The short answer
Margins between 0.5 and 1 inch all round, body text at single line spacing, and a clear gap before every section heading. White space is not wasted space β it is what lets a reader find the part they came for without reading the rest.
What matters most
- Half an inch is the practical floor for margins; one inch is the traditional ceiling. Anywhere between reads as normal.
- Single line spacing inside bullets, with a genuine gap before each section heading, beats uniform spacing everywhere.
- White space is what makes a page scannable β compressing it is the most expensive line you can buy back.
- Cut content before you touch margins, font size or leading. It is almost always available.
What margin width is actually safe
The one-inch default in Word is a general-purpose print setting inherited from typewritten correspondence. It was never a resume standard, and no employer measures it. What matters is that the text block sits inside the printable area of an ordinary office printer, and that the page does not look either cramped or half-empty.
| Margin | How it reads | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 inch all round | Roomy, traditional, slightly formal | Short resumes, early-career, conservative sectors such as law and finance |
| 0.75 inch all round | Balanced β the least conspicuous setting there is | The default worth starting from for most people |
| 0.5β0.6 inch all round | Dense but still comfortable | Ten-plus years of history that genuinely needs the room |
| Under 0.5 inch | Cramped; risks clipping on some printers | Avoid β this is the point where you should be cutting words instead |
| Asymmetric (wider top than sides) | Deliberate and designed, if done consistently | Fine, provided the left and right margins match each other |
Line spacing, and the difference between the three kinds
People say "spacing" to mean three separate settings that behave differently, which is why advice about it is so often useless. Separating them makes the whole thing tractable.
- Line spacing (leading). The gap between lines within a single paragraph or bullet. Single, or a touch above it, is right for a resume. Going to 1.5 wastes enormous room and makes a bullet look like a paragraph.
- Paragraph spacing. The gap before and after each block β between one bullet and the next, between one job and the next. This is where you should be spending your space, because it is what separates ideas.
- Section spacing. The larger gap before a heading such as Experience or Education. It should be visibly bigger than the gap between bullets, or the headings stop functioning as signposts.
The principle underneath all three is proximity: things that belong together should sit closer than things that do not. If the gap above a section heading is the same as the gap below it, the heading appears to float between two sections and the reader has to work out which one it labels. Make the space above a heading roughly twice the space below it and the whole page suddenly organises itself, without a single word changing.
What "enough" white space looks like
A useful test: hold the page at arm's length, far enough away that you cannot read individual words. You should still be able to see four or five distinct blocks with clear channels between them. If it resolves into one grey rectangle, the spacing has failed regardless of how good the writing is. If it resolves into fifteen tiny fragments floating in space, you have over-separated and the reader has no sense of hierarchy.
Every line at 1.5 spacing, one blank line between absolutely everything, headings the same size as body text and separated by the same gap as bullets.
Bullets at single spacing with a small gap between them, a double-height gap above each section heading, headings set slightly larger and in bold.
Recovering space, in the order that costs least
When a resume runs a few lines over, work down this list. Each step is more visible to the reader than the one before it, so stop as soon as you fit.
- 1Fix widowed lines
A bullet that spills two or three words onto a second line wastes a full line for almost no content. Rewriting it slightly shorter is free space and usually a tighter sentence.
- 2Compress the contact header
Name, one line of contact details, done. A stacked postal address plus a row of icons can eat an inch of the most valuable part of the page.
- 3Set skills in columns
A long single-column list of skills becomes three or four lines instead of twelve when set in two or three columns, and it is easier to scan.
- 4Narrow the margins one notch
From 1 inch to 0.75, or 0.75 to 0.6. Nobody notices this. It is the last change on the list that is genuinely invisible.
- 5Cut a bullet
If the four steps above were not enough, the document has more content than the page allows, and the honest fix is editing rather than layout.
Notice what is not on that list: shrinking the body text below about 10pt, condensing the typeface horizontally, and removing the gaps between sections. Those three are the changes that make a page unpleasant to read, and they trade a rule nobody enforces for a problem you genuinely get judged on. Font choice interacts with all of this, which is covered in our guide to choosing a resume font.
Spacing settings that survive the journey
A resume rarely gets read in the program it was written in. It gets exported, emailed, uploaded, re-rendered by an applicant tracking system, and sometimes printed on a machine nobody has serviced since the last reorganisation. Some spacing techniques survive all of that and some do not.
- Survives everything
- Real paragraph spacing set in the paragraph settings, real margin values set at page level, and genuine section headings. These are structural and they travel.
- Usually survives
- Tab stops and indents, provided they are set once and used consistently rather than nudged by hand on each line.
- Often breaks
- Blank paragraphs used as spacers, repeated spaces used to align things, and text boxes positioned by eye. All three shift when a document is opened in a different program or converted.
- Ignored entirely by parsers
- Anything placed in the page header or footer area. That is a separate problem in its own right, covered in our guide to resume headers and footers.
Page size: Letter or A4
This one catches people who apply across borders. US Letter is 8.5 by 11 inches; A4 is slightly narrower and slightly taller. A document laid out for one and printed on the other will reflow, and a layout that fitted exactly on one page can suddenly spill four lines onto a second. If you are applying to a US employer, set the page to Letter. If you are applying in the UK, Europe, Australia or most of Asia, set it to A4. Exporting to PDF freezes whichever you chose, which is one more reason PDF is usually the safer thing to send.
A short check before you export
Spacing problems are much easier to see in a preview than in an editor, because the editor shows you the document you have been staring at for an hour. Our free resume builder renders a true-to-size page as you type, so the point at which a section starts to look crowded is visible immediately rather than after you export.
- Left and right margins are equal, and both sit between 0.5 and 1 inch.
- The gap above a section heading is clearly larger than the gap between bullets.
- Body text is 10pt or larger and set at single or near-single line spacing.
- No bullet spills two or three words onto a line of its own.
- No blank paragraphs or runs of spaces are being used to position anything.
- The page size matches the country you are applying in.
- Held at arm's length, the page reads as four or five distinct blocks.
If it passes all seven, the layout is doing its job and any remaining problem is in the writing rather than the design. That is a better problem to have, and our free resume review is aimed squarely at it.
Questions people actually ask
What margin size should a resume have?
Between half an inch and one inch on every side, with the left and right margins matching each other. Three quarters of an inch is a good starting point because it looks completely conventional while giving back several lines compared with the one-inch default.
Can I use half-inch margins on a resume?
Yes. Half an inch is dense but entirely readable and nobody will remark on it. Below that you risk text being clipped by the non-printable border on some office printers, and the page starts to feel airless.
What line spacing should I use?
Single, or slightly above it, within bullets and paragraphs. The spacing that matters is the gap between blocks rather than the gap between lines, so put your space into separating sections rather than loosening sentences.
Does an applicant tracking system care about spacing?
It does not score you on it. What can go wrong is the mechanism you use to create spacing. Blank paragraphs, tables used purely for positioning and text boxes can all confuse a parser, whereas real paragraph and margin settings are read without difficulty.
Should I remove white space to fit one page?
That is the last thing to try, not the first. Cut a duplicated bullet, tighten a line that wraps by two words, or compress the contact header first. A dense page that fits is worse than a clear page that runs slightly long.
