Resume Index · August 2026 edition

Most resume bullet points contain no numbers

Measured across 2,366 real resumes and 27,100 work-experience bullet points.

Measured 18 August 2026 · CC-BY-4.0, free to reuse with attribution · Download the data

Score your resume

Free, no account needed.

Quantified bullet points

30%

of work-experience bullet points contain a number, a percentage or a currency figure.

The scorer points the same way. Impact & Quantification is the lowest-scoring of the 12 categories we publish, at 4.6 out of 10 across 427 scored resumes.

Resumes that quantify score higher

Mean ATS score by how much of a resume's work experience carries a figure. Resumes with no quantified bullets average 60; those where at least half carry one average 76.

The gap holds outside the category that grades quantification directly: on every other category, the same resumes average 7.8 out of 10 against 6.8 for resumes with no figures at all. These are associations across resumes, not proof that editing one thing moves the score. The impact category is excluded from the second column for that reason.

Short resumes score worst

Mean ATS score by length. Resumes under 250 words average 57, and the score keeps climbing to 72 at 400 to 599 words.

Where resumes land

Scores of the 427 resumes graded, in ten-point bands. The median is 67 out of 100, and 6% reach the top band.

Where resumes lose points

Mean score out of 10, weakest first, each row with its own sample.

  • Impact & Quantification · n=4274.6
  • Work Experience · n=3966.3
  • Projects · n=1606.6
  • Education · n=4187.1
  • Completeness & Structure · n=4277.2
  • Certifications · n=1827.2
  • Job Fit · n=1227.3
  • Contact Information · n=4277.4
  • ATS & Formatting · n=4277.6
  • Skills · n=4167.6
  • Professional Summary · n=3918.1
  • Languages · n=1178.5

The most common high-priority issues

Share of scored resumes where the checker raised at least one high-priority fix in that category.

  • Impact & Quantification · n=42779%
  • Job Fit · n=12241%
  • Completeness & Structure · n=42724%
  • ATS & Formatting · n=42719%
  • Contact Information · n=42718%
  • Work Experience · n=39615%

The anatomy of a real resume

Median values, each with the middle half of its own sample.

67/100ATS score61 to 74 across 427 scored resumes
327Words of content226 to 429 across 2,254 resumes
2Roles listed2 to 4 across 2,366 resumes
4Bullet points per role2 to 5 across 7,330 roles
17Skills listed9 to 24 across 2,366 resumes

Which sections resumes carry

Share of 2,366 resumes containing each section. Experience and education run high by construction: a resume needs one of them to be counted at all.

  • Professional summary87%
  • Work experience93%
  • Education96%
  • Skills92%
  • Projects36%
  • Certifications44%
  • Languages36%
  • Awards15%
  • Volunteering12%
  • Publications8%
  • References11%

How we measured this

  • Resumes built on JobSprout, counted directly. Category scores come from the same ATS scorer that powers the free resume checker (scoring model version 2), so they are model judgements on a 0-10 scale rather than counts.
  • 2,366 resumes measured and 427 scored. A resume needs work experience or education to be counted; drafts with neither are excluded.
  • Structure figures take one resume per account, the most recently updated, so a single person with many drafts cannot weight the corpus.
  • Score figures take one score per resume rather than per account, so the two halves of this report count differently: a person with several scored resumes appears once in the structure figures and once per resume in the scores.
  • Some scores were graded against a job the writer was targeting, which adds a job-fit category the free checker cannot apply without one; 121 of the 427 were scored this way.
  • A work-experience bullet counts as quantified when it contains a numeral, percentage or currency figure. Quantification is measured on work experience only, where achievements live. Each paragraph of a role's description counts as one bullet, which is how the templates render them.
  • Length counts the words in the summary, in the entry bullets of work experience, education, projects, certifications, awards, volunteering and publications, and in the skills listed. Headings, job titles, employer names, dates, languages and references are excluded, and resumes whose counted sections are empty are left out of this figure alone.
  • Scored resumes, joined back to their content. Buckets under the publication floor are omitted. These are associations across resumes, not proof that editing one thing moves the score. The impact category is excluded from the second column for that reason.
  • Categories score 0-10. 16 categories can be graded; the 4 that fewer than 50 resumes triggered are held back.
  • No figure is published against fewer than 50 observations, whether those are resumes, scores or bullet points. A share below 1% is shown as "<1%"; a section no resume used is shown as 0% with no bar.
  • Only aggregates leave the database. Resumes stay in the accounts that created them; no resume text, name, employer or contact detail is published here or in the dataset.

Cite this

JobSprout Resume Index, August 2026 edition, measured 18 August 2026. https://www.jobsprout.ai/resume-index. Free to reuse with attribution.

Download the dataHow scoring works

See where your resume lands

Score yours with the same checker that graded the resumes in this report.

Check my resume