How Long Should a Resume Be? (2026)

One page by default; two pages once your relevant experience genuinely fills more than one.

UC Berkeley’s career centre recommends “a simple, one-page format” for college students and says a resume can be longer, but “shouldn’t be unless you have extensive experience related to your job objective”. (UC Berkeley Career Engagement)

One published study points the other way. In a hiring simulation run by ResumeGo, a resume-writing company, 482 recruiters, hiring managers, HR professionals and executives screened resumes between 15 October and 2 November (the study was published in January 2019). Of the 7,712 resumes they picked, 5,375 were two pages long. But the two-page resumes also held more: 700 to 850 words against 350 to 500, and the company calls the study “only a simulation”. (ResumeGo) Read it as “more relevant content can help”, not “add a page”.

For the one-page case in detail, with what to cut, see one-page resume vs two pages.

One page up to about 10 years of experience, one to two pages after that, and two pages at most for late-career and US federal applications.

These are rules of thumb, not employer requirements. Where an employer or a job portal does set a limit, as US federal agencies now do, follow it.

One page, unless your college placement cell sets a different limit or format.

A campus placement office may fix the format. IIT Kanpur’s Students’ Placement Office, for example, has students upload “one/two page resumes” to its portal, checks every point against proof before the resume goes to companies, and asks for a table of educational qualifications with 10th and 12th marks and CPI, in reverse chronological order. (IIT Kanpur Students’ Placement Office) If your placement cell has rules like these, they override any general advice.

For off-campus applications, the student rule above applies: one page, with education, internships and projects first. See resume for freshers and campus placement resume.

For an academic CV. Not for US federal jobs, which since 27 September 2025 accept two pages at most.

An academic CV lists publications, papers, grants and teaching, so it has no fixed length: “A CV can be as long as it takes to state one’s qualifications, publications, papers presented, etc.” (UC Berkeley Career Engagement) UK advice is similar: two A4 pages for most CVs, “for academic CVs slightly longer”. (Prospects.ac.uk)

Federal resumes no longer can. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s guidance says the Merit Hiring Plan of 29 May 2025 “prohibits the current longform Federal resume structure”. From 27 September 2025 USAJOBS restricts all resumes to two pages for competitive and excepted service jobs under Title 5, and an applicant whose only resume is longer than two pages “is ineligible for further consideration”. Agencies outside Title 5, and the judicial and legislative branches, can accept a longer resume only if the job announcement says how. For positions that need a CV, typically in medical and research fields, an agency may ask for it as an “other document”. (U.S. Office of Personnel Management)

About the last 10 to 15 years; summarise or drop older jobs unless they matter for this role.

AARP’s advice is to focus on the job responsibilities you have had in the past 15 years and, for jobs from more than 15 years ago, to describe only the skills most relevant to the job and consider removing the dates. (AARP) A job search coach quoted in another AARP article recommends showing the last 10 years, because “there’s rarely a position that’s going to post and ask for more than 10 years of experience”. (AARP)

Early in a career the question does not arise: freshers and graduates can list every internship and project that shows relevant skills.

Two to five per job, with the most on your most recent and most relevant roles.

The University of Iowa Career Center suggests 2 to 5 bullet points per experience, each starting with an action verb and using numbers where you can. (University of Iowa Career Center) The UK National Careers Service puts it as “what you did, usually 2 to 3 lines” per job. (National Careers Service (UK government))

Our suggestion on top: spend bullets where the reader will look. A job from 12 years ago rarely needs more than one or two, and a job unrelated to the role may need none.

In our 7 templates, a full first page held 261 to 296 words of a sample resume.

We counted the words in PDFs exported from each template with three fictional resumes from our template parse study. The senior engineering manager’s resume runs onto a second page in every template, so its first page is full: only its last section, Certifications (10 words), moved to page 2. The one-page mid-career sample, the file you can download from each template page, used 129 to 160 words, and its last line sat 65% to 71% of the way down the page.

What it means: if your resume is much over 296 words, expect a second page in our templates. Our graduate’s one-page sample used 111 to 141 words and ended 61% to 67% of the way down the page, so a fresher resume of that size has room to spare. Counts differ between templates mainly because they print different labels and separators, and Catalyst has no summary section.

Method. A word is any whitespace-separated token with a letter or digit in it, so separators such as “|” are not counted. “Last line” is the lowest line of text, as a share of the page height from the top. The counts depend on the content: headings, dates and short skill lines hold fewer words than long bullets. The script is scripts/research/template-page-words.py and the raw numbers are in data/research/template-page-words-2026-10.json. We did not test any employer’s applicant tracking system.

Cut old and unrelated content first; shrink the layout last.

1. Drop or summarise jobs from more than 10 to 15 years ago that do not matter for this role.
2. Keep two to five bullets per job, and merge bullets that say the same thing.
3. List the skills the job description asks for, not every tool you have touched.
4. Remove “References available on request” and personal details the employer does not need.
5. Only then adjust the layout, within the University of Iowa’s ranges: 10 to 12 point font and margins between 0.5 and 1 inch. (University of Iowa Career Center)