How long should a resume be?

How long should a resume be for your situation?

Find your row. Each length is what the linked source says, and the sources mostly agree: one page until your experience fills two, two A4 pages as the usual cap in the UK and EU, and no fixed limit only for academic CVs.

A job posting that sets a length beats every row here. Europass tells applicants to check the vacancy notice, which can set the length and format of the CV.

What the research says about one page vs two

The famous six seconds comes from TheLadders. Its 2012 eye-tracking study found recruiters spent about six seconds on a resume before deciding. Its 2018 rerun measured 7.4 seconds for the first screen.

The 2018 study is also the best evidence on page two. An engaged recruiter spent as much time on a second page as on the first, but how long they stayed was strongly predicted by how compelling page one was, and later pages tended not to perform as strongly. Its advice on length: don't cram as much as you can onto the page.

ResumeGo, a resume-writing service, ran a hiring simulation with 482 recruiters, hiring managers, HR staff and executives. Each one-page resume had a two-page counterpart for a similar candidate. Two-page resumes were picked 2.3 times as often, scored 8.6 out of 10 against 7.1, and got 4 minutes 5 seconds of reading against 2 minutes 24 seconds.

Read that with its limits: it was a simulation, the company sells resume writing, and the page gives no year. Its one-page resumes ran 350 to 500 words and the two-page ones 700 to 850. So the lesson isn't to pad. It's that a second page full of relevant experience didn't count against anyone in the test.

Is a two-page resume OK?

Yes, once your experience fills it. MIT accepts two pages at 10+ years or an advanced degree, Harvard at a PhD or years into your career, and two A4 pages is the normal CV in the UK and across Europass. If you're a student or a new grad, both MIT and Harvard say one.

Two pages only works if page one does the selling. TheLadders found the time a recruiter gives page two depends on how strong page one is, so your most recent, most relevant results go on page one, and the older jobs go last.

And make page two a real page. Three lines that spilled over look like a formatting accident. Either cut them back onto page one or add enough relevant detail to earn the page.

What to cut when your resume is over a page

Cut words before you shrink anything. OPM's advice for fitting a federal resume into two pages works for any resume: put your most relevant and recent experience first, write short, results-focused lines, and remove outdated or unrelated experience. Prospects adds a rule for older detail: if it's from ten years ago, summarise it.

A cut order that works:

• Duty lines. “Responsible for…” describes the job, not what you did in it. Rewrite each as a result or delete it.
• Old jobs. Anything from more than about ten years ago gets one line: title, employer, dates.
• Anything unrelated to this job. If it doesn't help this application, it goes. This is the main cut for a career change.
• High school, once you have a degree. Europass says to include it only if it's relevant.
• “References available upon request.” Prospects says most employers assume it, so leave it out if you need the space.
• A summary made of adjectives. Two lines of “hard-working team player” prove nothing your bullets don't.

Font size and margins: how small is too small?

Squeezing the type is how a resume gets to one page and becomes hard to read. The career offices below put the floor for body text at 10 or 11 point.

If your resume only fits below 10pt or inside half-inch margins, it doesn't fit. Go back to the cut list: one deleted duty line buys more room than a smaller font, and it keeps the page easy to skim.

Does an ATS care how long your resume is?

An ATS reads every page. We ran a two-page PDF through pdf.js, pdftotext and our own checker, and all three returned the text from both pages, down to the education section at the bottom of page two.

The catch on a two-page resume is the header and footer, not the length. In the same tests, every reader returned the page header twice, and pdf.js put “Page 1 of 2” in the middle of the text, between two jobs. Keep your name and contact details in the body of page one, and skip page numbers if you can.

The upload limits we collected from ATS vendors' own documentation are about file type and file size, not page count. Length is a question for the person who reads the resume. The one place software enforces a page limit is USAJOBS, which won't take a resume longer than two pages.

The two-page limit on US federal resumes

OPM's Merit Hiring Plan of 29 May 2025 ended the long-form federal resume. Since 27 September 2025, resumes for Title 5 jobs, competitive and excepted service, must be two pages or less, and USAJOBS won't let you upload or build a longer one, including resumes already stored in your profile.

The penalty is hard: if the only resume you send is longer than two pages, OPM tells agencies you're ineligible for further consideration. Agencies outside Title 5, and the judicial and legislative branches, can accept a longer resume, and medical or research jobs can ask for a CV, but only when the job announcement says how.

What still has to fit in the two pages: for each job, your title and employer, start and end dates as month and year, and the hours you worked per week. OPM's hints for making it fit are the same cuts as above: put relevant and recent experience first, and remove outdated or unrelated experience.

When a few lines spill onto page two

That's the most annoying length problem: a whole page two for three lines. In the ATSPrep Studio, the Review page shows a Fit to 1 page button on desktop when your resume has one page break and page two is less than 40% full.

It tightens spacing and margins first, then the body text by 1pt at most, as one change that Undo puts back. If it can't get you to one page at a readable size, the button says so and nothing changes. The same check runs when you download: a last page under 40% full gets pulled back, and the download card offers Undo.

If your resume is a full page over, no button fixes that. The Review flags a resume that's close to or over one page, and once you have 10 or more years of work it tells you two pages is fine and to put your best recent results on page one.

Common questions