Your CV can lose a job before a person ever reads it. The wrong font makes text hard to scan, and a handful of decorative typefaces confuse the software that recruiters use to sort applications. Getting the font and size right is a small decision with an outsized effect on whether your experience gets read at all.
Why the font choice matters more than it looks
A recruiter spends a few seconds on the first pass of a CV. If the letters are cramped, oddly spaced, or too small, that scan gets slower and your strongest points get skipped. Clean typography does the opposite: it guides the eye from your name to your title to your recent role without friction.
There is also a machine reading your CV before any human does. Applicant tracking systems parse your document into plain text, and some fonts break that process. Thin display fonts, script fonts, and heavily stylised typefaces can produce garbled characters or drop words entirely. When that happens, the parser might file your CV under the wrong name or miss the keywords a recruiter searched for.
So the goal is narrow: pick something legible on screen and on paper, and safe for parsers. That rules out most of the interesting fonts, and that is fine. A CV is a document people read quickly, not a poster.
Best fonts for a CV
The safest choices are the ones that have been tested by millions of documents and render cleanly everywhere. You can split them into two camps.
Serif fonts have small feet on the letters and read well on printed pages:
- Georgia stays readable even at smaller sizes and has a warm, professional feel.
- Cambria was designed for screen reading and holds up when a PDF is viewed on a laptop.
- Garamond is compact, which helps if you are fighting to keep a CV to one page.
Sans-serif fonts have no feet and tend to look modern and clean on screens:
- Calibri is a common default and parses reliably.
- Arial is plain, widely installed, and never a wrong answer.
- Helvetica is a designer favourite, though it is not installed on every machine, so embed it in your PDF.
- Verdana was built for on-screen legibility and works well if your CV will mostly be read digitally.
Two quiet rules make any of these look better. Use one font for the whole document, or at most two, one for headings and one for body text. And avoid the fonts that get overused to the point of looking careless, which is the main knock against Times New Roman and Comic Sans.
A font that nobody notices is doing its job. Attention should land on what you did, not on the shapes of the letters.
CV font size in 2026
Size is where a lot of CVs quietly fail. Text set too large looks like you are padding a thin history. Text set too small strains the reader and signals that you crammed in more than fits.
Here is a range that works across almost every template:
- Body text: 10 to 12 points. This is where the bulk of your content lives, so start at 11 and adjust. Georgia and Verdana run large, so 10.5 is often enough. Garamond runs small, so push it to 12.
- Headings and section titles: 13 to 16 points. Enough contrast to break the page into blocks without shouting.
- Your name at the top: 18 to 24 points. It is the one place a bit of scale is welcome.
Point size is not the whole story. Line spacing between 1.0 and 1.15 keeps lines from touching while still fitting content. Margins between 1.5 and 2.5 centimetres give the text room to breathe. If you find yourself dropping to 9-point body text to fit everything, the answer is usually to cut words, not shrink them.
Check the result on two screens and, if you can, on a printout. A size that looks fine on a large monitor can turn tight on a phone, which is where a growing share of first reads now happen.
The ATS angle: fonts that break parsers
Applicant tracking systems read the text layer of your file, not the visual design. Several habits quietly damage that text layer.
- Decorative and script fonts often map to characters the parser cannot read, so "Manager" can arrive as a string of nonsense.
- Text inside images, icons, or logos is invisible to a parser. If your job titles live in a graphic, they may as well not exist.
- Fonts in text boxes, headers, or footers get skipped by some systems, so keep contact details in the main body.
- Non-standard fonts that are not embedded can be swapped for a fallback the parser handles poorly. Export to PDF with fonts embedded, or stick to system-standard typefaces.
The practical test is simple. Open your finished PDF, select all the text, copy it, and paste it into a plain text editor. If your name, titles, and dates come through in the right order and spelled correctly, a parser will likely read them too. If words are scrambled or missing, change the font or the layout before you send it anywhere.
If you build your CV from a LinkedIn profile, a tool like Postulit exports into clean, parser-friendly layouts, which removes a lot of this guesswork. Whatever you use, run the copy-paste test on the final file.
A quick recipe to close it out
Pick one font from the list above. Set body text to 11 points, headings around 14, and your name near 20. Keep line spacing at about 1.1 and margins near 2 centimetres. Export to PDF with fonts embedded, then do the copy-paste test to confirm the text reads cleanly.
That takes ten minutes and clears the two hurdles that stop most CVs: a human who needs to scan fast, and a machine that needs plain, readable text. Spend your remaining effort on what the words actually say.