Margins are the frame around your resume — invisible when right, loud when wrong. Recruiters won't praise good margins, but they notice a wall of edge-to-edge text or a page that's mostly white space.
In short: set margins to 1 inch (2.54 cm) on all sides by default. You can go down to 0.5 inch when you need the space — anything below that looks crammed on screen and risks clipping when printed. If your content doesn't fit at half-inch margins, the problem is the content, not the frame: cut bullets, don't shrink the page.
The numbers
| Setting | Value | When |
|---|---|---|
| Default margins | 1" all sides | Most resumes, most industries |
| Compact margins | 0.75" | Slightly dense one-pagers |
| Minimum margins | 0.5" | Experienced candidates fighting for one page |
| Font size | 10.5–12 pt body, 13–15 pt headers | Below 10 pt reads as cramming |
| Line spacing | 1.0–1.15 | Single spacing with breathing room |
Margins, font size, and spacing are one system — shrinking all three at once is how resumes end up unreadable. Adjust margins first (1" → 0.75" → 0.5"), then spacing, and touch font size last.
What actually goes wrong with tiny margins
- Print clipping. Some printers can't print closer than ~0.4" to the edge; a 0.3" margin means lost characters on paper — and interviews still print resumes.
- Screen fatigue. Recruiters skim dozens of resumes in a sitting; a dense block with no white space gets skimmed harder and remembered less.
- The signal. Sub-half-inch margins say "I couldn't make choices about what matters." The edit you avoided is visible.
ATS parsing, for the record, doesn't care about your margins — extraction works on text, not white space. Margins are for the humans who read it after the ATS passes it along.
The honest fix when nothing fits
If you're at 0.5" margins, 10.5 pt font, and still overflowing: your resume needs an editor, not a smaller frame. Cut the oldest role's bullets to one line, drop the objective statement, trim skills to what the target job names — the skills guide shows the modern compact format, and the bullet rewriter tightens verbose bullets to single lines. Our resume builder handles margins and spacing automatically so the layout question disappears entirely.
FAQ
Should margins be equal on all sides? Keep left/right equal always. Top can be slightly smaller (0.7–1") to fit your header; asymmetric side margins look like an accident.
Do margins differ for a two-page resume? No — same 1" default. If you're on two pages because of wide margins, tighten to 0.75" and see if you're really a one-pager.
Google Docs or Word defaults okay? Both default to 1" — fine as-is. In Word: Layout → Margins. In Docs: File → Page setup.