A font won't win you a job, but the wrong one can make a good resume harder to read. This guide covers the best fonts for a resume: whether to choose serif or sans-serif, the sizes to use in points for your name, headings and body text, the fonts and habits to avoid, what hiring software actually reads, and how ResumeInk's 20 themes pair heading and body fonts, which works as a ready-made list of combinations.
If you want a safe, good-looking choice without reading further, follow these rules:
The rest of this guide explains why, and when you can bend the rules.
Serif fonts have small strokes, or serifs, at the ends of letters: Garamond, Georgia, Baskerville, Times New Roman. They feel traditional, literary and formal. Sans-serif fonts don't: Inter, Arial, Helvetica, Calibri. They feel modern, clean and neutral.
On today's screens and printers both are easy to read at sensible sizes, so choose on tone and fit:
None of this is a rule. A software engineer with a well-set serif resume and a lawyer with a crisp sans-serif one will both be fine. What hurts is a font that's hard to read, or one that clashes with the role, such as a playful rounded font on a CV for a bank compliance job. The traditional resume template and modern resume template pages show the two moods side by side.
These are widely used, well-made typefaces with clear letters at small sizes:
If you write your resume in a word processor and send the document file itself, choose a font the reader is likely to have installed, such as Calibri, Arial, Georgia or Cambria. Otherwise their computer may swap in a different font and your layout can shift onto a second page. A PDF embeds the fonts, so the problem disappears.
These ranges work for most fonts on A4 or US Letter paper:
Point size isn't the whole story, because two fonts at the same size can look quite different. What matters is the x-height, the height of lower-case letters such as "x" and "a". Inter and Arial have tall lower-case letters, so 10 pt reads comfortably. EB Garamond and Times New Roman have short ones, so the same text may need 11 or 12 pt to feel the same size. Designed templates sometimes set body text at 9 to 9.5 pt in a font with a large x-height and generous line spacing; that can read well, but check it in print.
Two checks settle it. Print the page at 100% and read it at arm's length; if you squint at anything, go up a size. And never shrink text to squeeze onto one page; cut words instead. Our guide to one or two page resumes covers what to cut. Margins of roughly 1.3 to 2.5 cm (half an inch to an inch) leave room for the text to breathe.
A good font can still be set badly. These details matter as much as the typeface:
Creative roles get a little more room. A designer can show personality through colour and layout, but the portfolio is the place for experimental type; the resume still has to be easy to read. The creative resume template page shows how far you can go while keeping the text clean.
Applicant tracking systems read text, not typefaces. When a parser processes your PDF, it extracts the characters and works out which section each line belongs to. Whether those characters were set in Garamond or Inter doesn't matter, as long as the text is real (not an image) and the font isn't decorative or icon-based. You don't need to hunt for a special "ATS font".
Where fonts can cause trouble is in how the file is made:
The test is simple. Open your PDF, select all the text, copy it and paste it into a plain text editor. If it reads correctly and in a sensible order, software can read it too. You can also run it through our ATS resume checker, and our explainer on what an ATS is covers parsing in more detail.
Good pairings combine contrast in style with similar proportions; an expressive serif for headings and a calm sans-serif for body text is the classic recipe. ResumeInk's 20 colour themes each use a set pair (headings / body), which makes a handy reference even if you're setting your own:
A single family suits a quiet, uniform page, and a serif-throughout CV suits law and academia. For those looks, see the elegant resume template and black and white resume template pages.
In ResumeInk the font pair comes with the theme, so switching from Professional to Letterpress classic changes the whole typographic feel in one tap while your words stay put. In the editor you can fine-tune fonts and sizes if you'd like larger body text or a different heading font. Fonts are embedded in the PDF you download, so the reader sees exactly what you chose, and the text stays real and selectable for hiring software. The ATS score shows how readable the result is, and the resume templates page shows every theme and layout combination.
Upload your resume and let AI rebuild it into a clean, ATS-friendly design — free to preview and download.
Try ResumeInk freeThere's no single best font. A clean, well-made font such as Inter, Calibri, Arial, Georgia or Garamond at a sensible size works for almost any job; choose serif for a traditional feel and sans-serif for a modern one.
Body text is usually 10 to 12 pt, section headings 12 to 16 pt and your name 18 to 28 pt. Fonts with small lower-case letters, such as Garamond, need the upper end of the range.
Yes. It's readable and parsers handle it without trouble, but it can look dated and runs small, so set body text at 11 or 12 pt if you use it.
Not directly. Parsers read text, not typefaces, so any standard font is fine as long as the text is real and selectable and you avoid decorative or icon fonts.
One or two families at most: one for headings and one for body text, or a single family throughout.