The Best Fonts for a Resume (and the Ones to Avoid)

The shortlist, and what each one is good at

These are all faces you can rely on being present or correctly embedded, and all of them are drawn well enough to hold up at small sizes. The differences between them are real but modest — they change the tone of the page rather than whether it works.

Notice the last column, because it is the one that actually changes your life. The same resume set in Garamond and in Verdana can differ by several lines. If you are fighting for room, switching from a wide face to a compact one recovers space without shrinking anything — and it is a far better move than dropping to 9pt.

Serif or sans serif — does it matter?

The short answer

No, not in any way you will be able to detect in your response rate. The old argument that serifs guide the eye in print while sans serifs read better on screen was formed when screens were low resolution, and it has not survived the last fifteen years of display technology. Both are fine. Choose the one that suits the field you are in.

• Serif tends to read as established, formal and text-heavy. It sits naturally in law, academia, publishing, finance and the public sector.
• Sans serif reads as current and clean. It sits naturally in technology, design, startups, healthcare administration and most corporate roles.
• Mixing them — a sans serif for headings and a serif for body text, or the reverse — is a legitimate designer's move and works, provided the split is absolutely consistent. One face for every heading, one for every line of body text, and no exceptions.

Sizes that work

Size is more consequential than face, and the workable range is narrower than people expect. These are rendered sizes in the exported document, not what a builder shows you at a zoomed-out preview.

The failure everyone forgets: font substitution

This is the part that matters and the part nobody checks. When you send a Word file, the recipient's computer renders it with the fonts it has. If your resume is set in something that was bundled with a design suite, or downloaded from a font site, or shipped only with a particular version of an operating system, the reader's machine substitutes something else. The substitute has different letter widths, so every line rewraps, and the layout you spent an evening balancing arrives as something else entirely.

1. Send a PDF wherever the employer allows it. A PDF embeds the typeface, so the document renders identically everywhere. This is the single best defence and it costs nothing — the trade-offs are covered in our guide on sending a resume as PDF or Word.
2. If you must send a Word file, use a font that ships with Word. Calibri, Arial, Cambria, Georgia, Times New Roman and Garamond are all safe on effectively any machine you will encounter.
3. Test it honestly. Email the file to a friend on a different operating system and ask them to send back a screenshot. That five-minute check catches the problem the one time in twenty it actually occurs.
4. Do not embed exotic fonts as images. Setting your name as a picture so the typeface is preserved makes it invisible to every parser and to anyone using a screen reader.

Fonts to avoid, and the reason each one fails

The list of bad choices is short and the reasons are practical rather than snobbish. Every one of these causes a specific, describable problem.

• Script and handwriting faces — Brush Script, anything imitating cursive. They are hard to read at body size and effectively illegible when a parser tries to extract characters from them.
• Novelty faces — Comic Sans and its relatives. Whatever you intend by it, the reader reads it as a misjudgement of the situation.
• Condensed faces — Arial Narrow and similar. They buy space by squeezing letterforms, which is exactly the kind of space you should not be buying. Use a naturally compact face like Garamond instead.
• Very thin weights — the hairline and ultralight cuts of otherwise good families. They vanish on a laser printer and wash out on a low-contrast screen.
• All-caps body text. Fine for a short section heading, genuinely tiring for anything longer, because capitals remove the word-shape cues that make fast reading possible.
• Anything you downloaded specially. Not because it is ugly, but because it is the substitution problem waiting to happen.

What the font can and cannot do for you

It is worth being clear about the ceiling here. No typeface makes a weak resume competitive. What a good font choice buys you is the absence of friction: nothing about the page interrupts the reader, so their attention goes to your evidence rather than to the document. That is a real benefit and it is also the whole of the benefit. If you find yourself an hour into comparing two very similar sans serifs, the time is better spent on the writing — our guide to quantifying achievements will move the needle considerably further.

The practical route is to let a template settle it. Every layout in our template gallery is set in a face that is either safe by default or properly embedded on export, so the substitution problem simply does not arise. For plain, non-commercial guidance on resume conventions more broadly, the Purdue OWL resume writing section is a reliable reference, and the UK National Careers Service covers the CV equivalent.

One accessibility point worth taking seriously

Some employers, particularly in government and higher education, will run your document through accessibility tooling, and some readers will use screen magnification. Real text in a clean face at a reasonable size passes without comment. Light grey body text on white, decorative faces and text baked into images all fail. The WebAIM contrast guidance sets out the ratio conventionally treated as the minimum, and staying near-black on white keeps you comfortably clear of it.