# Resume Formatting (2026): Margins, Fonts, Size, Tested > Margins, fonts, sizes, colors and file type for a resume, plus what we found running 27 formats of one resume, then 20 fonts and 4 color schemes, through our own ATS parser. Canonical: https://hiredfolio.com/blog/resume-formatting Published 2026-10-13 · 15 min Keywords: resume formatting, resume format, how to format a resume, resume margins, resume font size, best font for resume, resume colors Every resume formatting guide gives you roughly the same numbers. One-inch margins, 10 to 12 point type, Calibri or Arial, one or two pages. Most of them also say these choices help you "get past the ATS". None of them shows what the software actually does with your margins. So we tested it. We built one resume 27 ways, as PDFs and Word files, and ran every version through the text extractor behind our own ATS checker. On October 4 a second resume followed, in 20 fonts and 4 color schemes. Some rules turned out to matter only to the person reading. A few things that no guide mentions changed what the software read. This article separates the two, then gives you the settings to use. ## Margins, font size and spacing: our parser cannot see them Our resume, Daniel Ortiz, a fictional data analyst, was printed at 11 point with one-inch margins. Then we printed it again at 9 point with half-inch margins and single line spacing. Then at 12 point with 1.5 line spacing, and once more in a serif font. All four files produced exactly the same text, character for character. A fifth version, forced onto two pages, differed by one page break.

0 bytes

of difference between 9pt and 12pt

between the text our parser extracted from a cramped 9pt, half-inch-margin resume and the same resume at 12pt with one-inch margins and 1.5 spacing.

Source: HiredFolio test of 27 versions of one resume, October 2026

That makes sense once you know what an extractor keeps. It reads the characters and the order they come in. Point size, margin width and line height are drawing instructions, and our code does not read any of them. Our scorer does not count pages either. Where it measures length, it counts words. Our second test pushed this further. The same page printed with 10 mm margins and with 25.4 mm margins, one inch, gave the same text to the character. So did the same page in 19 of 20 fonts, serif and sans, with ligatures on or off (more on those, and on the twentieth font, below). So pick margins and type sizes for the recruiter. Their eyes are the only reader those settings reach. A 9 point resume did not change what our parser read, but it is harder to read on a laptop screen. ### How we tested - **One resume, same words in every file.** 149 words: a summary, two jobs with bullets, education, skills and languages. - **PDFs printed by Chrome**, in Lato, one of the fonts our resume builder ships. **Word files** generated as standard .docx. - **Read by our extractors**: the PDF reader behind [our ATS checker](/ats-checker) and the .docx reader behind our resume import. - **Checked three things per file**: the raw text, whether our checker would accept the file, and whether 15 keywords from a data analyst posting (SQL, Tableau, forecasting, stakeholders...) were still found. This is one parser, ours. Employers use many others, and we can only speak for the one we can open. Where our result is "nothing broke", read it as "nothing broke here", not as a promise about every system. ## The formatting that does change what software reads Four choices changed the extracted text across our two tests. Three of them appear in almost no formatting guide. ### Headers and footers Word and Google Docs let you put your name and contact details in the page header, where they repeat on every page. We tried it. - **In the .docx file, they disappeared.** Our Word reader returned the body of the document only. Name, email, phone, LinkedIn and the page-number footer were all missing. The file still matched all 15 keywords, but the candidate had no name and no way to be contacted. - **In the PDF, they moved.** We printed the header with Chrome. The header text was still there, but it came out at the end of the page, after the Languages section. Our own scorer treats a missing email as the worst formatting problem there is: 20 points off the formatting check, tied with a resume under 150 words. Other systems may read headers better than ours. You cannot know which one an employer runs, and the fix costs nothing: put your name and contact line in the body of the page, at the top. ### Letter-spacing and small caps Designer templates love spaced-out capitals for the name and section titles. Our parser reads widely spaced letters as separate letters: > D A N I E L O R T I Z Data Analyst ... W O R K E X P E R I E N C E Senior Data Analyst... We tried five spacing values on the name and headings. At 0.1 em or less, every word came out whole. At 0.15 em and above, the name and every heading came out as separate letters. Small caps, the style that sets lowercase letters as smaller capitals, split letters the same way even with no extra spacing. That last result predates a fix we shipped on October 5, 2026: since then our parser reads a small-caps name as one word in capitals, "DANA GRIFFIN", while wide letter-spacing still splits. Split headings already cost something: a section titled "W O R K E X P E R I E N C E" no longer matches a list of standard headings. It can get worse. Our checker rejects a file when more than 30% of its words are single letters, because at that point the text is no longer words. Our 149-word resume crossed that line with a spaced name and headings (31%). Before the October 5 fix, it crossed it easily when job titles were in small caps too (61%), because "S E N I O R D A T A A N A L Y S T" is no longer a job title anywhere. With the whole resume letter-spaced, our checker refused the file outright, and our keyword matcher, run on the text directly, found 0 of the 15 keywords. A longer resume dilutes the percentage, but the headings stay split. Plain capitals are fine. "WORK EXPERIENCE" set in uppercase with normal spacing came through intact. ### Icons, tables and text boxes These are the usual suspects, and in our parser they did little harm: - **Icons** before the email and phone, drawn as images or set as symbols (✉ ☎), left the contact details intact. Our import still detected both. The icons themselves were either dropped or kept as symbols. - **A skills table** with three cells per row came out in order. Only the commas between cells were lost. - **An experience table** with dates in a narrow left cell kept everything, but the dates now came before the job title instead of after it. - **A text box** holding the contact line in a Word file was read normally. That is a result for one parser, not a license. Some guides warn that older systems mishandle tables and text boxes. We found no published test either way. A single-column layout with plain text is never the thing that fails, so it remains the safer default. ### Ligatures in the font A ligature is the single shape a font draws for two neighbouring letters: fi, ff, fl. Nearly every text font has them, and word processors and browsers apply them without asking. In the PDF the pair of letters becomes one character, and until October 5, 2026 our extractor read that character as a word of its own. We measured it on October 4, 2026 with a second fictional resume, Daniel Ortiz again, now a senior financial analyst, printed by Chrome in 20 fonts: the 10 our resume builder offers (Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Lato, Poppins, Montserrat, Merriweather and the free equivalents of Arial, Times New Roman and Georgia), EB Garamond, which one of our templates uses, Carlito, the free equivalent of Calibri, and 8 system fonts, among them Ubuntu, DejaVu and the free clones of Palatino and Century Schoolbook. Each font twice: as is, then with ligatures turned off.

Our test the same summary, ligatures on, before and after our fix

Ligatures on, extracted text, October 4

Certi fi ed fi nancial analyst with 7 years in corporate fi nance. E ffi cient at closing the books, fl uent in SQL and Tableau, and trusted by sta ff and stakeholders for clear forecasting.

Ligatures off, or on since October 5

Certified financial analyst with 7 years in corporate finance. Efficient at closing the books, fluent in SQL and Tableau, and trusted by staff and stakeholders for clear forecasting.

On October 4, nineteen of the 20 fonts split every word containing fi, ff or fl. Against 16 keywords from a financial analyst posting, our keyword matcher found 5 in those 19 versions, and 16 of 16 in the versions without ligatures. Certified, office, efficient, staff, workflow, fluent, financial reporting, profit, affiliate, offshore, difficult: all eleven were printed on the page, all eleven were reported missing. The five that survived were SQL, Tableau, forecasting, stakeholder management and finance, the last one only because "MSc Finance" starts with a capital F, and fonts have no ligature for a capital. The font itself made no difference: the most classic serif and the most modern sans produced the same splits, and the 134-word resume came out as 171 "words". The twentieth font, Ubuntu, passed for the wrong reason. Our extractor mistook that page for two columns and, while rebuilding the lines, glued the letters back together. That is not a font recommendation. That was a defect in our extractor, and we fixed it on October 5, 2026: it now joins pieces of text that touch on the same line. We ran the same 40 PDFs again after the fix. All 20 fonts now give the same words with ligatures on as with them off, and the matcher finds 16 of 16 keywords in every version. Ubuntu is still read as two columns. Other parsers may still split these letters; we tested one, ours. The check is the same as for letter-spacing: paste your PDF into a text editor and search for "fi" followed by a space. If you find any, turn ligatures off in your word processor's advanced font settings before exporting again, or send a .docx. A Word file stores the letters you typed; the ligature is only a drawing applied on screen, and our .docx reader reads the letters, not the drawing. ### Columns Two-column layouts are the one case where we saw real damage. In a PDF, a sidebar can interleave with your experience line by line and separate each job from its dates. We published that test, with the raw output, in [our Canva resume test](/blog/canva-resume-ats). A Word file with real Word columns, by contrast, came out in the right order in our test.

What changed the text in our two tests, 27 files then 20 fonts

Changed or lost text

Name and contact in a Word header

Headings spaced 0.15 em or wider

Small caps on job titles, before our October 5 fix

A PDF sidebar next to the experience

Ligatures left on, in 19 of 20 fonts, before the same fix

Came through intact

Name and contact as the first lines of the page

Uppercase headings with normal spacing

Bold or slightly larger job titles

One column, read top to bottom

Ligatures off

Margins, font size, line spacing, page count, font family and color changed nothing at all.

## Fonts, margins and colors: settings only the reader sees Each of these has a guide of its own on the ranking pages, and each guide ends with "so the ATS can read it". Our second test lets us say what the software sees, then give the setting for the human. ### Which font Nineteen of 20 fonts, serifs and sans-serifs alike, gave our extractor the same words once ligatures were off, and, since our October 5 fix, with ligatures on too. Ubuntu is the two-column misdetection described above, not a font result. One ranking guide claims that "sans serif fonts are easier for computers to scan" ([Resume Genius](https://resumegenius.com/blog/resume-help/best-font-for-resume), checked 2026-10-04). We saw no trace of that: Tinos, the Times New Roman clone, and Inter extracted letter for letter the same text. The choice of a font is a readability choice, not a compatibility one. The one case where a font makes a resume unreadable to software is a font whose letters are not encoded as letters, which happens with decorative and icon fonts. Our checker then refuses the file: it does so when more than 20% of the extracted words are made, for more than half of their characters, of signs that are neither letters nor digits. For the eye, one font for the whole document, two at most if the headings take another. Four sizes are enough: name at 18 to 24 points, target job title at 12 to 14, section headings at 12 to 14 in bold or capitals, body at 10.5 to 12. The guides disagree most about the name, from "14–16" on [Huntr](https://huntr.co/blog/resume-margins) to "28-35pt" on [Resume Genius](https://resumegenius.com/blog/resume-help/best-font-for-resume), both checked 2026-10-04; anything in between reads fine, the point is only that it be the largest thing on the page. Handwriting fonts, novelty fonts and serifs with hairline strokes read badly at body size on a laptop screen. A recruiter who has to zoom does not zoom, they open the next file. ### Margins, paper size and alignment For the machine, the margin does not exist. In our second test the same resume printed with 10 mm and with 25.4 mm margins gave identical text. Margins are set in Word under Layout, then Margins, and in Google Docs under File, then Page setup. Set the paper size in the same place: US Letter for the United States and Canada, A4 almost everywhere else. A document built on the wrong one reflows when the recruiter prints it, and your last line lands alone on page two. Our resume builder offers both sizes. Left-align the text. Justified text opens uneven gaps between words, and on a line as short as a resume bullet the gaps show. Leave the equivalent of one blank line between sections; inside a section, two to four points before each job separates the blocks without wasting the page. The numbers themselves are in the spec table below. ### Colors Our second test also varied the color: navy headings, a medium gray body, then a light gray body. All three gave exactly the same text as the black resume. An extractor reads characters, not colors. Color is a question for the eye and the printer, and that is where it is decided. Gray has a measurable threshold. The W3C accessibility rule for body text requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 with the background, and 3 to 1 from 18 points, or 14 points in bold ([WCAG 2.1, success criterion 1.4.3](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#contrast-minimum)). Computed with the W3C formula on white, a medium gray such as #777777 reaches 4.48, just under the line; the #999999 many templates use for dates and contact details falls to 2.85, and a light gray #bbbbbb to 1.92. A dark gray #666666 passes at 5.74, and a navy such as #1f3a5f, at 11.48, leaves all the room you want for headings. Our templates keep body text in a very dark gray, close to black. Three rules for the rest: - **Two colors, not more.** Black for the text and one accent for headings and rules. A third color is a designer's choice; a resume does not need it. - **Little text on a colored background.** A dark blue band behind a white name looks fine on screen and prints as a gray block in which the name is hard to read. If your template has one, keep it for a short title, never for the name or the contact line. - **No white text.** Some candidates paste keywords in white on white to fool the software. Our extractor read the hidden line in our test like the rest of the page, and so does the recruiter, the moment they select the text. That is not a trick, it is a resume that lies at the first Ctrl+A. ## What a resume looks like when you apply all of it Put the settings above together and you get the same page every time: one column, Letter or A4 portrait, one font, black plus one accent, and a top of page that says in six lines who you are and what you want. Here is the top of our financial analyst's resume, as the recruiter reads it and as the machine extracts it, in the same order.

The top of a resume that reads in one pass and the job of each block

Header

Daniel Ortiz

Senior Financial Analyst

daniel.ortiz@example.com · +1 555 010 2030 · Chicago, IL · linkedin.com/in/danielortiz

Summary

Certified financial analyst with 7 years in corporate finance. Efficient at closing the books, fluent in SQL and Tableau, and trusted by staff and stakeholders for clear forecasting.

First job

Senior Financial Analyst, Northfield Logistics, 2021 to present

  • Built the forecasting workflow in Tableau used by 40 office staff; cut month-end reporting from 9 days to 5.
  • Certified the fixed-asset register for the affiliate network, 12 entities, no audit findings in 3 years.

Name, target title and contact line in the body of the page, a summary with numbers, then the jobs from most recent to oldest with their dates on the same line. The rest of the page keeps the same rhythm.

What you cannot see in this excerpt counts as much: no sidebar, no skill gauges, no icons before the contact details. Several guides recommend a two-column layout, contact details on the left and career on the right. Our version 11 shows what that becomes once extracted, and the candidate never comes out ahead. ## PDF or Word? The guides disagree. Several say PDF. [Microsoft's own guide](https://word.cloud.microsoft/create/en/blog/best-resume-formats/) says .docx first. The honest answer is to send what the posting asks for. When it does not say, either works if the file is made from text. Our test adds two practical differences: - **Headers behave differently.** A Word header vanished in our reader, while a PDF header was kept but moved to the end. - **Both keep the words when the layout is plain.** Our one-column PDF and .docx both matched all 15 keywords. A PDF has one failure that a .docx does not: it can contain no text at all. A scan, a photo or a design exported as an image has nothing to extract, and our checker refuses it. Select your text with the mouse. If nothing highlights, the file is a picture. Our guide to [getting past ATS filters](/blog/ats-resume-filters) covers file types in more detail, including fonts that export as symbols. One more detail: our ATS checker takes PDFs. Our resume import reads .docx as well, but not the old .doc format. Name the file before you send it: firstname-lastname-resume.pdf. "Resume_final_v3 (2).pdf" is the first thing the recruiter reads about you, in their downloads folder. ## What our scorer checks, rule by rule Formatting advice usually ends with "so the ATS can read it", without saying what "read" means. Here is everything our own scorer encodes about formatting. **The free checker at /ats-checker** (anonymous, PDF only): - It refuses a file with no text, fewer than 100 characters of text, or text that is not words: more than 30% single letters, or more than 20% symbol soup. - It adds a critical "multi-column layout" issue when it had to rebuild the reading order of a page from columns. - It has no rule about margins, fonts, sizes, colors or page count. - It scores keywords and required skills against the posting. A separate AI model judges how well your experience fits. That model is instructed not to comment on formatting. **A scan of a resume built in the HiredFolio editor** adds a formatting check worth 15% of the score. It starts at 100 and subtracts: | Missing or out of range | Penalty | | ---------------------------------- | ------- | | No email address | -20 | | No phone number | -8 | | No professional summary | -8 | | No bullet points in any experience | -10 | | Under 150 words | -20 | | Over 1,200 words | -8 | Keywords weigh 40%, required skills 20% and experience fit 25%. So formatting, as our scorer sees it, means: contact details present, a summary, bullets, and a sensible length in words. Everything else on this page is for the human. ## The formatting spec These are the settings we would use, and where the guides disagree we say so. The numbers serve the recruiter, so the test is "can this be read in one pass on a laptop screen?" | Element | Setting | Note | | ---------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | Margins | 0.75 to 1 inch | Guides put the floor at 0.5 inch; below 0.75 the page looks crowded | | Body font | One sans or serif you already have: Calibri, Arial, Lato, Georgia | 19 of 20 fonts extracted identically in our second test; pick what reads well | | Ligatures | Off, or send a .docx | 19 of 20 fonts split fi, ff and fl words in our parser before October 5 | | Body size | 10.5 to 12 pt | Under 10 pt reads small on screen | | Name | 18 to 24 pt, plain spacing | Track it 0.1 em at most | | Section headings | 12 to 14 pt, bold or uppercase | No small caps, no wide spacing | | Line spacing | 1.0 to 1.15, a little space before each heading | Guides range up to 1.5 | | Paper size | US Letter in the US and Canada, A4 elsewhere | The wrong one reflows when the recruiter prints | | Alignment | Left-aligned body, dates on the same line or the next | Avoid justified text, which opens gaps between words | | Colors | Black or near-black body, one accent for headings and rules | Body gray no lighter than #666666 on white (5.74 to 1); test a grayscale print | | Section order | Contact, summary, experience, skills, education | Graduates can put education first | | Dates | One format throughout, "Jan 2024 - Mar 2026" or "2024 - 2026" | Keep the dates next to the job they belong to | | Length | One page under about ten years of experience, two at most | Our scorer counts words: 150 to 1,200 | | File name | firstname-lastname-resume.pdf | The recruiter sees it in their downloads | ## The writing rules that go with it Formatting makes the content readable. It does not replace it. The writing rules that matter fit in one list, and each has its own guide: - **A summary of two or three lines** under the title, giving the job, the years and one result. Our [resume summary examples](/blog/resume-summary) cover the common cases. - **Results with numbers rather than duties.** "Cut month-end reporting from 9 days to 5" reads in a second; "responsible for month-end reporting" says nothing. - **An action verb at the start of each bullet**, and no "I": the resume is written in the implied first person, the subject is always you. - **The posting's words, in their exact form.** Our checker compares words, and so does the recruiter in their search box. How to find them and where to put them: [resume keywords](/blog/resume-keywords). - **A skills section that names tools and specific know-how**, not qualities. Our [skills for a resume](/blog/skills-for-resume) guide shows the difference. - **A read-through out loud**, then a second one by someone else. A typo in a section heading is seen before anything else on the page. For what goes inside each section, see [how to write an effective resume](/blog/how-to-write-an-effective-resume). ## Check your own file Everything above is one fictional resume. Two checks tell you how yours behaves. First, the copy-paste test. Open your PDF, select everything, paste it into a plain text editor. Your name and email should be in the first lines. Your headings should be whole words, and no "fi" or "ff" should stand apart from the rest of its word. Each job should sit next to its dates. Second, run it through [our free ATS checker](/ats-checker) with a job posting. It reads your file with the same extractor we used here, tells you if it cannot read the text, flags a column layout, and lists the posting's keywords your resume is missing. If the layout is the problem, our [resume templates](/resume-templates) keep one reading order underneath, even the designs with a sidebar look, and export as text PDFs.

Key takeaways before you export again

01

Move your name and contact line out of the page header and into the first lines of the body.

02

Remove small caps and wide letter-spacing from your name, headings and job titles, and turn ligatures off if the copy-paste shows "certi fi ed".

03

Set margins, font size and spacing for a human reader, then paste your PDF into a text editor to check the order.

Then see what the software reads: scan your resume against a real posting.

## Read next - [How to write a targeted resume, with examples we scored](https://hiredfolio.com/blog/targeted-resume) - [Best resume builder websites in 2026: what they bill after the trial, and how to test the file](https://hiredfolio.com/blog/best-resume-builder-website) - [Resume headline: 40 examples and the rule most guides skip (2026)](https://hiredfolio.com/blog/resume-headline)