Cover letter format questions have a comforting property: unlike the writing itself, they have mostly settled answers. Where the greeting goes, how wide the margins run, which font to use, what file type to send — these are conventions, and following them costs nothing while breaking them costs a small tax of reader friction on every line. This guide lays out the standard format for 2026, element by element, with the reasoning behind each convention and honest notes on which rules are firm and which are merely safe defaults.
One framing point up front: format is the floor, not the ceiling. A perfectly formatted letter with generic content still loses to a slightly scruffy letter with real evidence. Get the format right in ten minutes using this guide, then spend your remaining time on the content — which is the subject of our full guide on how to write a cover letter.
The standard format, visualized: every element labeled
Here is the complete skeleton of a formatted letter, top to bottom:
JORDAN AVELAR
Denver, CO · (555) 014-2287 · jordan.avelar@email.com · linkedin.com/in/javelar
July 20, 2026
Marisol Tan
Head of Customer Operations
Beaconview Software
Dear Ms. Tan,
[Paragraph 1 — hook: who you are, the role, why this company. 2–3 sentences.]
[Paragraph 2 — proof: one story with stakes, actions, and outcome. 4–6 sentences.]
[Paragraph 3 — fit: their problem, your match, one researched specific. 3–4 sentences.]
[Paragraph 4 — close: value in one line, thanks, availability. 2 sentences.]
Sincerely,
Jordan Avelar
Nine elements, in fixed order: contact header, date, recipient block, greeting, four body paragraphs, sign-off, typed name. Everything below is detail on getting each one right.
A note on the recipient block: it's a holdover from postal correspondence, and in 2026 it's optional. Including it looks traditional and tidy; omitting it (going straight from date to greeting) looks modern and loses you nothing. For email-body letters, drop it always.
Header and contact block: matching your resume's design
Your letter's header should be visually identical to your resume's header — same name treatment, same font, same contact line. When the two documents sit side by side in a review screen, matched headers read as one coherent application; mismatched ones read as documents assembled from different eras of your job search.
Contents of the contact line: city and state, phone, email, and LinkedIn or portfolio if they're on your resume. No full street address — nobody mails you anything, and the line space is better spent. No photo, no date of birth, none of the biographical extras still floating around in older international conventions unless you're applying in a market that expects them.
The simplest way to guarantee the match is to build both documents in the same tool with a shared header. If you're assembling them separately, copy the resume header into the letter document and resist the urge to restyle it.
Greeting, body, and sign-off conventions in 2026
Greeting. "Dear [Name]," remains the standard and offends no one. Use the hiring manager's name when you can find it; "Dear Hiring Manager," or "Dear [Team] Team," when you can't. The full decision tree — including honorifics, ambiguous names, and agency applications — is in our guide on how to address a cover letter. Avoid "To Whom It May Concern" (fossilized) and "Hey there" (overcorrected).
Body. Four paragraphs, no headings, no bullet points as a default. A short bulleted list (three items, one line each) is defensible when you're matching specific posted requirements, but bullets are resume grammar — a letter's value is precisely that it's prose. No indentation on paragraphs; use the blank line between them as the separator. Left-align everything; justified text creates uneven word spacing that's harder to read.
Sign-off. "Sincerely," is the reliable default. "Best regards," and "Kind regards," are equally safe. "Respectfully," fits government and military-adjacent contexts. Skip "Cheers," "Warmly," and "Yours faithfully" — the first two are too casual for a first contact, the last too Victorian. Below the sign-off, your typed full name. A scanned signature image is unnecessary and can render badly; typed is standard now.
Fonts, margins, and spacing that mirror your resume
The numbers that work:
- Font: the same font as your resume. If choosing fresh: Calibri, Source Sans Pro, Georgia, or Garamond all read cleanly on screen and in print. Nothing script, nothing condensed.
- Size: 10.5–12pt body. If you're at 10pt to make it fit, the problem is length, not type size — see our guide to how long a cover letter should be for what to cut.
- Margins: 1 inch all around; 0.75 inch is acceptable. Below that, the page looks crowded before anyone reads a word.
- Spacing: single-spaced lines, one blank line between paragraphs and between structural elements (after the date, after the greeting, before the sign-off).
- Length on the page: aim for the letter to occupy half to two-thirds of the page. Generous white space signals confidence and editing; a wall of text to the bottom margin signals neither.
- Alignment: left-aligned throughout, including the date. Centered headers are fine if your resume's header is centered — the matching rule wins.
None of these numbers is magic. Their combined effect is a page that a tired reader can enter without resistance, which is the entire goal of formatting.
Email body vs attachment vs form field: three formats compared
The same letter takes three different shapes depending on the submission channel:
Attachment (PDF). The full formal format described above — header, date, greeting, sign-off. This is the version for "attach cover letter" upload fields and for applications where documents get printed or forwarded. Send PDF, not DOCX, unless the posting requests otherwise: PDF freezes your layout on every device. The same logic applies to resumes, and the tradeoffs are covered in our PDF or Word guide.
Email body. When your application is an email, the letter becomes the message. Drop the contact header, date, and recipient block — the email's metadata carries them. Open with the greeting, run your four paragraphs (tightened; on-screen reading is less patient), sign off, and put your phone and LinkedIn under your name. The subject line joins the format: "Application: Senior Payroll Specialist — Jordan Avelar" or, when you have a referral, lead with it.
Form field. Application text boxes strip all formatting. No greeting or sign-off unless the box is explicitly labeled "cover letter" and accepts length; for "why do you want to work here?" boxes, write one dense 80–150 word paragraph merging your hook and proof. Draft in a text editor and paste — some forms time out and eat unsaved work — and check how line breaks survived the paste before submitting.
File naming and PDF export done right
Recruiters download files into folders full of documents named "coverletter_final_v2 (1).pdf." Name yours so it identifies you after it leaves your computer:
Jordan-Avelar-Cover-Letter-Beaconview.pdf
Name, document type, company. Hyphens or underscores, no spaces if you want to be maximally safe with older systems, and no version numbers — "v3_FINAL" tells the reader about your process in a way you didn't intend.
On export: generate the PDF directly from your editor's export function rather than printing to PDF through an intermediate step, confirm the text is selectable (open the PDF and try to highlight a sentence — if you can't, it exported as an image and can't be parsed or searched), and open it once on a phone. A surprising number of letters get their first read on a phone screen, and that render is worth the thirty-second check.
Before sending, run the last-mile checklist: recipient name spelled correctly, company name correct in every mention (the pasted-from-last-application company name is the classic fatal error), file named properly, and the letter attached — the "please find attached" email with nothing attached remains a daily occurrence in every recruiter's inbox.
Frequently asked questions
Does a cover letter need my full mailing address?
No. City and state (or city and country for international applications) is the modern standard — it establishes location for logistics without pasting your street address into every applicant database. The full-address block at the top of both sender and recipient is a postal-era convention that survives only as decoration.
Should the cover letter be in the same file as my resume?
Keep them separate unless the application instructions say otherwise. Most application systems have distinct upload slots, and recruiters expect to open each document independently. If a system offers only one upload, put the resume first and the letter after it in a single PDF — the resume is the document more readers prioritize.
Is one long paragraph acceptable if the content is good?
Break it up. Paragraph breaks are processing cues, and a single block forces the reader to hold your whole argument in one visual bite. The four-paragraph convention isn't arbitrary — hook, proof, fit, and close are separable thoughts, and formatting them separately lets a skimmer navigate to the one they care about.
Do letter formatting rules differ by country?
Meaningfully, yes. The advice here fits the US and Canadian markets and travels reasonably well to the UK and Australia. Germany, France, Japan, and several other markets retain more formal conventions — stricter salutations, sometimes photos or handwritten elements in specific contexts. For international applications, check one or two local sources before defaulting to this format.
Format once, reuse everywhere
Set the skeleton up correctly one time and every future letter inherits it. Workplacea keeps your letter and resume visually matched automatically, and its free resume checker will confirm the resume half of your application renders and parses as cleanly as the letter you just formatted.