Classic serif, full margins. Times New Roman or Cambria at 11 points, with one inch of space on the top, bottom, left and right. CareerOneStop (U.S. Department of Labor-funded, undated) recommends a clear margin of about one inch all round and names Times New Roman, Cambria and Arial as simple font choices, with body text at 10 to 12 points. This is the setup to use when you do not know who is reading, when the employer is conservative, or when the resume will be printed and passed around a hiring panel. It never looks wrong. If you are early in your career and have one page of content, this layout fills the page honestly instead of padding it.
Modern sans, full margins. Arial, Helvetica or Calibri at 10.5 or 11 points, again with one-inch margins. Indeed's career guide (2026-06-15) lists Arial, Helvetica and Calibri as sans serif examples and suggests judging size by what looks equivalent to Times New Roman at 10, 11 or 12 point — worth remembering, because the same point size looks noticeably bigger in Arial than in Times. Use this when the resume will mostly be read on a laptop or phone, which is most of the time now, and in industries where a serif face reads as stuffy. Calibri is a safe default in Microsoft Word; Helvetica is the equivalent on a Mac.
Space-saving serif. Garamond, Georgia or Palatino at 11 or 12 points with 0.75-inch margins. Garamond passed all five parsers in a font-parsing test (ATS Verification, 2026-05-08), and Georgia and Palatino both appear on Jobscan's list of best resume fonts (undated). Reach for this when you have fifteen or more years of relevant work and the content genuinely will not fit two pages in Times New Roman. Garamond's letterforms are small for their point size, so set it at 11 or 12 rather than 10 — shrinking it further defeats the purpose by making the page unreadable.
Wide sans for screen reading. Verdana or Tahoma at 10 points, keeping the full one-inch margin. Both are on Jobscan's best-fonts list (undated), and Verdana passed every parser in the font-parsing test (ATS Verification, 2026-05-08). These faces were designed for screens and stay crisp at small sizes, which helps if you expect a recruiter to scan the file on a phone. The trade-off is width: Verdana at 10 points occupies more line space than Times New Roman at 11, so check your page count before committing.
Tight layout. Any of the standard fonts at 10 points with half-inch margins on all four sides. Indeed's guide (2026-06-15) puts the usable range at half an inch to one inch and specifically suggests reducing margins to 0.5 inches to fit more content; ResumeFast (undated) gives the same 0.5-to-1-inch range. Use it when you have already cut the weak bullets and the strong ones still overflow. Do not use it to avoid editing. Half an inch is the floor — below that, home and office printers start clipping text, and the page stops having any breathing room.
Designer template. A display or downloaded font, a coloured sidebar, skill rating bars, icons beside your phone number, two columns. This is a different document with a different job. Jobscan (undated) is blunt that cluttering a resume with graphics is a reliable way to get it lost in an applicant tracking system, and multi-column layouts give a parser no clear reading order. Keep a version like this for handing out in person, linking from a portfolio, or sending directly to a hiring manager who asked for your work — and keep a plain, single-column version for every online application.
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