Formatting a cover letter is a pass-or-fail hygiene check, not the thing that gets you hired. Here are the margins and fonts, plus the one delivery decision that actually changes whether it gets read.
Format a cover letter as a single page in block layout: one-inch margins, a standard 11 to 12 point font that matches your résumé, single spacing, and a blank line between paragraphs. Save it as a PDF with a clear filename. The bigger decision is delivery, because pasting into an email or an application box strips your styling.
You have written the actual words of your cover letter, and now you are an hour deep in the margins. Calibri or Georgia? Eleven point or twelve? Do you need the full formal block with your address and the date, like a letter to a bank? The document keeps growing a second page and you keep nudging the spacing to pull it back.
I have spent that hour. It is almost entirely wasted. Cover letter formatting is real, but it is a hygiene check you pass and move on from, not the thing that decides anything.
The takeaways
A standard cover letter is a single page in block format: every line left-aligned, no indents, with a blank line between paragraphs instead. The safe defaults are one-inch margins on all four sides, single line spacing, and a professional font at 11 or 12 points (Calibri, Arial, Georgia, and Times New Roman all read cleanly). This is the same advice on every guide because it is genuinely settled, and there is no bonus for deviating from it.
The block format runs top to bottom: your contact header, an optional date and employer address for a formal application, the salutation, three or four short body paragraphs, a sign-off, and your name. If you want the letter to look like the cover letters someone actually reads, the layout should be invisible: nothing on the page should make the reader work to find the first sentence.
No. A flawless layout gets you over a bar, and every other applicant clears the same bar. Formatting signals one thing, that you can follow a convention without being told, and that signal is binary: present or absent. Once it is present, more formatting effort adds nothing. I have seen beautifully typeset letters that said nothing and got binned in seconds.
This is the honest limit that the margin-and-font guides skip: no amount of spacing polish rescues a letter that could have been sent to any other company. The formatting is the easy 20 percent because there is a right answer you can copy. The hard 80 percent is whether the letter answers something this specific posting raised, which is a content problem, not a layout one. So spend five minutes on format, then put the hour into the length and what to cut.
Identical at the top. A recruiter opens both documents in the same glance, and a cover letter whose header uses a different font, a different name style, or a different phone format than the résumé reads as two things stapled together. Copy the header block from your résumé into the letter verbatim: same name, same contact line, same typeface.
Carry the pairing into the filename too. Jordan-Rivera-CoverLetter.pdf sitting
next to Jordan-Rivera-Resume.pdf tells the reader you assembled one application on
purpose. A file called Cover Letter FINAL v3.docx, or worse one that still carries
a previous employer's name, does the opposite. This matters because an applicant
tracking system (ATS) and a human both see the filename before they see a word of
your writing, so it is the first formatting choice either one reads.
Most of it disappears. When you paste your letter into an email body or a plain-text box inside an online application, the font, the spacing, and any styling get stripped down to raw text. The careful one-inch margins never make it out of your Word document. This is the formatting fork the checklists ignore, and it is the one that changes what you do.
So before you tune the typography, find out how the letter is actually sent. If it uploads as an attachment, a PDF preserves your layout exactly, which is why a PDF is the safe default unless the posting asks for Word. If it goes in a text box or an email, assume zero formatting survives: drop the formal header, keep paragraphs short so they do not become a wall on a phone screen, and make the first line strong enough to stand with nothing above it. The mechanics of starting a cover letter matter twice as much when there is no header to soften the landing.
Use a plain one, and skip anything with a sidebar, columns, color blocks, or icons. Those decorative templates cause the same trouble on a cover letter that they cause on a résumé: a text box or a two-column layout can scramble when an ATS parses it, or collapse into nonsense when the letter is pasted as plain text. The visual flair you paid for or downloaded is exactly what breaks in the systems your letter passes through.
A template earns its place only as a skeleton, a header and paragraph spacing you do not have to rebuild each time. The moment it dictates content, with pre-written lines you fill in, it produces the generic letter a recruiter has read two hundred times. A tool can carry the structure; the words still have to be yours. This is also the honest limit of any AI draft, including the letter JobScalr writes: it is a draft you review and adapt, and I built it to draft around the specific posting rather than hand you a template to fill, because the fill-in-the-blank version is the problem, not the fix.
A standard, readable font at 11 or 12 points: Calibri, Arial, Georgia, Times New Roman, or Helvetica. The single best move is to match the font on your résumé so the two documents look like one set. Do not drop below 10.5 points to squeeze the letter onto one page; cut a sentence instead.
Yes. One page, three or four short paragraphs, is the expectation across almost every industry and country. If it runs long, the fix is content, not shrinking the font or the margins. A second page is read as not knowing what to leave out.
Send a PDF unless the posting specifically asks for Word, because a PDF preserves your layout on any device and cannot be accidentally edited. Some older ATS instructions still request .docx, so follow the posting when it names a format. Name the file with your full name and the word "CoverLetter".
Follow the instructions in the posting first. When there are none and you are emailing directly, a short version in the body with the full letter attached as a PDF covers both readers. Remember that the body text loses all formatting, so keep those paragraphs especially short.
Only for a formal, attached letter, and even then it is optional in most markets now. If the letter is going into a text box or an email, drop the formal heading entirely and open with your first line. The convention exists for a printed page, and almost no cover letter is printed anymore.
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