How to Format a Cover Letter
Content decides whether a cover letter works. Format decides whether it gets read properly, and a badly laid out letter creates a small drag on everything underneath it.
The conventions are not complicated, and once you have a template that follows them you never have to think about it again.
The Overall Shape
A cover letter is one page, and in practice should fill between half and three quarters of it. Four paragraphs is the standard structure, occasionally five.
White space is your friend. A single dense block of text spanning the whole page will be skimmed rather than read, and skimming is where your best sentence gets missed.
Set margins between 2cm and 2.5cm on all sides. Left align the body text and do not justify it, because justification creates uneven word spacing that looks amateurish in a short document.
Font and Size
Use the same font as your CV. The two documents arrive together and should look like a set.
Stick to something ordinary and readable: Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Georgia, Garamond. Size 10.5 to 12 for the body, depending on the font. Nothing decorative, nothing at 9pt to squeeze more in, and no more than one font in the whole document.
Line spacing of 1.15 or 1.5 gives the page room to breathe. Single spacing across a full page of text is hard work to read on screen.
The Header
Put your name and contact details at the top, formatted the same way as the top of your CV. Name, phone number, email, and your town and county.
Below that, on the left, the date. Then the recipient’s name, job title, company name and address if you have it.
For a letter sent as an email attachment, the full postal address of the company is optional and increasingly omitted. Nobody is posting this. What matters is the name of the person and the organisation.
If you are writing the letter directly into the body of an email rather than attaching it, drop the header block entirely. Your details go at the bottom under your sign off, and the email itself supplies the date and the recipient.
The Greeting
Address a named person wherever you possibly can. “Dear Mrs Okonkwo” is worth the ten minutes it takes to find out who is hiring.
If you genuinely cannot find a name, “Dear Hiring Manager” is the safest fallback. “To Whom It May Concern” reads as dated and impersonal, and “Dear Sir or Madam” is fading for the same reason.
Get the courtesy title right or avoid it. Using the person’s full name, as in “Dear Alex Bennett”, sidesteps the problem entirely and is perfectly acceptable. Our guide on how to address a cover letter covers the awkward cases in detail.
The Subject or Reference Line
Directly under the greeting, or above it, state which job you are applying for and any reference number from the advert.
This is not decoration. Larger employers run several vacancies at once and a letter that does not name the role creates work for the person sorting applications. Bold it so it is unmissable.
Paragraphs and Spacing
Leave a blank line between paragraphs and do not indent the first line. Indentation is a print convention that looks odd in a document read on screen.
Keep paragraphs short. Three to five lines each. If one runs longer than six lines, it is almost certainly making two points and should be split.
You can use a small bulleted list for two or three specific pieces of evidence, and it often improves readability. Do not turn the whole letter into bullets, because at that point you have written a second CV.
The Sign Off
The rule is straightforward. If you opened with a named person, close with “Yours sincerely”. If you opened with “Dear Hiring Manager” or similar, close with “Yours faithfully”.
Leave space for a signature if the letter will be printed, then type your full name underneath. For an emailed PDF, an image of your signature is optional and adds nothing functional, so do not worry if you do not have one.
“Kind regards” is acceptable in an emailed letter and increasingly common. It is slightly less formal, which suits some sectors and not others. Our guide on how to end a cover letter covers the final paragraph as well as the sign off.
Saving and Sending
Send as a PDF unless told otherwise, and name the file properly: your name, the words cover letter, and ideally the role. Something like Jane-Smith-Cover-Letter-Operations-Manager.pdf.
If the application is by email, write a brief covering message in the email body as well rather than sending a blank email with two attachments. Three lines is enough: what you are applying for, that the CV and letter are attached, and thank you.
The Final Look
Print it, or at least view it at full page size on screen. You are checking that it looks like a letter: balanced on the page, not crammed at the top, not spilling onto a second page by two lines.
If it does spill, cut a sentence rather than shrinking the font or the margins. A letter that has clearly been squeezed to fit is more obvious than a letter that is simply shorter.
