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How long should a CV be?
It causes more anxiety than it deserves. A CV should be as long as it needs to be to make your case, and not a line longer. Here is the right length for every stage of your career.
How long should a CV be? It is one of the most common questions I am asked, and it causes more anxiety than it deserves. The honest answer is that a CV should be as long as it needs to be to make your case, and not a line longer. For most people in the UK that means two pages, but the right length genuinely depends on where you are in your career.
What matters is relevance, not page count. A tight, well-edited CV always beats a padded one. Here is the right length for each stage, and how to get there.
How long should a CV be at each career stage
Graduates and early career
One page is ideal. With limited work history, two pages forces padding, and padding is obvious. Lead with education, projects and transferable skills, tightly.
Mid-career professionals
Two pages is the standard and the safe choice. Enough room to evidence achievements across several roles without drifting into irrelevance.
Senior and executive
Two to three pages. Larger scope and longer track records justify the space, but only if every line earns its place. Seniority is not a licence to ramble.
Why a shorter CV usually wins
Recruiters read at speed and read many CVs. A long CV is not impressive, it is tiring, and it buries your best material under detail nobody needs. The discipline of cutting is what makes a CV strong: it forces you to lead with what matters and drop what does not. If a recruiter has to dig for your achievements, they will simply move to the next candidate. So when you ask how long should a CV be, the honest answer is shorter than most people think.
Applicant tracking systems do not reward length either. They reward relevance and clear matching, which a focused CV delivers better than a sprawling one.
How long should a CV be, and how to get there
If you are over length, the answer is almost never a smaller font or narrower margins, both of which make a CV harder to read and to parse. The answer is editing.
- Cut or summarise roles older than about fifteen years into a brief earlier-career line.
- Remove early or irrelevant jobs that no longer support your direction.
- Replace long duty lists with a few sharp, quantified achievements.
- Delete filler: objective statements, references lines, hobbies that add nothing.
- Tighten every sentence. Most CVs can lose a fifth of their words with no loss of meaning.
Deciding what to keep is really about deciding what is relevant, which our guide to what to include in your CV covers in full. And once it is the right length, make sure the content is doing its job, as set out in our complete guide to writing a CV.
Is your CV the right length, or just long?
Send it over and a recruiter will tell you what to keep, what to cut, and what is quietly working against you. Honest feedback, no obligation.