The Best Font for a Resume Is One the Reader Already Has
Font choice is the smallest decision on your resume and the one people spend longest on. What matters is whether it survives someone else's computer.
The best font for a resume is not the prettiest one. It is the one already installed on the reader's computer.
The real question is what happens when it opens somewhere else
If you send a Word file set in a font the reader does not have installed, their computer picks a substitute. Different letter widths, different line breaks. The page you spent an evening balancing arrives with a heading wrapped onto two lines and a job pushed onto page two.
This is the entire font problem. Everything else is taste.
It also explains why the advice sounds so boring. The reliable fonts are the ones that ship with Word and Google Docs on every machine, which is exactly why they look familiar.
The best fonts for a resume, and why they are boring
- Arial — plain, neutral, on every machine ever made.
- Helvetica — the same shapes with slightly better spacing, on Macs.
- Calibri — Word's default for years. Softer, slightly informal.
- Georgia — a serif designed for screens. Warmer than Times, and it does not look like a school essay.
- Times New Roman — nobody's favourite, and completely safe. Reads as conservative, which suits law and academia.
Pick one and use it for everything. A serif for headings and a sans for the body is a real design technique, but two typefaces need to be chosen together, and getting it wrong looks worse than not trying.
The ones to avoid, and why
Comic Sans and Papyrus, for the obvious reason. Anything script or handwritten, because it is slow to read and often illegible when the file is turned into text. Anything condensed, because saving space by squeezing letters makes a dense page denser.
And anything you downloaded. A font you installed is a font almost nobody else has, so what you are looking at is not what will be read.
Size and spacing matter more than the typeface
Body text at 10 to 12 points. Below ten it becomes hard work; above twelve it looks like you are filling space.
Line spacing between 1.15 and 1.5. The single biggest improvement most resumes can make is not a different font — it is more white space around the one they already have.
Your name can be large, 18 to 24 points. Section headings only need to be a couple of points bigger than the body, or the same size in bold. They are signposts, not billboards.
One trick to be careful with
Wide letter spacing on a small heading — WORK EXPERIENCE stretched out — is the cheapest way to make a plain document look designed, and it is the one typographic flourish that can genuinely break.
Past a certain point the software reading your file stops believing the letters belong to one word, and inserts spaces between them. The heading arrives as separate characters, and a system looking for the words "Work Experience" to find where your job history starts finds nothing.
Use it lightly or not at all. Get the emphasis from size and weight instead, which nothing measures.
The short version
Arial or Georgia, 11 point, 1.2 line spacing, one typeface throughout. Then stop thinking about it and go and fix your bullet points, which is where the actual decision is.
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