What is the best font for a resume?

Any clean, widely-rendered face used consistently: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, Lato, or Source Sans among sans-serifs; Georgia, Garamond, or Cambria among serifs. The best font is the one the reader never consciously notices — the resume gets judged on its content, and the type's only job is to stay out of the way. Avoid script, display, condensed, and ultra-light faces; they cost readability at skim speed.

What font size should a resume be?

Body text 10–11.5pt, your name 18–24pt, section headings 12–13pt in bold or caps. Below 10pt reads as cramming — if you're tempted to shrink, cut content instead. One type family with two or three weights makes a cleaner hierarchy than mixing fonts.

Can I use color on a resume?

One restrained accent, on headings or rules only — navy, deep green, or a muted accent reads as considered; body text stays black or near-black on white. Multiple colors, colored body text, or skill bars read as decoration substituting for content, and low-contrast prints turn illegible.

Resume Fonts, Sizes, and Margins: The Goal Is Invisibility

A practical guide from the team behind PlainResume, the free resume builder.

No font has ever gotten anyone hired — but fonts get resumes unread regularly: too small to skim, too decorative to take seriously, too broken to parse. The right way to think about resume typography is invisibility. If the reader finishes the page without a single conscious thought about the type, the type did its job perfectly, and your content got the whole audience.

The shortlist — and the actual avoid list

Style	Safe choices	Reads as
Sans-serif	Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, Lato, Source Sans	Modern, neutral — the default for most fields
Serif	Georgia, Garamond, Cambria	Traditional — at home in law, finance, academia

Any of these, used consistently, is correct — the choice among them is taste, not strategy. Even Times New Roman is fine; it reads slightly dated only because it was everyone's default for twenty years. The real avoid list is shorter and sharper: script and display faces (unserious), condensed faces (unreadable at skim speed), ultra-light weights (vanish on cheap monitors and printers), and Comic Sans (you knew). And use one family — hierarchy comes from size and weight, not from mixing fonts.

Sizes: a hierarchy the eye can use

✓ Name 18–24pt · section headings 12–13pt, bold or spaced caps · body 10–11.5pt · dates and metadata 9.5–10.5pt

A recruiter's eye doesn't read the page first — it lands on it, and the size hierarchy is the landing map: name, then headings, then whatever bullets sit under the heading they care about. Two rules protect the map: never drop body text below 10pt (the universal signal of cramming), and keep every heading the same size as every other heading — a hierarchy with exceptions is not a hierarchy. If everything doesn't fit at 10pt, the problem is content selection, not type size.

Margins and white space: the pressure valve people misuse

Margins between 0.5 and 1 inch, line spacing around 1.15–1.3, and a consistent gap before each section. When space runs out, the temptation runs in exactly the wrong order: people shrink margins, then font, then line height — and only then consider cutting a bullet. Reverse it. A dense wall at 0.3-inch margins reads as "couldn't prioritize," which is a worse signal than any missing bullet. Two smaller habits with outsized effect: left-align everything (justified text opens rivers of white space in narrow columns), and keep date alignment consistent down the right edge — ragged dates are the most common "something feels off" trigger on otherwise clean resumes.

Formatting that breaks the machine

The ATS guide covers structure; the typography-adjacent traps are worth repeating in one breath: your name in a Word header/footer (some parsers skip those regions entirely), text boxes and multi-column layouts (scrambled reading order), skill bars and icons (invisible to parsers, and a designer's "4 of 5 dots for Excel" tells a human less than the word "Excel"). Export as PDF and the font you chose actually travels with the document — a .docx silently substitutes whatever the reader's machine has.

Color: one accent, if any

✗ Teal name, orange headings, blue links, gray body, green skill bars

✓ Black body text; one muted accent on headings or rules — or no color at all

A single restrained accent reads as considered; a palette reads as decoration doing content's job. Body text stays black or near-black — recruiters still print resumes, and light gray text on paper is the quietest way to lose a reader.

Typography, pre-decided. PlainResume's templates handle fonts, sizes, hierarchy, and margins so you never think about them — and what you preview is exactly what prints. Free, no sign-up, no paywall on the PDF.

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Frequently asked questions

What's the best font for a resume?

Any clean, common face used consistently — Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, or Lato; Georgia, Garamond, or Cambria for a traditional read. The best font is one the reader never notices.

What size should the text be?

Body 10–11.5pt, name 18–24pt, headings 12–13pt. Below 10pt signals cramming — cut content instead.

Can I use color?

One muted accent on headings at most; body text stays near-black. Skill bars and multi-color palettes subtract.