Resume Fonts, Margins, and Formatting: What ATS Can Actually Read

You could have the perfect experience, the right keywords, and a compelling professional summary. But if your resume formatting confuses an applicant tracking system, none of that matters. The ATS will mangle your information, and a recruiter will see a garbled mess instead of your carefully crafted resume.

The frustrating part is that many popular resume templates, the ones that look beautiful in a design tool, are the exact ones that ATS software struggles to parse. Two-column layouts, creative icons, fancy fonts, and elaborate headers all create problems.

Here is a complete breakdown of what works, what breaks, and what the real answers are to the formatting questions everyone asks.

Fonts: Which Ones Work, Which Ones Break

ATS software reads your resume by extracting text from the document file. Standard fonts render correctly every time. Unusual or decorative fonts can cause characters to display incorrectly or not at all.

Safe fonts that always work:

• Calibri (the most common default in modern Word documents)
• Arial
• Helvetica
• Times New Roman
• Georgia
• Cambria
• Garamond
• Verdana
• Tahoma
• Trebuchet MS

Fonts to avoid:

• Any decorative or script font (Pacifico, Lobster, Brush Script)
• Fonts from design tools that are not standard system fonts
• Custom web fonts that may not be embedded in your document
• Symbol fonts or icon fonts (Wingdings, Font Awesome icons)

Stick with one font for your entire resume. If you want variety, use the same font family with different weights, for example, Calibri Regular for body text and Calibri Bold for headings. This keeps your resume clean and guarantees ATS compatibility.

Font Size: The Right Range

There is a practical range that works for resumes, and going outside it causes problems.

Your name: 14-16pt. This should be the largest text on the page. It makes your identity immediately clear.

Section headings: 12-14pt, bold. Headings like "Experience," "Education," and "Skills" need to stand out visually, but they should not overpower the actual content.

Body text: 10-12pt. This is the sweet spot. Go below 10pt and your resume becomes hard to read, both for humans and for ATS that occasionally struggle with very small text. Go above 12pt and you waste valuable space.

Contact information: 10-11pt is fine. It does not need to be large.

A common mistake is shrinking the font to 9pt to fit more content on one page. If you need to do that, you have too much content. Cut something instead of making everything tiny.

Margins: 0.5 to 1 Inch

Standard margins work best. Here is the practical guidance:

0.5 inch margins: The minimum. This gives you maximum space for content while still looking professional. Some ATS and printers handle 0.5-inch margins fine. Use this if you need the extra space.

0.75 inch margins: A good middle ground. This is what many professionally formatted resumes use.

1 inch margins: The default in most word processors. Looks clean with plenty of white space. If your content fits comfortably with 1-inch margins, use them.

Anything less than 0.5 inches: Risky. Some printers will cut off text, and some ATS systems may ignore content that falls outside expected margins. Do not go below 0.5 inches.

Keep margins consistent on all four sides. Asymmetric margins (wider on the left, narrower on the right) look off and serve no purpose.

Line Spacing: 1.0 to 1.15

Single spacing (1.0) is the standard for resumes. If your resume looks cramped at single spacing, try 1.15, it adds a small amount of breathing room without wasting space.

Do not use double spacing (2.0). That is for academic papers, not resumes. Your one-page resume would become two pages, and it would look like you are padding.

Between sections, add a small amount of extra space, about 6-8pt of space after each section heading. This creates visual separation without using full blank lines.

Bullet Points: Keep Them Standard

Use standard round bullet points. That is it.

Do not use:

• Arrows
• Checkmarks
• Dashes
• Custom symbols or icons
• Stars or diamonds
• Square bullets

ATS software reliably recognizes standard round bullets. Anything else might be converted to strange characters, stripped out entirely, or cause parsing errors that break the formatting of your bullet text.

Each bullet point should be one to two lines long. If a bullet runs to three or more lines, it is probably trying to say too much. Split it or tighten the language.

Bold and Italic: Use Sparingly

You might also want to check out our article on choosing the best resume format.

Good news: most ATS handle bold and italic text without issues. The text is still extracted correctly. So you can use them for emphasis.

Use bold for:

• Your name
• Section headings
• Job titles
• Company names

Use italic for:

• Dates (optional)
• Degree names (optional)
• Publication titles if you have them

Do not use:

• Underlining for anything other than hyperlinks. Underlines can make text look like a link and confuse both readers and some parsers.
• ALL CAPS for large sections of text. A heading in all caps is fine. A paragraph in all caps is shouting.
• Strikethrough. No reason to have this on a resume, and it confuses ATS.

The key principle: use formatting to create hierarchy and emphasis, not decoration. Every bold or italic word should serve a purpose.

Headers and Footers: Never Put Important Info Here

This is one of the most common and damaging formatting mistakes. Many resume templates put your name, contact information, or page numbers in the header or footer of the document.

The problem: most ATS completely ignore headers and footers. They are designed to parse the main body of the document. Anything in a header or footer simply disappears from the extracted text.

If your name and email are in the header, the ATS may not know who you are. That is an instant rejection from an automated system.

The rule is simple: Put all important information in the main body of your document. Your name, phone number, email, LinkedIn URL, and city should all be in the body text at the top of the page, not in a header.

Page numbers in footers are fine since they do not contain critical information. But as a general practice, keep the footer empty too.

File Format: DOCX vs PDF

This is the most debated question in resume formatting, and the answer is more detailed than most people suggest.

DOCX (Microsoft Word):

• Parsed most reliably by ATS. Word documents have a structured format that ATS software is specifically built to read.
• Formatting may shift slightly if opened in a different version of Word or on a different operating system.
• Easy to edit, which is good for you but also means others could theoretically modify it.

PDF:

• Preserves formatting exactly. What you see is what the recruiter sees.
• Most modern ATS handle PDFs well. The myth that ATS cannot read PDFs was true 10 years ago but is largely outdated.
• Some older or cheaper ATS may still struggle with PDFs, especially image-based PDFs (scanned documents) rather than text-based PDFs.
• If you create a PDF from a Word document using "Save As PDF," the text layer is preserved and almost every ATS can read it.

The real answer: If the job posting specifies a format, use that format. Period. If it does not specify, PDF is generally the safer choice because it preserves your formatting and works with the vast majority of modern ATS. If you are applying through a system that seems outdated, or if you are uploading to a company's own portal that explicitly asks for Word, use DOCX.

Never submit a PDF that was created by scanning a printed document. These are image-based PDFs with no text layer, and no ATS can extract text from them without OCR, which is unreliable.

Colors: Minimal or None

A small amount of color is fine. Using a dark blue or dark gray for your name or section headings is perfectly acceptable and adds a touch of visual distinction. ATS extracts the text regardless of its color.

But there are practical limits:

• Do not use light colors for text. Light gray text on a white background is hard to read when printed and may appear invisible in some ATS previews.
• Do not use colored backgrounds or shading behind text. This can create readability issues.
• Do not rely on color to convey information. If you use green for skills you are expert in and yellow for intermediate skills, that meaning is lost entirely in ATS parsing and on black-and-white prints.
• Stick to dark text on a white background for all body content. If you use an accent color, limit it to headings.

Monochrome resumes are always safe. A well-organized black-and-white resume looks professional and works everywhere.

Templates: Which Ones Are ATS-Safe

Most of the visually striking resume templates you find online are not ATS-friendly. Here is how to tell the difference.

Red flags in a template:

• Two-column layout (ATS may read across columns, mixing unrelated information)
• Sidebar for skills or contact info (often parsed incorrectly or ignored)
• Icons or graphics next to section headings
• Progress bars or skill ratings (ATS cannot interpret visual scales)
• Tables used for layout (tables can scramble the reading order)
• Text boxes (content inside text boxes is often skipped entirely)
• Header/footer content placement

Green flags in a template:

• Single-column layout
• Standard section headings (Experience, Education, Skills)
• Body text and headings in the main document flow
• No tables, text boxes, or graphics
• Standard fonts
• Clean, simple design

If you are not sure whether a template is ATS-safe, test it. Copy all the text from your completed resume and paste it into a plain text editor like Notepad. If the text comes out in a logical order with all information intact, the ATS will probably read it correctly. If the text is jumbled or missing sections, switch to a simpler template.

Putting It All Together

Here is a quick-reference checklist for ATS-friendly formatting:

• Font: Calibri, Arial, or another standard font. One font throughout.
• Font size: 10-12pt body, 14-16pt name, 12-14pt headings.
• Margins: 0.5-1 inch on all sides, consistent.
• Line spacing: 1.0-1.15.
• Bullets: Standard round bullets only.
• Bold/italic: For emphasis, used consistently and sparingly.
• Headers/footers: Empty. All content in the body.
• File format: PDF (text-based) or DOCX, following posting instructions.
• Colors: Minimal. Dark text on white background.
• Layout: Single column. No tables, text boxes, or graphics for layout.
• Template: Simple and clean. Function over form.

Your resume's content is what gets you the job. But proper formatting is what gets your content seen. Spending 15 minutes fixing your formatting is worth more than spending hours perfecting a bullet point that an ATS never reads.

If you want to check whether your resume's formatting passes ATS screening, try running it through Sira. It parses your resume the same way an ATS would and flags any formatting issues along with keyword gaps for the specific job you are targeting.