A4 or US Letter: which paper size should your CV use?

Use US Letter for the US and Canada, A4 almost everywhere else, and check the print dialog matches before you save.

Most CVs are never printed, but they are still laid out on a page, and the page has a size. Pick the one your reader uses, so the document looks right when they open it, print it or attach it to a file.

The two sizes

The differences are small: Letter is about 6 mm wider, and A4 is about 18 mm taller. That is enough to move a line or two of text from one page to the next.

Who uses which

• US Letter: the United States and Canada, plus Mexico, the Philippines and a few other countries in the Americas.
• A4: the UK, Ireland, all of continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand, India, most of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and much of South America.

Canada is officially metric, but Letter is the everyday office paper size, so Canadian résumés normally use Letter.

A simple rule: if the job is in the US or Canada, use Letter; otherwise use A4. Follow the location of the job, not where you live. If you apply to both, keep two exports.

What happens if you send the wrong size

Usually nothing dramatic, but small things go wrong:

• Opened on screen: most readers will not notice. PDF viewers fit the page to the window. A careful reader may notice the slightly odd proportions or margins.
• Printed on the other size: printers either scale the page to fit or print at 100% and clip.
• An A4 CV printed on Letter is usually shrunk to around 94% so the extra height fits. The text gets slightly smaller and the side margins get wider. If the printer does not scale, the bottom line or footer can be cut off.
• A Letter CV printed on A4 gains a band of empty space at the bottom of each page. If your side margins are very narrow, the edges may be clipped because Letter is slightly wider.
• Page breaks: if your CV was designed to fill exactly two A4 pages, switching to Letter can push the last few lines onto a third page. Always check the page count after changing size.
• Applicant tracking systems: parsers read text, not page dimensions, so paper size makes no difference to whether your CV is parsed. It only affects how it looks to a person.

Watch out: The most common accident is not choosing the wrong size in your CV editor but in the print dialog. If the CV is set to A4 and the print dialog is set to Letter (the default on many US computers), the browser may rescale it. CV Once sets the page size in the page itself, and most browsers pick that up, but check the dialog anyway and make them match.

Setting the paper size correctly

1. Choose the size in your CV. In CV Once, starting with ?new=us gives a US Letter résumé, while ?new=uk and ?new=eu start on A4. You can change the paper size later in the CV settings without retyping anything.
2. Match it in the print dialog when saving as PDF. In Chrome and Edge it is under “More settings” then “Paper size”. In Firefox it is in the main print panel under “Paper size” (you may need “More settings”). In Safari on a Mac, look for “Paper Size” in the print dialog.
3. Keep scale at 100% (or “Default”). “Fit to page” can shrink the text to make it fit the wrong size, which hides the problem instead of fixing it.
4. Check the preview page count before you save.
5. Check the saved PDF: most viewers show the page size in document properties. A4 shows as 210 × 297 mm or 8.27 × 11.69 in; Letter as 8.5 × 11 in.

Step-by-step instructions for each browser are in how to save your CV as a PDF.

Margins that work on both

If you need a single file that survives being printed on either size (for example, a CV handed to a multinational with offices on both sides of the Atlantic), use these settings:

• Side margins of at least 15 mm (about 0.6 in), so Letter’s extra width and A4’s narrower width both leave breathing room.
• Bottom margin of at least 20 mm, so an A4 page scaled onto Letter does not clip.
• Do not place anything important in the very last lines of a page.

This is a compromise. For individual applications it is still better to export the size the reader uses.

Word processors and templates

If you previously wrote your CV in a word processor, check the document’s page setup. Templates downloaded from the internet are often in Letter even when the rest of the file uses British spelling, because many template sites are US-based. If your CV has an odd gap at the bottom of every page when printed in the UK, this is usually why.

Quick reference

Next: save your CV as a PDF and CV vs résumé.