.

When the letter is pasted into an email or a form

This is now the most common case, so treat it as the default rather than the exception.

Pasted into an email body: no image, ever. Close with your sign-off, your typed full name, then your phone and LinkedIn. Do not let your automatic email signature block do this job for you. An email signature is a company-branded footer with a job title, a logo, and often a legal disclaimer - it belongs to your current employer and it looks strange attached to a job application. Turn it off or delete it, and type a clean three-line block instead.

Application form field: many forms strip formatting entirely. Write the sign-off and your name as plain text on separate lines and stop there. If the form already collects your phone and email in other fields, do not repeat them - it wastes the character limit.

Uploaded as an attachment: PDF, always. Word files reflow, and a signature image placed in a .docx can land on a page of its own on someone else's machine.

Mistakes that cost you

• Signature image that breaks in an ATS. Some parsers drop images, some render them as a filename, and a few choke on the file. If the typed name is missing, your letter now ends anonymously. This is the single strongest argument for always typing your name.
• A giant scrawled signature taking up a quarter of the page. It reads as unserious.
• No name at all, because the writer assumed the file name or the email account covered it. It does not.
• Mismatched name and email. If the letter is signed "Alexandra Petrova" and it arrives from "sunshine_alex99@", the recruiter pauses. Use a plain firstname.lastname address.
• A signature from a different letter with the previous company's name still under it. It happens more than you would think, and it is fatal.
• Two sign-offs. "Kind regards" at the end of your last paragraph and again above your name.

The quick check

Before you send, read the last five lines out loud. Is there a sign-off? Does it match how you addressed the reader? Is your full name typed in plain text? Are the phone number and email the same ones on your CV? If yes to all four, the bottom of your letter is doing its job, with or without a scanned signature.