Best font for CV: how to choose a clear font and the right size

A recruiter skims a CV in seconds, often on a laptop screen, sometimes on a phone, sometimes on paper. The National Careers Service asks for a clear font in size 11 or bigger, the same style throughout, and headings and bullet points to make it easy to read. Prospects adds: professional, clear and easy to read, with fonts and sizes consistent throughout. Both name Calibri among their examples.

In practice, a good CV font has:

• Open, regular letters that stay readable at 10 or 11 pt, with clear differences between similar characters (1, l and I; 0 and O).
• A regular and a bold weight, so headings and job titles stand out without a second font.
• A professional tone: nothing that looks handwritten, playful or decorative.
• Support for every character you need: accented names, the £ sign, apostrophes and dashes in your own text.

Serif fonts have small strokes at the ends of the letters; sans serif fonts don't. Neither is more correct. The choice says something about you and the sector you're applying to:

Kandiq's CV templates use four fonts, all free, open-licence typefaces. Each template comes with one, and you can switch to any of the four.

You can see every template, with its font, in the CV templates gallery.

• Body text: 10 to 12 pt, as Prospects recommends. The National Careers Service sets the floor at 11 pt: if your font looks small, go up.
• Headings: 14 or 16 pt and bold, according to Prospects. Section titles in capitals or with a rule can be a little smaller.
• Your name: the largest text on the page, so it's the first thing read.
• Contact details and dates: the same size as the body text.

Font sizes aren't equal: at the same point size, some fonts look larger than others. Judge on the page, not on the number. Print one page or view it at 100% on screen: if you have to lean in, it's too small.

• One font for the whole CV. Prospects and the National Careers Service both ask for consistency. Contrast comes from size and bold, not from a second typeface.
• Bold for headings and job titles, sparingly elsewhere. If everything is bold, nothing stands out.
• Italics for small details only, like dates or a course name, and never for whole paragraphs.
• Dark text on a white page. A colour accent for headings is fine; light grey body text is hard to read and prints badly.
• No underlining except for links.
• White space: generous margins (Prospects suggests about 2.5 cm) and line spacing that lets each line breathe.

• Script and handwriting fonts: hard to read and out of place in a job application.
• Novelty and comic-style fonts: they make a recruiter doubt your judgement before reading a word.
• Display fonts made for posters and logos: striking at 40 pt, unreadable at 10.
• Very thin or condensed fonts: they fade on screen and print grey.
• Monospaced fonts (the typewriter look), unless you're a developer quoting code.
• Decorative symbols and emoji in place of words: applicant tracking systems can drop them, sometimes with the words that follow.

A PDF keeps your font. The document looks the same on every screen and printer. Send a PDF unless the advert asks for a Word file.

A Word file depends on the reader's computer. If they don't have your font installed, Word swaps it for another, and your layout can shift. That's why Kandiq's Word export uses fonts present wherever Word runs: Calibri in place of Source Sans and Figtree, Georgia in place of Lora and EB Garamond.

Applicant tracking systems read the text, not the letter shapes. Any of the fonts above is read without trouble when the CV is real text. What causes problems is text placed inside images, decorative symbols, and type so small that lines run together. Check how yours reads with an ATS CV checker.

In the Kandiq CV builder, each template comes with its font, and in the last step, under “Advanced settings”, the “CV font” menu lets you switch between Source Sans, Figtree, Lora and EB Garamond. The whole document changes at once, so your CV always uses a single font. Templates start between 10 and 10.8 pt; the “Text size” slider goes from 8.5 to 12.5 pt, so you can set 11 pt if you want to follow the National Careers Service. Line spacing and margins have their own sliders.

The AI CV checker then checks that your text size and margins stay readable (it flags text below 9 pt and margins under 10 mm) and that no emoji or decorative symbol gets in the way of the text.