Best Font for a Resume: What Parsers Actually Extract

The best font for a resume is any plain, common font that you set at 10 to 12 points and leave alone: Arial, Aptos, Calibri, Helvetica, Georgia, Garamond or Times New Roman all work. We tested that claim instead of repeating it. We exported the same resume in nine fonts and ran each PDF through three open-source text extractors. All nine produced the same text, accented names and ligatures included. What did break extraction had nothing to do with which font you pick: letter-spaced headings, icon fonts for your phone and email, and names in some non-Latin scripts. The details, and how to check your own file, are below.

The short answer

• Pick a common font that ships with both Windows and macOS, so a DOCX looks the same on the recruiter's screen. Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia and Verdana do. Calibri ships with Windows, and Aptos comes with Microsoft 365.
• Use 10 to 12 points for body text, a larger size for your name, and one font for the whole page.
• Do not letter-space your headings by more than about 0.08 em. In our test, 0.10 em broke "PROJECTS" apart in every font we tried, for example into "P ROJECTS" in Arial.
• Do not use icon fonts for the phone, email or LinkedIn symbols.
• Send a PDF unless the employer asks for a DOCX, then check it with the copy-and-paste test at the end of this post.

Comparison table: fonts, availability, best use

Availability is from Microsoft's Windows 11 font list and Apple's fonts included with macOS Tahoe, both checked on 18 October 2026. "Our test" is the extraction test described below.

Calibri and Cambria were not tested because they are not on our test machine. For Garamond we used EB Garamond, a free revival from Google Fonts, because Apple lists Garamond as a document-support font, available only to documents that already use it. Microsoft's own Word blog on resume fonts, updated 14 September 2026, recommends Calibri, Garamond, Montserrat, Candara, Cambria, Aptos and Arial, and says "Aptos is the default font in Microsoft Word and Microsoft 365."

What happens to a font inside an ATS

An applicant tracking system does not look at your font. It extracts the text from your file and stores that text in fields: name, email, employers, titles, dates, skills. Greenhouse, for example, tells candidates that "when recruiters search for these terms, they'll find exact matches in candidates' applications." The font only matters if it changes what comes out of the extraction step.

In a PDF, every font is embedded and paired with a map from each drawn shape back to a character. Poppler's pdffonts tool reports this per font: "emb" means the font is embedded and "uni" means there is an explicit ToUnicode map. Every PDF in our test showed "yes" in both columns. When that map exists, the extractor reads characters, not shapes, and the typeface is irrelevant.

Our extraction test: one resume, nine fonts

Method. On 18 October 2026 we wrote one sample resume (an invented person named Renée Šťastná-Nguyễn, with an invented phone and email) and typeset it in nine fonts with Typst 0.15.1 on a Mac: Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Georgia, Verdana, Aptos (downloaded from Microsoft's Aptos page), EB Garamond, Roboto and Lato. Each was exported twice, with standard ligatures on and off. We then extracted the text with three open-source tools: Poppler's pdftotext 26.04.0, pdfminer.six 20231228 and PyMuPDF 1.23.21. No ATS publishes its parser, so these stand in for the extraction step, not for any one vendor.

The test lines were chosen to catch the usual failures:

Renée Šťastná-Nguyễn Cut office workflow time 30% by fixing fifty financial filings in the official file. Built C++ and C# tools; shipped Node.js and .NET services with 99.9% uptime for R&D. Saved $1.2M; wrote the "Quarterly Review" and the team's café naïve-forecast guide.

Result for body text: no differences. All nine fonts, with ligatures on or off, gave the same extracted text in all three tools. The accented name, the "fi" and "ffi" words, "C++", "C#", ".NET", "$1.2M" and "99.9%" all came through intact.

The test does not prove that every ATS reads every PDF well. It shows that among common fonts, the choice of font is not what decides it. Files made in Word or Google Docs embed fonts their own way, so run the check at the end of this post on your own file.

Headings, letter spacing and ligatures

Letter spacing, also called tracking, is the one style choice that broke extraction, and it broke it the same way in every font.

We set eight common section headings in capitals (SUMMARY, EXPERIENCE, EDUCATION, PROJECTS, SKILLS, AWARDS, CERTIFICATIONS, LEADERSHIP) at ten spacing levels and counted how many of the eight came out as one word.

At 0.10 em in Arial, pdftotext returned "S UMMARY", "E XPERIENCE" and "CERTI FICATIO NS". At 0.12 em it returned "S U M M A RY". The break point did not move with font size either: we repeated the Arial run at 9, 12 and 14 points and 0.09 em held while 0.10 em broke. That fits how the extractors work. pdfminer.six's documentation says its default word_margin is 0.1: characters further apart than that, relative to character width, are treated as separate words.

A section heading that reads "E XPERIENCE" may not be recognised as your experience section, and the jobs under it may land in the wrong field.

Worked example in Word. Word sets letter spacing in points, not em, under Font, Advanced, Spacing: Expanded, by an amount you type. To convert, divide the points by the font size.

• 12 pt heading, expanded by 1 pt: 1 / 12 = 0.083 em. Under the break point.
• 11 pt heading, expanded by 1 pt: 1 / 11 = 0.091 em. Right at the edge.
• 10 pt heading, expanded by 1 pt: 1 / 10 = 0.10 em. Broke in our test.
• 12 pt heading, expanded by 1.5 pt: 1.5 / 12 = 0.125 em. Broke in our test.

The simplest rule: leave character spacing at Normal on headings, and use bold or a slightly larger size for emphasis instead.

Ligatures were not a problem. Ligatures join letter pairs such as "fi" into one shape. Five of the nine fonts (Aptos, EB Garamond, Helvetica, Lato and Roboto) drew ligature glyphs in our files, and all three extractors still returned "fi" and "ffi" as separate letters, because the PDF mapped each ligature back to its characters. Turning ligatures off is a harmless precaution, not a requirement.

Size and margins

Harvard's Mignone Center for Career Success also says to "stick to a common, easy to read font, and avoid text boxes, color, and shading". Microsoft's blog suggests no more than two fonts on one resume. One is simpler.

Fonts at the same point size are not the same physical size. In the font files we tested, the height of a lowercase x is 0.545 of the point size in Verdana, 0.519 in Arial, 0.476 in Aptos, 0.447 in Times New Roman and 0.40 in EB Garamond. So Verdana at 10 pt reads much larger than Garamond at 10 pt, and if a page is a few lines too long, a more compact font can bring it back to one page without cutting content. Our guide to the one page resume covers the other cuts.

Names with accents and non-Latin characters

If your name has accents or comes from a non-Latin script, this is the section that matters most.

Accented Latin letters are safe in every font we tested. We checked each font file on our test machine for é, Š, ť, ễ (Vietnamese), Ł, ó, ź, Ø, İ, ş, ğ, ă, ș, ț, ő and ű, plus Cyrillic and Greek letters. All nine fonts had every one. Microsoft's page for Aptos says it supports Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, and Vietnamese.

Non-Latin scripts depend on a fallback font. None of the nine fonts contains Chinese characters or Devanagari. When we added a line with 林嘉怡 and प्रिया, Typst drew them with a fallback font (Arial Unicode MS). The Chinese name extracted correctly in all three tools. The Devanagari name extracted correctly in pdftotext but came out garbled in pdfminer.six and PyMuPDF, with letters repeated or control characters inserted.

Old character sets drop letters. Some older systems store text in Latin-1, a character set that covers Western European accents only. When we asked pdftotext for Latin-1 output, "Renée Šťastná-Nguyễn" became "Renée Sastná-Nguyn": é and á survived, Š became a plain S, and ť and ễ vanished. "Łódź" became "Lód", "İstanbul" became "stanbul", and the Chinese and Devanagari names disappeared. This is not something a font can fix.

What to do:

1. Write your name in the Latin alphabet as the main name, the way it appears on your passport or visa documents.
2. Add the native-script form after it only if it helps the reader, and accept that some systems will not keep it.
3. Type your name in the application form fields exactly as on your resume, so the record the employer stores matches the file you uploaded.

International students applying in the US can find more on formats in our guide to CV vs resume.

Fonts to avoid

Icon fonts. Many templates draw the phone, email and LinkedIn symbols with an icon font. We tested Font Awesome's phone and envelope icons. Every extractor returned them as private-use characters (the phone icon came out as code point U+F095), which show up as blank boxes or nothing at all. Your number survived next to it, but the symbol became junk text at the start of your contact line. Write "Phone", "Email" and the plain URL instead, or just the values.

Decorative and script fonts. Microsoft's blog says Comic Sans and "over-stylized" fonts can look unprofessional. They also make a recruiter work harder to read the page.

A font the reader does not have, in a DOCX. A PDF carries its fonts with it. A Word file names a font and relies on the reader's computer. Microsoft's page on cloud fonts in Office says those fonts are hosted by Microsoft 365, that a device needs to be online to get them, and recommends embedding fonts when you share files with people on older Office versions. If you must send a DOCX, use a font from the table that ships with both Windows and macOS.

Letter-spaced capitals over about 0.08 em. Covered above. This is the only one of the four that broke words in our test.

Is Times New Roman or Calibri okay?

Both are fine. Times New Roman ships with Windows 11 and macOS and extracted cleanly in our test. It also has a recent official endorsement: in December 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered US diplomatic correspondence to return to Times New Roman from Calibri, which the department had adopted in 2023, according to the Associated Press.

Calibri still ships with Windows 11. It is no longer Office's default: Microsoft says type designer Steve Matteson designed Aptos "as a new default Office font to replace Calibri". If you write in a current Word for Microsoft 365 and do nothing, your resume will be in Aptos.

Check your own file in one minute

1. Open your PDF, select all the text, copy it and paste it into a plain text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit in plain text mode.
2. Read the headings. Each should be one word, not "E XPERIENCE".
3. Read your contact line. There should be no boxes or stray symbols before the phone and email.
4. Read your name. Every accent should be there.
5. Check the order. If two columns interleave into one jumbled line, switch to a single-column layout. Our guide to the ATS friendly resume format covers layout.

If you are comfortable with a terminal, pdftotext resume.pdf - prints exactly what Poppler extracts.

ApplyEze, the product this blog belongs to, writes a resume for every posting, as PDF and DOCX, and reads each one back with a parser check before upload.