The short answer
A cover letter has about eleven possible components and only five of them are genuinely required: your contact details, a salutation, an opening that names the role, body paragraphs carrying evidence, and a sign-off with your name. Everything else — the date, the employer's postal address, a subject line, a headline, enclosures, a postscript — is conditional on how you are sending it. Adding all of them to a letter pasted into a web form is the most common way people make a good letter look wrong.
What matters most
- Five components are always required: your contact details, a salutation, an opening naming the role, evidence paragraphs, and a signed sign-off.
- The date and the employer's postal address belong on a formal printed or PDF letter, and nowhere else.
- Never include salary expectations, references, personal details such as age or marital status, or a photograph unless the employer explicitly asks.
- Match the header block of the letter to the header block of your resume so the two documents read as a set.
The five components you always need
Regardless of format, channel or country, a cover letter needs these five things. If one is missing the letter is incomplete, and the most commonly missing one is the last.
- Your contact details
- Name, phone, email, city and state, and a LinkedIn URL if you keep the profile current. Nothing else. A full street address is optional in the US and increasingly omitted.
- A salutation
- A named person where you can find one, a role-based greeting where you cannot. This is the one line that instantly signals whether the letter was written for this employer.
- An opening that names the role
- Somewhere in the first two sentences the reader must know which vacancy this is about. Large employers run several similar postings at once.
- Evidence paragraphs
- One to three short paragraphs, each carrying a specific thing you have done rather than a claim about what you are like.
- A sign-off and your name
- A closing phrase, then your typed name. Letters that end mid-thought because the writer ran out of steam are more common than you would expect.
That is the irreducible letter. Everything from here is conditional, and the condition is almost always the same one: how is this reaching the reader?
The conditional components
These six elements are correct in one context and wrong in another. The mistake is not including them; it is including them everywhere.
| Component | Include when | Omit when |
|---|---|---|
| The date | You are producing a formal PDF or printed letter, or applying to government, legal, academic or clinical employers where the letter may be filed. | You are pasting into a form or writing in an email body. The system already timestamps it. |
| Employer name and postal address | The letter is formal and on paper, or the sector expects business-letter conventions. | Almost every online application. Nobody is posting this. |
| A subject or reference line | The posting quotes a job reference number, or you are emailing a shared inbox where the letter must be routed. | The application form already captured the role you applied for. |
| A headline above the greeting | You are using a designed letter template that pairs visually with a designed resume. | The letter is going into a plain text field, where the headline becomes an orphaned line. |
| An enclosure or attachment line | Formal letters, particularly in the public sector, where the reader needs to know what should have arrived with it. | Email, where the attachment is visible, and web forms, where there is nothing to enclose. |
| A postscript | You have one genuinely useful extra fact — a portfolio link, a start date, a relevant certification finishing next month. | You are using it to smuggle in a sixth paragraph. A PS with a sales pitch in it reads as a sales pitch. |
Your header should match your resume
This is the single cheapest improvement available and it takes about ninety seconds. Copy the header block from your resume — same name, same typeface, same weight, same contact line, same colour — onto the letter. When both documents open in the same window the reader sees one candidate rather than two files.
It matters more than it sounds like it should. Hiring managers open dozens of attachments a week, most of them mismatched. A pair that obviously belongs together buys a small amount of goodwill before a single sentence has been read. The cover letter builder does this automatically by carrying whichever resume template you chose across to the letter, which removes the fiddly part of getting fonts and margins to agree.
What the body paragraphs should carry
Not a summary of the resume. The letter earns its place by holding the two things a resume structurally cannot hold: reasoning, and connection to this specific employer.
- One or two pieces of evidence, in full. A resume bullet gives the outcome. The letter gives the situation, the decision you made and why you made it. That reasoning is what a hiring manager is actually assessing.
- A reason this employer, not employers in general. Something you noticed about their product, their market, a change they have made, the way the posting is written. Fifteen minutes of reading produces this.
- One pre-emptive answer, if you have an obvious gap. A career change, a break in employment, or a requirement you fall slightly short of. One sentence, factual, then move on.
- The vocabulary of the posting. Not stuffed, but the terms they used for the work should appear in the way you describe the work.
What never goes in
Some of these are matters of judgement. Most are not.
- Salary expectations, unless the posting explicitly asks for them.
- References or referee contact details — those come at offer stage, on a separate sheet.
- Date of birth, marital status, nationality, a headshot, or anything else about your personal circumstances. US employers generally do not want these on file, and the EEOC's list of prohibited employment practices explains why volunteering them creates a problem for the reader rather than a favour.
- Negative comment about a current or previous employer, however justified.
- Anything you cannot substantiate in an interview, including qualifications in progress described as though they were finished.
- Your whole employment history restated in prose. They have the resume.
Photographs deserve a separate note because the advice genuinely differs by country. They are normal on applications in parts of continental Europe and much of Asia, and actively unwelcome in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, where they raise discrimination-risk concerns for the employer. If you are applying across borders, follow the destination country's convention rather than your own.
A quick assembly check
Before you send, run the letter against the channel it is going down. Three questions settle almost every layout question.
- Is this being uploaded as a file, pasted into a box, or typed into an email? The answer decides whether the date, addresses and letterhead belong.
- Does the header match the resume that is going with it? If they are visibly different documents, fix the letter, not the resume.
- Can a reader tell which role this is for from the first two sentences alone? If not, the opening is doing too little work.
If you want to see the components assembled in context rather than described, the cover letter examples library shows complete letters for hundreds of roles, and the career letter builders cover the neighbouring documents — resignation, thank-you, follow-up — that use the same furniture with a different argument.
Questions people actually ask
Do I need to put my address on a cover letter?
Your city and state are useful because employers filter for location. A full street address is optional in the US and most applicants now leave it off. The employer's postal address is a different question and only belongs on a formal printed or PDF letter, never on something pasted into a web form.
Should I include the date on a cover letter?
Only on a formal letter that will be filed or printed. On an emailed letter or a form field the date is redundant because the system records when you applied, and a stray date line at the top of a text box looks like a document dropped in the wrong place.
Can I put a photo on my cover letter?
It depends where you are applying. Photographs are conventional in parts of continental Europe and Asia. In the US, UK, Canada and Australia they are unwelcome, because employers avoid holding information that could support a discrimination claim. Follow the convention of the country you are applying to.
Should I mention salary in a cover letter?
Only if the posting asks for expectations, in which case answer with a range and a short justification. Volunteering a number unprompted anchors the negotiation before you have any leverage, and can screen you out on a technicality.
Do I need to list my attachments at the bottom?
An enclosure line is a formal business-letter convention and is worth keeping for public sector, legal and academic applications. In email it is redundant, since the attachments are visible, and in a web form there is nothing to enclose.
