Resume Writing · 6 min read
The Best Fonts for a Resume in 2026 (and Which to Avoid)
Comic Sans is the easy joke. The real font mistakes are subtler — and they're costing people interviews. Here's what to use, what to avoid, and why.
Pick a modern, widely-available sans-serif or transitional serif. Set the body at 10.5–11 pt. Use one font for the whole document (or at most a different one for the name in the header). Done.
Best fonts for the body
Sans-serif (modern, default for tech, marketing, ops)
- Inter — designed for screens, ships with most modern OSes and Google Fonts.
- Source Sans Pro / Source Sans 3 — Adobe's open-source workhorse.
- IBM Plex Sans — reads as confident, not corporate.
- Lato — friendly, widely installed.
- Helvetica / Arial — boring but bulletproof.
Serif (good for legal, finance, academia, executive)
- Source Serif Pro / Source Serif 4 — clean, modern serif.
- Charter — designed for low-resolution screens; reads extremely well.
- IBM Plex Serif
- Georgia — installed everywhere, designed for screens.
Don't
- ❌ Times New Roman — reads dated.
- ❌ Calibri — was great in 2007.
- ❌ Comic Sans, Papyrus, Brush Script — obvious.
- ❌ Garamond — beautiful in print, breaks down at small screen sizes.
- ❌ Custom display fonts — the recruiter's ATS doesn't have them.
For your name in the header
- Inter Black / 800 at 22–28pt
- Playfair Display 700 at 22–26pt (only with a serif body)
- Space Grotesk 700 at 22–26pt (only with a sans body)
Sizes & weights
- Body: 10.5–11 pt
- Section headings: 11.5–13 pt
- Your name: 22–28 pt
- Line height: 1.25–1.4
- Bullet character: • (U+2022)
TL;DR
- Modern sans-serif (Inter, Source Sans, IBM Plex) or transitional serif.
- 10.5–11 pt body, 22–28 pt name.
- One font for the whole document. Two max.
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