Cover letter format: layout, fonts, file type and 8 settings

There are seven parts, in this order. Every line starts at the left margin, with one blank line between parts, and nothing is indented.

[Your name]
[Phone] | [Email] | [Town or city]

[Date, with the month as a word]

[Recipient's name]
[Their job title]
[Company]

Dear [Mr/Ms Surname or Hiring Manager],

[Paragraph 1: your strongest relevant result, and the role.]

[Paragraph 2: a requirement from the listing, and what you did about it.]

[Paragraph 3: a second requirement, then one or two sentences on why this company.]

[Paragraph 4: what you would like to discuss, and when you are free.]

[Yours sincerely, after a name; Yours faithfully, after "Hiring Manager"]
[Your name]

• Header. Your name, phone number, email address and town or city. Add a full postal address only if the listing asks for one.
• Date. Write the month as a word. In figures, 06/10/2026 means 6 October in some countries and 10 June in others.
• Recipient. Name, job title and company, one per line. Leave out a line you cannot fill.
• Greeting. "Dear", the title and surname, and a comma. Who to address a cover letter to covers the cases with no name.
• Paragraphs. Four or five, of two to four sentences each. How to write a cover letter sets out what goes in each.
• Sign-off and name. "Yours sincerely," after a name, "Yours faithfully," after "Dear Hiring Manager," (British usage), or "Kind regards," with either, then your full name on the next line. More endings are in How to end a cover letter.

If the letter runs onto a second page, cut words before you change a setting. When it is two or three lines over, set the line spacing to single and bring the margins in to 2 cm, but do not go below 10.5 point. How long should a cover letter be? shows the same letter at three lengths.

A short letter does not have to fill the page. Leave the space at the bottom empty; do not enlarge the font to spread it out.

Use a standard font: one that comes with common word processors and operating systems and was drawn for paragraphs of text. There are two kinds.

• Serif fonts have small strokes at the ends of the letters, as in a printed book: Georgia, Cambria, Times New Roman.
• Sans-serif fonts have plain ends and a more modern look: Arial, Calibri, Verdana.

We will not rank them. Between two standard fonts the choice is taste, and the easy answer is the one already on your resume. A standard font is safe for a practical reason: a Word file is displayed in the fonts installed on the machine that opens it. If yours is missing, the software substitutes another, and your line breaks and page count can move. Helvetica and Garamond are safe only in a PDF, which carries its fonts with it.

Leave out script and handwriting fonts, display fonts made for headlines, condensed and light weights, and anything you downloaded for the occasion. Use one font throughout, in black, with no bold or underlining in the paragraphs.

Point sizes are not equal between fonts: 11 point in one can look as large as 12 in another. Judge by eye on a printed page or at full size on screen.

The letter and the resume are sent together, so make them look like a pair.

• Same header. Copy the name and contact block from the resume exactly: the same spelling of your name, the same details, the same position on the page.
• Same font, with the body text within half a point of the resume's.

The quick way: open your resume, save a copy under a new name, delete everything below the header and write the letter there. If the margins are narrower than 2 cm, widen them: a page of paragraphs needs more white space than a page of bullet points.

One exception. If the resume has two columns, a sidebar, icons or a photo, do not carry that design into the letter. Take the font and the header text and keep the letter to a single column.

Read the listing and the upload form first. If either names a file type, send that one, even if you would have chosen another.

If nothing is said, send a PDF. A PDF fixes the page: the fonts, line breaks and margins look the same on every screen and on paper. Create it with Save as PDF or Export in your word processor, so the text in it is real text: you can select a sentence with the cursor and copy it. A letter that was printed and then scanned or photographed is a picture of text.

If you are applying through an online system (an applicant tracking system), the cautious choices are the ones already described: a plain single-column layout, real text that can be selected, and the file type the listing asks for. They also suit a person reading on a screen.

When Word is the better choice

• The listing or the recruiter asks for Word, .doc or .docx.
• The upload form accepts Word files and not PDFs.
• A recruitment agency has told you it will edit or reformat your documents before passing them on.

Save it as .docx unless you are asked for .doc, and keep to a standard font.

Name the file so it can be found

Put your name first, then what the document is, then the role, using only letters, numbers and hyphens. The examples belong to Farida Rahimi, an accounts assistant applying for a Finance Officer role.

Some applications take no file: the letter goes into a box on a form or the body of an email. Count on your words arriving, and usually the blank lines between paragraphs. Assume the rest is gone: fonts, sizes, bold, italics, colour, alignment, tabs, columns and the layout of the header. Bullets, curly quotation marks and other symbols can arrive as different characters.

So lay the letter out to need none of it:

1. Start at the greeting. Leave out the header, the date and the recipient's details.
2. Keep one blank line between paragraphs, with no indents or tabs.
3. Turn lists into sentences. If a list has to stay, start each line with a hyphen.
4. Let position do the work of bold. What you would have emphasised goes first in its paragraph.
5. Put your contact details under your name, one per line.
6. Check after pasting. Are the blank lines still there, and have any quotation marks, dashes or accented letters changed? If the box has a character limit, see How long should a cover letter be?.

The same layout works in the body of an email. An email can carry formatting, but you do not control how the reader's mail app shows it, so write as if it could not. How to send a cover letter by email covers subject lines and whether to paste or attach.