Best Fonts for a Resume, Ranked by a Typesetting Engine

Most "best fonts for a resume" lists give you the same three names (Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman) and stop there. That advice is not wrong, exactly, but it treats font choice as a formatting checkbox rather than a design decision that affects how readable and how modern your CV looks in the 6 to 7 seconds a recruiter actually spends on it.

Font choice does three jobs at once: it has to parse cleanly through an applicant tracking system (ATS), it has to stay legible at the small sizes a one-page CV forces on you, and it has to signal the right thing about you before a single word gets read.

This guide ranks 12 fonts across serif and sans-serif, tells you exactly what each one signals, and gives you the size and spacing to pair with it. We can be this specific because JobSprout renders every CV through Typst, a real typesetting engine (the kind used for academic papers and technical documentation), rather than a word processor's rough approximation of layout. That means we can talk about x-height, optical sizing, and kerning as things that actually change on the page, not just theory.

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Why Font Choice Matters More Than People Think

A font is doing typographic work whether you notice it or not. Two fonts set at the same "11pt" can look meaningfully different in size because of x-height (how tall the lowercase letters are relative to the point size) and letter spacing. That is why a resume set in Garamond at 11pt looks smaller and more delicate than the same text in Calibri at 11pt, even though the point size is identical.

This matters for a resume specifically because you are usually fighting to fit a career onto one page. The wrong font either wastes space (forcing you to cut content) or crams so tight it becomes hard to skim in the handful of seconds a recruiter gives it before deciding whether to keep reading.

It also matters for ATS parsing. Fonts with standard, well-hinted letterforms and no unusual ligatures extract cleanly as text. Anything decorative, handwritten, or overly condensed risks garbled or dropped characters when a parser converts your PDF back into plain text.

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Best Fonts for a Resume: Serif Picks

Serif fonts (the ones with small strokes finishing off each letter) read as traditional and considered. They work well for law, finance, academia, government, and any senior role where gravitas matters more than modernity.

Georgia

Designed by Matthew Carter specifically for screen legibility, Georgia has a generous x-height and sturdy serifs that hold up well even at small sizes. It comes across as confident and professional without feeling stuffy. Set body text at 10.5 to 11pt: Georgia runs slightly wider than most sans fonts, so it will use a touch more space per line than Calibri at the same size, which you should account for when you're deciding how much detail to include per bullet.

Cambria

Designed by Jelle Bosma for Microsoft's ClearType Font Collection, Cambria was engineered to look sharp both on screen and printed. It has become common as a Word default for formal documents, which makes it a safe, low-risk choice, but also a slightly forgettable one. Good for conservative industries where you want the content to do the talking and the font to stay invisible.

Garamond

Based on the 16th-century types cut by Claude Garamond, this is the most elegant option on this list, and the one most associated with long-form reading (it's a common choice for book typesetting). The trade-off is thinner strokes and a smaller x-height, so set it a half-point larger than you would a sans font, around 11 to 11.5pt for body text, to keep it comfortably legible on screen.

Charter

Charter was designed in the late 1980s specifically to survive low-resolution printing, which means it stays crisp and legible even when compressed or exported at lower quality. It carries a warm, sturdy feel without the datedness of Times New Roman, and because far fewer resumes use it, it feels like a small, deliberate choice rather than a default you accepted without thinking.

Palatino

Hermann Zapf's 1949 design, rooted in Renaissance calligraphy, sits between Georgia's sturdiness and Garamond's delicacy: a larger x-height than Garamond, so it stays legible at 10.5 to 11pt without upsizing, but with more warmth and character than Cambria. It ships widely as Palatino Linotype on Windows (Book Antiqua is the metric-compatible stand-in), so it parses everywhere. A good fit for senior, academic, and consulting CVs where you want established-but-considered rather than merely traditional.

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Best Fonts for a Resume: Sans-Serif Picks

Sans-serif fonts read as modern and efficient. They dominate tech, marketing, design, startups, and most roles under 40 where the expectation has shifted away from formal serif documents.

Calibri

The default body font in Microsoft Word since 2007, Calibri is humanist, slightly rounded, and genuinely easy to read. Its problem is not quality, it's ubiquity: because it's the path of least resistance, it can read as "didn't think about formatting" the same way Times New Roman does on the serif side. It's still a perfectly safe choice, just not a differentiating one. Set body text at 10.5 to 11pt.

Helvetica / Arial

Helvetica is the internationally recognised neutral grotesque used across corporate branding worldwide. Arial is Microsoft's metric-compatible substitute (same character widths, slightly different curves), created because true Helvetica isn't preinstalled on Windows and carries a licence. For a CV, either comes across clean, corporate, and safe. If you're applying internationally or to a large, conservative employer, this is close to a risk-free choice.

Lato

Designed by Łukasz Dziedzic and distributed free through Google Fonts, Lato has softer, warmer letterforms than Calibri while still feeling professional. It's a good middle ground for marketing, startup, and customer-facing roles where you want modern without going all the way to a stark, corporate sans.

Source Sans

Adobe's first open-source typeface, built originally for user interfaces. It's exceptionally clean at small sizes and comes in a wide range of weights, which makes it easy to create clear hierarchy (bold section headers, regular body text) without introducing a second font family. A strong pick for tech, product, and design CVs.

Verdana

Another Matthew Carter design, built specifically for legibility on low-resolution screens. Verdana's letters are unusually wide and generously spaced, which makes it very easy to read but also means it eats horizontal space fast. On a one-page CV that can push you over the edge onto a second page. Useful when legibility for an older or vision-sensitive reader matters more than density, but it's the least space-efficient font on this list.

Aptos

Steve Matteson's grotesque replaced Calibri as the Microsoft Office default in 2024, which makes it the font most of the working world is quietly reading right now. On a CV it signals current without trying: same safe neutrality as Calibri, slightly crisper letterforms. Its ubiquity clock is ticking (it will eventually inherit Calibri's "didn't think about it" problem), but that's still years away. Availability isn't a concern for the reader either way, since a properly exported PDF embeds the font.

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Fonts to Avoid on a Resume

None of these three actually break ATS parsing. All three are standard, well-supported fonts and will extract as clean text. The problem is entirely about human perception.

Times New Roman was designed in 1932 for narrow newspaper columns, and its tight, thin serifs were never intended for the loose, generous layout of a modern one-page CV. It's not a bad font. It's just the historic default that a recruiter has seen thousands of times, which means it does nothing to help your CV stand out among a stack of otherwise identical Times New Roman resumes.

Comic Sans needs no real explanation: it was designed for a cartoon dog's speech bubbles in a 1990s Microsoft product, and casual, rounded, childlike letterforms are the opposite of what a hiring manager wants to see on a document meant to demonstrate professional judgement.

Courier and other monospaced fonts have a legitimate niche (legal filings, code samples on a technical CV), but as your main body font, every character taking up identical width means you either shrink the text uncomfortably to fit a page or you spill onto a second one. Rezi's ATS font research reaches the same conclusion: technical parseability isn't the argument against these fonts, space efficiency and perception are.

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Font Size, Spacing, and Pairing That Actually Work

Once you've picked a font, the size and spacing decisions matter almost as much as the choice itself.

• Your name: 16 to 22pt, bold. This is the one place you can go larger without wasting valuable content space, since it sits alone at the top.
• Section headings: 11 to 13pt, bold, sometimes with slightly wider letter spacing (tracking) to create hierarchy without switching font weight too aggressively.
• Body text: 10 to 11.5pt. Serif fonts with a smaller x-height, like Garamond, read comfortably a half-point larger than sans fonts at the same nominal size.
• Line spacing (leading): 1.15 to 1.3 times the point size. Most word processors default to 1.5, which is too loose for a document trying to fit a career onto one page.
• Margins: 0.5 to 0.75 inches (1.3 to 1.9cm) on all sides.

Stick to one font family for the whole document and lean on weight (regular, bold) and size for hierarchy instead of mixing multiple typefaces. If you want a second font purely for your name or headings, pair a serif body with a clean sans header, or vice versa, but never more than two families total.

This is also where a real typesetting engine earns its keep. A word processor applies spacing as a flat rule: the same gap after every paragraph, the same leading regardless of what's on the line. Typst solves layout as a constraint problem, so it can tighten a line that's about to overflow by a few points of kerning rather than force an ugly page break, and it can hold consistent optical alignment between a bold heading and the body text below it. That's the difference between a document that was formatted and one that was properly typeset, and it's part of why JobSprout's AI assistant can suggest a tighter rewrite instead of just telling you to shrink the font when your CV runs long.

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Matching Your Font to Your Resume's Structure

Font choice doesn't exist in isolation. It sits inside the bigger decisions about how your CV is organised. If you haven't settled on a resume format yet, chronological, functional, or combination, get that right first, since it determines how much white space your font choice actually has to work with.

The same goes for what goes where on the page: a font that looks clean in a two-column layout can feel cramped in a single-column one, and vice versa. And if you're not sure what a well-typeset CV should even look like structurally before you start worrying about typefaces, our guide on what a resume should look like covers layout, margins, and section balance in more detail.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the single best font for a resume?

There isn't one universally correct answer, but Georgia (serif) and Source Sans (sans-serif) are the two safest, most versatile picks. Both are highly legible at small sizes, parse cleanly through every major ATS, and are used infrequently enough that they still stand out slightly against a stack of Calibri and Times New Roman resumes.

Is Calibri still a good font for a resume in 2026?

Yes, functionally. It's clean, ATS-safe, and legible. The only downside is that it's the most common resume font in existence, so it does nothing to differentiate you. If you're applying to a highly competitive role, a font like Lato or Charter gives you the same reliability with slightly more personality.

Does font choice actually affect ATS parsing?

For any standard font (the ones listed in this guide), no. Modern ATS platforms extract text cleanly from Georgia, Calibri, Garamond, Verdana, and the rest without issue. Where parsing does break down is decorative, handwritten, or heavily stylised fonts, and documents built as images rather than real text. Run your CV through our ATS resume checker if you want to confirm yours parses correctly regardless of font.

What font size should I use for a resume?

Body text between 10 and 11.5pt, section headings at 11 to 13pt bold, and your name at 16 to 22pt. Exact sizing depends on the font's x-height. Garamond and other thin-stroked serifs read comfortably a half-point larger than a sans font at the same nominal size.

Should headings and body text use the same font?

They can, using bold for the heading and regular weight for the body, which is the simplest and safest approach. If you want two fonts, pair a sans heading with a serif body (or the reverse) and stop there. More than two typefaces on one page reads as inconsistent rather than intentional.

Is Times New Roman really that bad for a resume?

It's not bad, it's just overused. Times New Roman was designed in 1932 for narrow newspaper columns, not a modern one-page CV, and its ubiquity means it does nothing to help you stand out. It parses through an ATS exactly as well as any other standard serif, so the only real downside is that it signals you defaulted rather than chose.

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Ready to Put This into Practice?

Picking the right font is a five-minute decision. Making sure the rest of your CV (structure, spacing, section order, and content) is working just as hard is the bigger job.

Create your CV with JobSprout and it's typeset through the same engine behind this guide, with fonts, sizing, and spacing handled automatically so you can focus on the words. Free to create and download.