Do you still need a cover letter in 2026? 9 surveys compared

Our reasoning for the second row is about cost. A specific letter takes perhaps an hour, less if you start from a draft. Leaving it out costs nothing with a reader who never opens letters, and may cost the interview with one who expects them. You cannot tell which reader you have, so writing the letter is the cheaper mistake.

Each row is one survey, and the rows run from the most encouraging headline to the least.

Read down the last column and the range is plain: from 94% who said letters influence their decisions to nearly 40% who said they do not read them at all. These are nine sets of questions put to nine groups of people, so there is no trend to read from row to row. Figures on length, reading time and AI are in Cover letter statistics.

Five things change from row to row, and any of them can move the number.

The question

"Influence", "important", "key factor" and "valuable" are bars of different heights. "Influence" is a low one: 94% of Resume Genius's hiring managers cleared it, while about one in four of the same group called letters "very important". OfficeTeam's 91% is the 21% who said "very valuable" added to the 70% who said "somewhat valuable". Zety's 81% said they have rejected applicants based solely on their cover letters: that it has happened, not how often.

Who was asked

Recruiters, hiring managers, HR staff and senior managers hold different jobs. CV Genius shows the effect inside a single survey: 51% of in-house employers expect a letter, against 33% of recruiters. Country counts as well: CV Genius asked in the UK and Resume Genius in the US, and a result from one tells you little about the other.

Who published it

Most of the nine were published by companies that sell resume or cover letter products, and a company that sells them has a reason to want letters to matter. That does not make a figure wrong: the least encouraging number in the table comes from a resume builder. Read ours the same way, since Cover Letter Guru sells a cover letter tool.

Saying against measuring

All nine asked people to describe their own behaviour. In the Resume Genius survey, 83% said they frequently or always read cover letters, and 36% said they spend less than 30 seconds reading one. Both are estimates people gave about themselves. Nobody held a stopwatch.

The year

The table runs from 2012 to 2025. ResumeLab's page gives no date for its survey; others cite it as 2019, and the original page is gone, so we link to an archived copy. Its 72% is also repeated in the key takeaways of another publisher's statistics page, which is how numbers drift from site to site.

The surveys are furthest apart on the question most readers of this page are asking. Two of them put nearly the same question.

Take the five differences in turn. The wording is nearly identical, though "expect" can be heard as "will mark you down without it" or as "would like to see it". The people differ: 200 "hiring decision-makers" against 603 "hiring professionals across 56 industries", and neither label says how they were found. The publishers are a resume builder and a job board. One survey is undated; the other was published in 2021. Both are self-report.

We cannot tell you which is closer to the truth. What you can do is plan on the lower number. On iHire's figure, the readers who expect an optional letter are a minority, but one large enough to meet many times in a job search, and you cannot pick them out in advance. Our advice rests on that, and does not need the higher figure to be right.

Surveys ask. Only one of our sources tested the question: ResumeGo sent out fictitious applications, some with a cover letter and some without, and counted the callbacks.

It has three limits.

• It is one experiment, run by a resume writing company between July 2019 and January 2020, and not peer reviewed.
• The figure is relative. It compares one callback rate with another. It does not mean that 53% of the tailored applications got a call, and it says nothing about offers.
• The letters were tailored. The result is for a letter written to the job, against no letter. It does not show that any letter helps.

The finding is narrow, then: one company's test, tailored letters against none. It is still the only place in this guide where something was counted, and it points the same way as our advice.

Applicants are divided too. In a 2023 survey of more than 5,579 of Novoresume's own users, 22% said they always submit a cover letter, 47% said only if the job explicitly asks for one, and 31% said they do not use cover letters at all. An older Harris Poll for CareerBuilder, from 2016, found that 45% of job seekers said they do not include a cover letter with their resume.

Some say the letter stops them applying: in July 2026, 47.3% of 1,000 US job seekers told Novoresume they have skipped at least one job because it required a cover letter.

If the other applicants for your job behave like the people in these surveys, many of them will send no letter to an optional posting. That is a possibility and not a promise: none of these surveys counted the letters a posting receives.

Tailoring is where the surveys come closest to agreeing. At iHire, 77.3% want candidates to customise the letter for the specific position. At Resume Genius, 72% said customising a cover letter is "important" or "very important". At ResumeGo, 81% said they valued tailored letters significantly over generic ones. Jobscan's 54%, for personalised letters, is the low end and still a majority.

Job seekers mostly say they already do it: 73.4% of the 1,000 US job seekers Novoresume asked in 2026 said they tailor their cover letters in some way, and 10.6% said they send the same letter to every job. "In some way" could be a changed company name or a rewritten letter.

Our test for a tailored letter: put another company's name on it, and it should stop making sense. Choose two or three things the listing asks for and answer each with something you have done. How to write a cover letter takes that method one step at a time.