Best Font for Resume: 9 Safe Fonts and Sizes (2026 Data)

The best fonts for a resume in 2026 are Calibri, Aptos, Arial, Helvetica, Garamond, Georgia, Cambria, Times New Roman and Verdana. Set body text at 10 to 12 points (11 is a safe default), section headings at 12 to 14 points and your name at 16 to 22 points, use margins of 0.5 to 1 inch, and stick to one font family.

Every one of those fonts is installed on standard computers, embeds cleanly in a PDF and is read without errors by applicant tracking systems (ATS). The choice between them is about look and space, not about passing software. What does cause problems is type that is too small and unusual fonts that come from design templates. We know because our own resume checker measured the fonts and type sizes inside 3,313 PDF resumes between 8 and 26 September 2026, one per person. The numbers are below.

The 9 best fonts for a resume, compared

Pick any font from this table and you are safe. Use the "Size" column, because fonts of the same point size are not the same physical size on the page.

What font size should a resume be?

Use 10 to 12 points for body text, and never go below 10. That is the range university career centers give: UT Austin's College of Natural Sciences career services says to keep font size "between 10 to 12pt" and "Don't go smaller than 10 pt!", and Georgetown University's career center says to "Keep font size to 10, 11, or 12 point font." Within that range, choose by font: Garamond and Times New Roman need 11 or 12, Verdana and Georgia read well at 10.

Should a resume be 11 or 12 point font?

Use 11 point for most fonts and 12 point for small-looking serif fonts like Garamond and Times New Roman. Calibri, Arial, Cambria and Aptos all read comfortably at 11. Go to 12 if you have space to spare and a short resume; go to 10.5 or 10 only with wide fonts like Verdana or Georgia, and only to save a line, not a page.

Is 8.5 point font too small for a resume?

Yes. 8.5 point is too small to read comfortably on a phone or in print, and it falls below the 9 point line where we flag type as a parsing risk. It is also the most common font problem we see: 15.2% of the 3,313 PDFs we measured had body text set below 9 points, more than the 11.0% flagged for the typeface itself. It usually happens in a sidebar, a footer or a dense skills strip, where someone shrank the text to keep the resume on one page. Cut a bullet instead. The extreme cases are expensive: the 0.4% of files with text below the legible threshold averaged 68.6, about 21 points below clean files.

Resume margins and line spacing

Use margins between 0.5 and 1 inch on all sides, and line spacing between 1.0 and 1.15. Georgetown University's career center says to "Set margins to no less than 0.5 inch on all sides", and UT Austin gives the same half-inch minimum because "Sometimes people need to print resumes!" Google Docs starts new documents with 1 inch margins, which is a comfortable default if your resume fits.

• Margins: 1 inch if you have space, 0.7 to 0.75 inch for a full page, 0.5 inch at the very least. Below that, text creeps into the header and footer band, which some parsers skip.
• Line spacing: single (1.0) to 1.15 for body text. Add a little extra space (6 to 12 points) before each section heading rather than blank lines everywhere.
• Alignment: left-aligned body text. Justified text creates uneven gaps between words, especially in narrow columns.
• Space beats size. If you are a few lines over one page, reduce margins slightly or switch to a narrower font (Garamond, Calibri) before you shrink the type.

What are the best ATS-friendly fonts?

Any standard system font is ATS-friendly: all nine fonts in the table above, plus Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Book Antiqua and similar fonts that ship with Windows or macOS. An ATS does not judge whether a font looks good. It needs to pull the text out of your file, and only three things about a font can stop that:

• The font is not embedded. If your PDF does not carry the font, the computer opening it substitutes another one. Letter widths change, lines rewrap, and text can collide.
• The text is too small. Under about 9 points, text extraction becomes less reliable, and some text can be dropped or misread.
• The font has a broken character map. Decorative fonts and ligatures (joined letters like "fi" and "ff") can look right on screen but come out wrong when copied. In our sample 11.7% of files had ligature or special-glyph problems, where a word like "office" can extract as "oce".

Our own numbers put this in proportion. In 2,620 English-language resumes checked between 8 September and 15 October 2026 (one per person), 25.0% carried a font finding. The rate is much higher in some other languages: 57.4% of Italian resumes (n=210) and 54.8% of Polish resumes (n=201), mostly because of template fonts. The full breakdown is in ATS resume problems by language.

The fonts that actually got flagged

These are the font families that most often triggered a font finding in the 3,313-file sample. None of them looks unprofessional. They are flagged because they are less common, usually arrive with a design-tool or template-site resume, and are more likely to be missing or substituted on the computer that opens your file.

If your resume uses one of these, the fix takes a minute: change the font to one from the safe list and export again. If you would rather start from a layout that is already clean, the ATS-friendly resume templates are single-column and use standard fonts.

Is Arial or Calibri better for a resume?

Neither is better for ATS; both are read perfectly. The difference is visual. Calibri is narrower with softly rounded letters, so it fits more words per line and feels a little warmer; use it at 11pt. Arial is wider and plainer, so it reads as more neutral; 10 or 10.5pt is usually enough. If you are tight on space, choose Calibri. If you want the most standard look possible, choose Arial.

What font is the most professional?

For most industries, Calibri, Aptos, Arial and Cambria look the most professional because they are clean and familiar without drawing attention. Serif fonts such as Garamond, Georgia and Times New Roman read as more traditional, which suits law, finance, academia, government and senior roles. In design, marketing and tech, a clean sans serif like Aptos, Helvetica or Calibri looks current. "Professional" here mostly means consistent: one font, used the same way from top to bottom.

Serif or sans serif for a resume?

Either works, and ATS reads both the same way. Serif fonts (Garamond, Georgia, Cambria, Times New Roman) have small strokes at the ends of letters and feel traditional. Sans serif fonts (Calibri, Arial, Aptos, Helvetica, Verdana) have none and look clean on screens, where most resumes are now read first. Choose the one you find easier to read at 11 points. The rule that matters more is one family; if you use two, keep one for headings and one for body text, and never more.

Is Garamond good for a resume?

Yes. Garamond is one of the best choices if you want a classic look or need to fit more on one page, because its letters are narrow. Set it at 11 or 12 points: it looks about a point smaller than Arial at the same size. In Word, use Garamond; in Google Docs, the closest option is EB Garamond, an open-source version of the same design. Both are safe for ATS as long as you export a PDF, which embeds the font.

Is Times New Roman a good font for a resume?

Yes, technically it is perfect: every computer has it and every ATS reads it. The only objection is taste. Some readers see it as a default that nobody chose, which matters more in design, marketing and startup roles than in law, government, finance or academia, where it is still normal. It is not on its way out in formal settings: in December 2025 the US State Department switched its official documents back from Calibri to Times New Roman. Use 11 or 12 points, because it is small at 10. If you want a serif that looks more current, try Georgia or Cambria.

Default resume fonts in Word and Google Docs

The default font is a perfectly good resume font in both programs, so if you have not changed it, you do not need to.

• Microsoft Word: new documents use Aptos. According to Microsoft, "Aptos is the default font across all of Office". It replaced Calibri in 2023 after about 15 years as the default. Both are safe resume fonts.
• Google Docs: new documents use Arial at 11 points with 1 inch margins, as Edmonds College's Google Docs handout notes. Docs also offers Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana and EB Garamond in its main font menu.

If you write in Google Docs, the PDF it exports may embed a metric-compatible substitute such as Arimo (for Arial) or Tinos (for Times New Roman). These have exactly the same letter widths, so nothing on the page moves and they are no risk.

Which fonts are not recommended for a resume?

Avoid script, handwriting and novelty fonts such as Comic Sans, Papyrus, Brush Script and Lobster; very thin or light weights; condensed display fonts; and monospaced fonts like Courier unless you are in a field where that is expected. They are either hard to read, look unprofessional, or are more likely to be substituted or mis-extracted.

• Script and handwriting fonts: hard to read and often extract badly.
• Thin or light weights: fade on screens and when printed.
• Condensed or display fonts (Impact, Oswald): built for headlines, tiring in body text.
• Icon fonts and decorative bullets: extract as unknown characters; 10.6% of the files we checked used them.
• Unusual template fonts: see the flagged list above. They look fine but carry substitution risk.
• Mixing three or more fonts: looks messy and gives the reader nothing.

The font is rarely what is costing you

Here is the part most font guides leave out. In our sample, files with a font finding averaged 83.3 against 89.4 for files with no file-level finding at all, a gap of about six points. Files with a two-column or sidebar layout averaged 74.6, a gap of about fifteen. The layout decision costs about two and a half times what the font decision costs.

A sidebar looks organised to a person, but software reads the page left to right, so a skills list can end up glued into the middle of a job description. If you fix one thing, make it a single column; the chronological resume template shows the layout. Then check that nothing is under 10 points. The typeface comes third. Our ATS resume statistics cover every finding in the same sample.

How to check your resume font in one minute

Open your PDF, select all, copy, and paste into a plain text editor or an empty email. What you see is close to what an ATS sees.

The free resume checker does the same checks automatically. Upload your PDF and, with no account and no card, you get a score, the text a parser extracts, and every file-level finding with its fix, including fonts that are not embedded, type under 9 points, ligatures and two-column layouts.

How we measured this

The file figures come from public checks run through the OwlApply resume checker between 8 and 26 September 2026: 3,313 PDF files whose layout could be analysed, counting one resume per person. The English-language and per-language figures come from a separate count of checks between 8 September and 15 October 2026, again one per person, with the language detected from the resume text. We report totals across the whole sample and never examine or quote an individual resume.

Two caveats. These are people who chose to check a resume, so the sample probably over-represents job seekers who already suspect a problem. And the window starts on 8 September 2026 on purpose: the checks behind these findings were revised on that date, and mixing two versions would measure the change rather than the resumes. A font finding is a parsing risk, not a rejection; a person still decides.