Font and formatting will not win you the job. They can lose you the read, which is almost the same thing.

A recruiter opening a cover letter for the first time spends about 30 seconds on it. In that window, the brain decides whether the document looks easy enough to read or whether it should skip to the next one. Font, line spacing, and margins are doing most of that work before a single word is processed.

This post is about the boring decisions that quietly move that needle.

The font: pick one of five, then stop

Only five fonts really matter for a cover letter. All of them are pre-installed on Mac, Windows, and Google Docs, which means the formatting will not break when the recruiter opens the file:

• Calibri — Microsoft default, modern, low-stakes. Reads cleanly on screen at 11pt.
• Arial — sans-serif, very neutral. The safe one when you have no opinion.
• Helvetica — almost identical to Arial, slightly better on Mac. Use it on Apple platforms.
• Georgia — serif, designed for screens. Looks more traditional without looking dated.
• Garamond — serif, lower x-height. Lets you fit slightly more text on one page without it feeling crammed.

That is the list. Anything else is a small risk for no upside.

What to avoid: Times New Roman (reads as a 2008 student paper), Comic Sans (obvious), Papyrus (also obvious), and any heavy display font from a free Google Fonts directory. Recruiters notice unfamiliar fonts, and "why is this in Cinzel Decorative?" is not the thought you want them to have first.

Match the CV. The single most useful rule: use the same font on the cover letter and the CV. They are two halves of the same application. Different fonts on each one signal a candidate who copy-pasted templates.

Font size and weight

• Body text: 10.5pt to 12pt. 11pt is the safe default for Calibri and Arial. 10.5pt for Garamond if you are tight on space.
• Header (your name): 14pt to 16pt, bold, not centered.
• No italics for emphasis. Use bold sparingly, or just rewrite the sentence so the emphasis lands on its own. Underlines are a non-starter — they make text look like a hyperlink.

If you find yourself going below 10pt to make the letter fit on one page, the letter is too long. That is a content problem, not a formatting problem.

Line spacing and margins

• Line spacing: 1.15 or 1.5. Single-spacing reads as a wall of text on screen; double-spacing reads as a school essay. Word's default 1.08 is fine too.
• Paragraph spacing: one blank line between paragraphs, not a tab indent. Indented paragraphs look correct on paper and wrong on screen, and the cover letter is read on screen 95% of the time.
• Margins: 1 inch (2.54 cm) all around. If you need to shrink margins to fit the content, do not go below 0.7 inch (1.78 cm) anywhere — anything tighter looks crammed and prints with cut text on some printers.

Layout — the structure on the page

The page, top to bottom:

1. Your name and contact — name in bold, then phone, email, city, LinkedIn URL on one or two lines below. Left-aligned. No address line unless the role explicitly asks (more on that in our cover letter format post).
2. Date — one line, ISO-style or written out ("May 30, 2026"). Skip it if you are emailing the letter in the body of the email.
3. Recipient name and company — addressed to a real person if you can find one. "Dear Hiring Manager" if you cannot.
4. Three to four short paragraphs of body text.
5. Sign-off — "Sincerely" or "Best regards," then your typed name. No handwritten signature image unless the role specifically wants one (rare in tech, common in law and finance).

Alignment: everything left-aligned, ragged-right. Justified text (the kind that stretches to both margins) creates ugly word spacing on short letters and reads as old-fashioned.

Color and visual flourishes

For 90% of roles: black text on white background, no decoration. The exceptions:

• Creative roles (designers, art directors, certain marketing roles) can use one accent color — a colored bar at the top, or your name in a brand color. One, not three. If your portfolio has a brand, match it.
• Avoid colored body text. Colored headings are fine in moderation; colored paragraphs read as a brochure, not a letter.
• No photo on a cover letter. Even in markets where the CV traditionally has a photo (France, Spain, Germany), the cover letter does not.
• No icons. The phone, email, LinkedIn icons make sense on a CV header where space is tight. On a cover letter they read as decoration.

File format and naming

Send a PDF, not a Word file, unless the application form explicitly asks for .docx. PDFs render identically everywhere; Word files break formatting depending on the recruiter's font versions and Word build. The cover letter you spent an hour formatting can look completely different on the other side.

File name: Firstname-Lastname-Cover-Letter.pdf or Firstname-Lastname-CL-CompanyName.pdf. No spaces (some systems break on them), no version numbers, no "v3-final-FINAL" residue.

We go deeper on the PDF-vs-Word decision in PDF vs Word for ATS. The short version: PDFs win for cover letters in 2026.

A 30-second checklist before you send

• One page, no exceptions.
• Same font as the CV, 10.5–12pt body.
• 1-inch margins, no tighter than 0.7 inch.
• Left-aligned, blank line between paragraphs.
• No color in body text, no icons, no photo.
• PDF, clean file name.
• Print preview on the screen, then look at it on a phone. If it looks dense or awkward on either, fix it.

Format is not the place to be original. The original part is the writing. The format's only job is to disappear so the writing can do its work.

If you are pulling your career data from LinkedIn into Postulit, the tool handles the typography for both your CV and the matching cover letter, so they look like one application instead of two stitched-together documents. That alone fixes the most common formatting mistake — the mismatch between the two files in the same envelope.