Almost every resume formatting guide gives you the same numbers: one-inch margins, 11pt font, 1.15 line spacing. Almost none of them tell you where those numbers came from, what happens at the edges of each range, or what "1.15 line spacing" actually measures once a real typesetter renders it in a real font. We build a resume renderer, which means we had to answer all three — not as advice, but as code that produces a PDF. This is the complete specification we ship, every number in it, and the evidence behind each one. It includes a measured line-pitch table across eight common resume fonts that we have not seen published anywhere else, and an honest account of what to compress first when your content will not fit one page.
Resume Formatting Standards 2026: Margins, Font Size & Spacing
Almost every resume formatting guide gives you the same numbers: one-inch margins, 11pt font, 1.15 line spacing. Almost none of them tell you where those numbers came from, what happens at the edges of each range, or what "1.15 line spacing" actually measures once a real typesetter renders it in a r...
The Complete Specification, In One Table
Here is the whole thing. Every number below is what our renderer actually uses, not a rounded-off recommendation. If you are formatting a resume by hand in Word or Google Docs, you can copy this table directly.
Margins
The accepted range is 0.5 to 1.0 inch on all four sides. Below 0.5in you risk clipping on consumer printers and losing edge text in scanned copies; above 1.0in the text column gets narrow enough that line breaks start to look awkward. Most guidance recommends 0.75 to 1.0in. We ship 0.625in as the default, and we are explicit that this is a product decision below the recommendation rather than a correction of it. The reason is arithmetic: a full inch combined with 10.5pt body text pushes a large share of otherwise-single-page resumes onto a second page, and at 0.75in the text column measures only 82% of an A4 sheet, which reads as conspicuously loose against a resume's own content. 0.625in leaves headroom in both directions. What matters more than the exact number: use the same margin on all four sides. Asymmetric margins are the single most common giveaway that a resume was squeezed to fit.
Font sizes
Body text: 10 to 12pt, never below 10. We ship 10.5pt. The floor was the obvious alternative and the wrong one — a resume rendering at exactly the minimum has no room left to shrink at all, which matters the moment you need to fit one page. Section headers: 12 to 16pt, and 2 to 4pt above your body size. We ship 13pt against a 10.5pt body. Your name: 18 to 24pt bold. We ship 24pt. This is the one place to spend size; it is the first thing a human reads and the anchor an ATS uses to identify the document. Job titles and entry headings sit between body and section header — 11.5 to 12.5pt — and no published standard speaks to them, because they are a hierarchy decision rather than a legibility one. Anything below 9pt is a hard floor, not a style choice. Print quality and OCR reliability both fall off there together, which means a 8pt "space saver" is simultaneously harder for a human to read and more likely to be misparsed by software.
Spacing
Four gaps, four different jobs: Before a section header: 12 to 16pt. We ship 14pt. This is the largest gap on the page and it is what makes a resume scannable — it tells the eye where one block of information ends. After a section header, before its first line: 4 to 6pt. We ship 5pt. Keep this tight. A header floating far above its own content reads as unattached. Between entries within a section: 8 to 10pt. We ship 9pt. Between bullet points: 2 to 4pt of space added on top of the line spacing. We ship 3.15pt. That last one has a trap in it worth stating plainly, because it is the most commonly misapplied number in resume formatting.
The bullet spacing trap
"2 to 4pt between bullets" is Word's space-after-paragraph setting, which sits on top of line spacing. It is not the total gap between two bullets. Set it as a total gap instead — which is what many layout tools do — and something subtly wrong happens: at 10.5pt body text, the lines inside a single wrapped bullet sit about 6.8pt apart, while two adjacent bullets sit 3.15pt apart. The bullets are now closer together than the lines within them, and the list stops reading as a list. It reads as one block of text with stray markers in it. The fix is to make bullet spacing additive: line spacing plus the gap. Then bullets stay more separated than their own wrapped lines at every line-spacing setting, which is the visual signal that makes a list scannable in the first place. One more bullet rule: use a hanging indent, so the marker sits at the left margin and wrapped lines align under the text rather than under the marker. Do not indent the whole block. The frequently-cited "0.25 to 0.35in bullet indentation" is Word's default tab stop, not an ATS requirement.
Why Every One of Those Numbers Is a Range
Notice that almost nothing above is a single value. That is not vagueness in the sources — it is the actual shape of the constraint, and understanding why tells you how to choose within each range. Each band has a floor set by legibility and a ceiling set by density. Body text below 10pt gets hard to read and hard to scan; above 12pt you fit noticeably less on the page and the document starts to look padded. Margins below 0.5in risk physical clipping; above 1.0in the line length gets short enough to hurt reading. Between those two ends, the right answer depends on how much content you have. That is the real variable, and it is why any guide insisting on one exact number is oversimplifying. The practical rule: start at the middle of every band. If you overflow, move down within the bands — all of them, a little — before you move any single one to its floor. A resume at 10pt body, 0.5in margins and minimum spacing looks cramped in a way a reader notices immediately. A resume that took 10% off each of six different dimensions looks normal.
Which numbers ATS actually cares about
Almost none of them. Applicant tracking systems extract text. Font size, margin width and line spacing are presentation, and a well-formed PDF carries its text layer independently of how that text is laid out. A 10pt resume and a 12pt resume parse identically. What the numbers affect is the human on the other end — and the human is the one who decides. So treat the standards as readability guidance, which is what they are, and spend your ATS attention on the things covered in the next section, which is where parsers genuinely fail.
What about why every one of those numbers is a range?
Notice that almost nothing above is a single value. That is not vagueness in the sources — it is the actual shape of the constraint, and understanding why tells you how to choose within each range. Each band has a floor set by legibility and a ceili...
Measured: What "1.15 Line Spacing" Actually Renders As
This is the number every guide gives and none of them define. "Line spacing 1.15" is a Word setting. What it means physically is baseline-to-baseline pitch as a multiple of the font size. But in a real typesetting engine the gap you set between lines is separate from the ink height of the line itself, and ink height varies by font. Pitch is ink height plus leading — so the same leading value produces different pitch in different fonts. We measured it. Eight of the most common resume fonts, one-line box height and resulting pitch, at the leading value we ship (0.65em): Inter — 7.28pt box, 1.378em pitch Merriweather — 7.43pt box, 1.393em pitch Lato — 7.17pt box, 1.366em pitch Open Sans — 7.14pt box, 1.364em pitch Roboto — 7.11pt box, 1.361em pitch Montserrat — 7.00pt box, 1.350em pitch Poppins — 6.98pt box, 1.348em pitch Source Sans 3 — 6.60pt box, 1.310em pitch The spread is 1.31 to 1.39 across the eight — about 6% between the tightest and loosest — from a single leading setting. Every one of them lands inside the 1.20 to 1.45 target band, which is the band "1.0 to 1.15 line spacing" corresponds to when measured this way.
What this means for you
Two practical consequences. First: if you switch fonts, your line spacing changes even though you did not touch the setting. Source Sans 3 renders about 5% tighter than Merriweather at identical settings. If your resume just barely fit one page and you changed font, that is why it no longer does. Second: "1.15 line spacing" is not a portable instruction. It means something specific in Word and something slightly different everywhere else. If you are choosing by eye rather than by number, aim for pitch that looks roughly 1.3 to 1.4 times your font size — comfortably open, without lines drifting apart.
What ATS Actually Breaks On
The formatting numbers above are for humans. This section is the one that is genuinely about parsers, and the popular advice here is a mix of true, outdated, and confidently wrong. The single variable that matters is reading order — the sequence in which text comes out of the PDF. Everything that breaks an ATS breaks it by scrambling that sequence. What genuinely causes problems: Contact details in the page header or footer. Some parsers never read those regions at all. Your email address ends up in a part of the file the extractor skips. This is the highest-cost, lowest-effort mistake on the list — move contact details into the body of the document. Tables and text boxes. These break reading order directly, because the extractor has to guess whether to read across rows or down columns. It often guesses wrong, and a table of skills comes out interleaved into nonsense. Text rendered as an image. A graphic containing your job title contains no text at all as far as a parser is concerned. Non-standard section headings. "Where I Have Worked" is charming and unmatched by the pattern list a parser uses. Use "Experience", "Education", "Skills".
The two-column question, honestly
This is where the published advice is most contradictory, so here is the actual state of the evidence. One tested study reports two-column resumes parsing successfully at 98%. Another reports failure in 7 of 8 systems tested. Both are real results, and the reason they disagree is that column count is not the variable — it is a proxy for one. What actually matters is how the columns were built. Columns laid out as a proper two-column flow, where the underlying reading order runs down one column and then the other, parse fine. Columns built out of a table, or out of positioned text boxes, do not — and that is the far more common way people produce a two-column resume in a word processor, which is why the failure results exist. The practical guidance: a single-column resume is the safe default and always will be. A two-column template from a tool that renders it as a real layout rather than a table is fine. A two-column resume you built yourself out of a table in Word is the case the horror stories are about.
Colour
Body text black or dark charcoal, and at most one accent hue used consistently for headings and small emphasis. The failure mode here is not parsing — colour has no effect on text extraction. It is contrast, and it shows up in print and in scanned copies. A mid-grey that looks refined on a bright monitor can fall to 4.5:1 contrast or lower, which reads as washed out on paper and degrades OCR accuracy. We ship body text at 14.68:1 contrast on white and secondary text at 7.56:1 — both comfortably above the 7:1 threshold for accessible body text. If you are choosing your own, a good rule of thumb is that if the text looks light on screen, it will look broken on paper.
What about what ats actually breaks on?
The formatting numbers above are for humans. This section is the one that is genuinely about parsers, and the popular advice here is a mix of true, outdated, and confidently wrong. The single variable that matters is reading order — the sequence in ...
The Resume Photo Question, By Country
The advice "include a professional headshot" and the advice "never include a photo" are both correct, in different places. This is one of the few resume rules that is genuinely regional rather than contested. In the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, the default is no photo. Two independent reasons. The first is legal exposure: including a photo introduces protected-characteristic information into a hiring decision, and many recruiters are instructed to discard or redact such resumes on receipt. The second is mechanical: a large image at the top of the page can push your name below the region some parsers use for identity extraction. In Germany, France, Spain and Italy, a photo is conventional and its absence is sometimes noticed. If you are applying across regions, keep two versions. If you are unsure, leave it out — the downside of omitting a photo where it is customary is far smaller than the downside of including one where it is not. When a template does use one, the geometry matters: roughly 1.0 to 1.25 inches square, circular or lightly rounded mask, with about one line-height of clear space around it. Bigger than that and it competes with your name.
Dates
Use "Jan 2023" or "01/2023" and right-align them on the same line as the job title. Consistency matters more than which of the two you pick. Spell out "Present" for a current role rather than leaving the end date blank. A blank reads as missing data to both a human skimming and a parser filling a field.
When It Will Not Fit: The Compression Budget, In Order
Every resume guide tells you to fit one page. None of them tell you what to spend first, which is the only part that is actually a decision. Here is the order, cheapest to most expensive in terms of what the reader loses: 1. Line spacing and bullet gaps. Tightening leading from the middle of its band to the bottom costs the reader essentially nothing — the document stays inside the standard, and most people cannot tell the difference in a side-by-side. 2. Margins, down to 0.5in. A 0.5in margin is a normal, perfectly professional margin. Nobody has ever been rejected for it. 3. Font size, down to 10pt. Now the reader notices, which is why this comes third rather than first. 4. Below 10pt body text. This leaves the standard. It is a legitimate choice — a dense single page can beat a sparse two-page document — but it should be a choice you make knowingly, not one a tool makes for you silently. 5. Cut content. Which, past a point, is the honest answer. A resume with fifteen years of experience compressed onto one page at 8pt is not a one-page resume; it is a two-page resume that has been made hard to read. The reason this order matters: the levers are not equally valuable. Spending the cheap ones first often gets you there with no visible cost at all, and people routinely reach straight for font size — the third-cheapest lever — because it is the most obvious one in the toolbar.
How much does compression actually buy?
We measured this on our own renderer, because it is the kind of claim that should come with a number. Against a single-column ATS template with one experience entry, counting how many single-line bullets fit on one page: No compression: 13 bullets. Standard compression — spacing, then margins, then type down to a 9pt floor: 25 bullets. That is 92% more content on the same page. Below-standard compression, with the type floor lowered to 7pt: 41 bullets, or 215% more. On a full five-page sample resume, standard compression takes it to four pages and below-standard compression takes it to three. That is the honest shape of the thing: compression is powerful at the margin — it reliably rescues a resume that overflows by a few lines — and it cannot turn five pages into one. Anything claiming otherwise is either lying or producing something unreadable.
What about when it will not fit: the compression budget, in order?
Every resume guide tells you to fit one page. None of them tell you what to spend first, which is the only part that is actually a decision. Here is the order, cheapest to most expensive in terms of what the reader loses: 1. Line spacing and bullet...
How Infinite Resume Applies This
Our position is that the defaults should be the standard, and everything above it should be a choice you make deliberately. So every one of the numbers in this article is what you get without touching a single control. Body text 10.5pt, section headers 13pt, name 24pt, margins 0.625in on all four sides, the four-tier spacing scale, additive bullet spacing with a hanging indent, and body text at 14.68:1 contrast. Across all templates. You do not have to know any of this to benefit from it. They are not written into the templates, either — they live in a single specification file, and the templates are built out of components that read from it. That is why a change to the standard reaches every template at once rather than 52 separate edits, and why we can assert in the test suite that no shipped value has drifted outside its band.
And then the Design Studio, for when you want something else
Every dimension is a slider: font size, line spacing, section spacing, margins, bullet spacing, bullet indent, paper size, bullet marker style, section order and visibility. Each slider carries a tick mark at the industry standard value, so you can always see where you started, and a one-click "Reset to industry standard". When a setting leaves its standard band, the panel says so in plain language — for example, "body text would be 9.98pt, below the 10pt minimum" — rather than silently allowing it. One-Page Auto-Fit runs exactly the compression order described above, spending the cheap levers before the expensive ones, and stops at a 9pt body. If that is not enough it paginates honestly onto a second page and tells you, rather than shrinking your resume to something nobody can read. A separate opt-in toggle, labelled as below the industry standard, lowers that floor to 7pt for people who would rather have one dense page than two clean ones. That is the whole design philosophy in one sentence: the default is the standard, the override is available, and the override is labelled.
Conclusion
If you take one thing from this: the numbers are ranges, not values, and the right answer within each range depends on how much content you have. Start in the middle of every band, and if you need space, take a little from several dimensions rather than a lot from one. And spend your ATS worry on reading order — contact details out of the header, no tables, no text-as-image, standard section headings — because that is where parsers actually fail, not on whether your margins are 0.75 or 1.0 inch. If you would rather not think about any of it, our builder ships every number in this article as its default, and the Design Studio is there for the day you want something different. It is free, with no watermarks.