The Best Free Fonts for Résumés and CVs
A résumé font has one job: to disappear while making you look organised. Recruiters spend seconds on the first pass; the typography's task is to make those seconds effortless. Here are free fonts that do exactly that, the settings that matter as much as the font, and the choices that quietly work against you.
What a résumé font must survive
Your CV will be read on a laptop screen, skimmed on a phone, possibly printed on an office laser printer, and parsed by applicant-tracking software (ATS) before any human sees it. That implies four requirements: excellent screen rendering at 10–11pt, clean printing in plain black, a proper weight range so hierarchy comes from the type rather than from underlines and boxes, and standard character encoding — any normal, professionally made font passes ATS parsing; the real ATS risk is layout gimmicks (tables, text in images, columns that scramble reading order), not the typeface.
The safe-but-not-boring picks
All free for commercial use and available at Google Fonts unless noted.
1. Source Sans 3 — the professional default
Adobe's first open-source family, a humanist sans with open apertures that stays crisp at small sizes. It reads as competent and modern without a trace of trend-chasing. If you want one font for the entire document, this is the pick. Get it here.
2. Inter — the contemporary choice
Designed for user interfaces, which is precisely why it works: large x-height, unambiguous characters, superb rendering. Slightly more "tech" in flavour — a natural fit for developers, product managers, and data roles. Use the Display cut or add a touch of negative tracking for your name at the top. Get it here.
3. Lato — the warm professional
A humanist sans with slightly rounded details that read as approachable rather than casual. Good for client-facing, teaching, healthcare, and management roles where "friendly and organised" is the message. Get it here.
4. Source Serif 4 — the credible serif
If your field expects gravitas — law, academia, editorial, finance — a serif still signals it fastest. Source Serif is sturdier on screen than the classic book faces and pairs perfectly with Source Sans if you want a two-font structure. Get it here.
5. EB Garamond — the humanities classic
For cover letters, academic CVs, and fields where literary polish is a feature, a true Garamond revival brings five centuries of book tradition to your side. Set it a point larger than you would a sans — its small x-height makes it run small. Get it here.
6. IBM Plex Sans — the structured one
Slightly more angular and engineered than Lato or Source Sans; the whole Plex superfamily (Sans, Serif, Mono) shares proportions, which is handy if your CV includes code samples or you want a matching portfolio site. Get it here.
Settings matter more than the font
An excellent font at bad settings loses to a decent font at good ones. The numbers that consistently work:
- Body size: 10–11.5pt (never below 10 to cram more in — cut content instead).
- Line spacing: 1.15–1.3. Single spacing suffocates; 1.5 wastes the page. See our spacing guide for why.
- Hierarchy through weight, not decoration: name in bold at 18–22pt, section headings in bold or semibold at 12–13pt, everything else regular. No underlines, no ALL-CAPS paragraphs, one accent colour at most.
- Margins: 1.8–2.5cm. Recruiters notice cramped margins the way you notice a crowded elevator.
- One family, two weights is the robust default; a serif/sans pair (headings/body) is the maximum. Anything more reads as decoration.
- Export to PDF, always, with fonts embedded (any modern export does this) — otherwise the recruiter's machine substitutes whatever it has, and your careful layout reflows.
What to avoid, and why
- Times New Roman at default settings — not wrong, just invisible: it says "I didn't make a decision". If you want a serif, the picks above give the same credibility with more care.
- Arial/Calibri defaults — same reasoning; they're the absence of a choice.
- Comic Sans, Papyrus, brush scripts — you know this, but their cousins sneak in: any font with visible "personality" at body size steals attention from your experience.
- Condensed or thin weights for body text — they photograph badly on screens and vanish on cheap printers.
- "Free" fonts of unknown licence — a CV is commercial use of a sort; more practically, amateur fonts have bad spacing and missing glyphs. Stick to properly licensed sources — see our licensing guide.
The two-minute test
When you've picked and set your font, do this: zoom the PDF to 50% and squint. You should still see a clear visual hierarchy — name, sections, entries — as blocks of different weight. Then print it in black and white and hand it to someone for eight seconds. If they can tell you your job title, most recent employer, and one skill, the typography is doing its job. That's the whole game: not to impress, but to never once get in the way.