The Best Fonts for an ATS Resume (and the Ones to Skip)

Almost every font parses correctly, so the real question is readability. The safe list, what to avoid, and the sizes and spacing that go with it.

Umair Sajid12 September 20265 min read

A plain single-column resume page with one section marked in green

The short version

Any widely installed typeface parses correctly. The font choice is a readability decision, not a technical one.
Safe and good: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, Lato, Source Sans, Georgia, Garamond, Cambria, Verdana.
Avoid script and display faces, condensed variants at small sizes, and anything that will not embed in a PDF.
Body text at 10–12pt, headings 14–18pt, one family throughout or two at most.

“What font is ATS friendly?” is a question with a disappointing answer: nearly all of them. Text is text. A parser reads the characters your document stores, not the shapes it draws on screen, so the choice between Arial and Calibri has no effect on whether your work history is extracted correctly.

That does not make the question pointless. Font choice affects two real things: whether your resume survives being exported, opened and printed somewhere else, and whether a tired recruiter reads it comfortably at eight o’clock on a Friday. Those are worth getting right.

The fonts that are genuinely safe

“Safe” here means installed almost everywhere, legible at 10 point, and reliable when a document moves between Word, Google Docs, Pages and PDF.

Sans serif

Calibri — Microsoft’s long-standing default. Soft, modern, slightly small on the page, so set it a half point larger than you would Arial.
Arial and Helvetica — neutral to the point of invisibility, which is exactly what you want.
Lato — friendlier than Arial, free, and widely available through Google Fonts.
Source Sans 3 — designed for user interfaces, so it holds up at small sizes.
Verdana — very wide. Excellent legibility, but it eats space; use it only if you have room.
Aptos — the newer Microsoft 365 default. Fine, though older installations may substitute it.

Serif

Georgia — built for screens, generous and readable. A good choice if you want warmth without fuss.
Cambria — Microsoft’s screen serif, sturdy at small sizes.
Garamond — elegant and space-efficient. Set it a point larger than you think; it runs small.
Source Serif 4 — contemporary, open, free.

Times New Roman parses perfectly and reads acceptably. It is on no technical blacklist. Its only problem is that it is the default nobody chose, and some readers register it as a document that was not thought about.

What to avoid, and why

Script and handwriting faces — Brush Script, Lucida Handwriting. Hard to read in bulk, and they signal the wrong thing for almost every role.
Display faces — anything designed for a poster. They lose legibility badly below 14 point.
Comic Sans and Papyrus — for reasons that need no explanation.
Condensed and narrow variants at body size — Arial Narrow squeezes more words onto a page by making each one harder to read. If you need a narrow font to fit, you need to cut words instead.
Very light weights — a 300-weight body text looks refined on a retina display and disappears when printed.
Anything you downloaded that week — if the font is not embedded in your PDF export, the reader’s machine substitutes something else and your layout reflows.

Sizes, spacing and the rest of the typography

The font is one decision out of five, and the other four matter more.

Body size: 10 to 12 point. Below 10 you are asking for trouble; above 12 you are padding.
Headings: 14 to 18 point, bold, in the same family. A second family is allowed — a serif heading over sans body reads well — but stop at two.
Line spacing: 1.15 to 1.5. Single spacing on a dense page is punishing.
Margins: 1.27 cm to 2.54 cm (half an inch to an inch) on all sides. Tighter than half an inch and some printers clip it.
Alignment: ragged right. Justified text creates rivers of white space in a narrow column and helps nobody.

Use the same font for every part of the document, including the header. Mixing three families is the single most common way a resume looks amateur, and it has nothing to do with parsing.

The one font problem that is technical

It is not the typeface. It is symbol fonts used for bullets.

If your bullet character comes from Wingdings, Webdings or a decorative set — a checkmark, an arrow, a star — it may be extracted as a question mark, a random letter, or nothing. That will not hide your text, but it makes the parsed record ugly, and where a symbol replaces a hyphen in a date range it can confuse the date extraction.

Use your word processor’s standard list bullet, or a plain hyphen. Keep the clever glyphs for a personal website.

Choosing between serif and sans

Neither is more professional. The decision is closer to tone than to function.

A sans serif reads as contemporary and neutral, which suits technology, operations, healthcare, trades and most corporate roles. A serif reads as considered and traditional, which suits law, academia, finance, editorial and senior roles where gravity is the point.

If you cannot decide: Calibri or Lato at 11 point will never be wrong. Georgia at 11 point will never be wrong either, and slightly fewer people will have used it.

What the templates here use

Every file on this site is set in one widely installed family at 11 point, with headings in the same family at a larger weight, ragged-right alignment and 1.15 line spacing — and all of it is editable, so if your industry has a convention, you can change it in one click without breaking the layout. The files are one column with no tables or text boxes, which is the part that actually affects parsing; see the eight formatting rules for why.

Templates are written per job title — accountant, graphic designer, truck driver and 495 more, browsable by industry or field.

Common questions

Is Times New Roman bad for a resume?

Not technically. It parses fine and it is perfectly readable in print. The objection is aesthetic: it is the font a document has when nobody picked one.

Can I use two different fonts?

Yes, one for headings and one for body text. Pair a serif with a sans rather than two of the same kind, and stop at two.

What font size is too small?

Anything under 10 point for body text. If your resume only fits at 9 point, the problem is the word count, not the type size.

Will a Google Font break an ATS?

No. Text is text whatever the typeface. The only caution is export: make sure the font embeds in your PDF, or send DOCX and let the reader’s machine substitute a close match.

Does bold or italic text confuse a parser?

No. Both are normal character formatting and come through as plain text. Use them to help a human skim; just do not bold whole paragraphs.

Start from a file that already does this

Every template is written for one job title, in a single column, with no tables and no text boxes, and the bullet points are already drafted at 1, 2, 5 and 10+ years. Edit it in Word, Google Docs or Pages.

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