The Best Fonts for an ATS Resume (2026)
2 min read
Font choice rarely breaks an ATS on its own — but the wrong font hurts readability, and a decorative one can genuinely confuse parsing. The good news: the safe list is short, boring, and effective. Here's what to use in 2026.
The safe fonts
These parse cleanly across the major enterprise systems (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Taleo) and are pre-installed on Word and Google Docs:
| Sans-serif | Serif |
|---|---|
| Calibri | Georgia |
| Arial | Cambria |
| Aptos (Word's new default) | Times New Roman |
| Verdana | — |
| Tahoma | — |
Best overall pick: Calibri. It reads as modern without being trendy, ships everywhere, and parses reliably. Georgia or Cambria are excellent if you prefer a serif (a slightly more traditional, "leadership" feel).
The honest truth: any font on this list is fine. Recruiters aren't scoring your typeface — they're scanning content. Pick one and move on.
The right sizes
- Body text: 10–12 pt (11 pt is the sweet spot for most people).
- Your name: larger — around 16–22 pt.
- Section headings: a couple of points above body, bold.
- Line spacing: ~1.15 for readability.
If you're shrinking below 10 pt to fit everything on one page, that's a sign to cut content, not font size — see how long should a resume be.
Fonts (and font tricks) to avoid
- Decorative / script / display fonts — anything designed to look fancy. Hard to read, occasionally hard to parse.
- Uncommon fonts not installed by default — if the system substitutes a fallback, your spacing breaks.
- Text rendered as an image (common in design-tool exports) — zero readable text for an ATS.
- Multiple competing fonts — one or two max (e.g., one for headings, one for body).
- Heavy use of color, all-caps blocks, or letter-spacing tricks to "stand out" — they cost readability for no parsing benefit.
What matters far more than the font
A safe font on a broken layout still fails. The things that actually determine whether you get parsed are structural:
- A single-column layout (not two columns).
- Standard section headings and real, selectable text.
- No tables, text boxes, or graphics holding your content.
Get those right and your font is a rounding error. For the full set of rules, see the ATS-friendly resume format guide.
The easy way to be sure
If you want a clean, correctly-structured resume without fiddling with font menus, upload your current one to ResumeToATS — it rebuilds your content into a single-column, text-based document with safe, standard formatting and gives you PDF, Word, and Markdown versions.
Bottom line
Use Calibri (or Arial/Georgia/Cambria), set body text to 10–12 pt, and stop worrying about fonts. Spend that energy on the layout — that's what actually decides whether an ATS can read you.