CV Format in the UK

What UK law restricts, and who it restricts

The relevant duties sit on the employer. GOV.UK’s guidance for employers on preventing discrimination has a section headed "Questions you cannot ask when recruiting", and it is short: "You must not ask candidates about ‘protected characteristics’ or whether they: are married, single or in a civil partnership / have children or plan to have children." Health and disability are treated separately, and may be asked about only in narrow circumstances — where a necessary requirement of the job cannot be met with reasonable adjustments, where the employer is establishing whether someone needs help to take part in a test or interview, or where positive action is being used to recruit a disabled person.

Date of birth is the clearest case, and it is where the mechanism behind the whole convention becomes visible. The same guidance says an employer "can only ask for someone’s date of birth on an application form if they must be a certain age to do the job, for example selling alcohol." Where it is collected lawfully for monitoring purposes, the instruction is explicit about where it must not go: "You can ask someone their date of birth on a separate equality monitoring form. You should not let the person selecting or interviewing candidates see this form." Checked 2026-10-02.

Read that twice, because it explains the convention better than any advice about taste. UK recruitment is designed so that certain facts about you never reach the person making the shortlisting decision. Nothing in it makes it unlawful for you to put your date of birth on your own CV — you are not the one under the duty. What it does is hand the selector, in the one document they are guaranteed to read, a fact the process has gone to some trouble to keep away from them. That is why the omission is near-universal here and why some employers strip or return documents that include it: they are managing their own exposure, not enforcing a rule against you.

The personal-details block

Official UK careers guidance is unusually specific here, which makes this one of the few parts of a CV where there is a published answer rather than a consensus of opinion. The National Careers Service, the government’s own careers service for England, says: "You should include your name, phone number, email address and a link to your work network profile, if you have one". On what to leave out it is equally direct: "You should not include your age, your date of birth, whether you're married or your nationality." Checked 2026-10-02.

Two things are worth noticing about that page, because what it does not say is as useful as what it does. It makes no mention of a photograph at all, and it gives no page count. Both of those are therefore custom in this market rather than official recommendation, which is a different standing from the personal-details list above.

Order, length and the shape of the page

The conventional running order is contact details, a short profile, work experience, education, then skills. Education moves above experience while you are a recent graduate and moves back down once you have a couple of jobs worth reading about. Dates are month and year, most recent first, and the only real rule is to be consistent about the format once you have chosen one.

Two pages is the common expectation for most UK commercial and public-sector applications, and it is worth saying plainly that this is a widely held convention rather than an official instruction — the National Careers Service page above does not state a length at all. It is also not uniform across fields. Academic CVs run far longer by design, and clinical CVs are assembled against scored categories rather than trimmed to fit, so the two-page figure is simply the wrong target in both. Our guide on CV length sets out the expectation at each career stage and what justifies going past two pages, and this guide does not repeat it.

References: where our advice and the government’s differ

This guide used to tell you not to write "references available on request", on the grounds that it wastes a line. The National Careers Service recommends the opposite. Its page says: "However you should not put someone else's contact details on your CV. Instead, you can say that 'references are available on request'." Checked 2026-10-02. Rather than quietly drop our position or pretend the disagreement does not exist, here is what each side is actually about.

The part that is not a matter of opinion is the first half of that sentence. Publishing a referee’s name, employer, phone number and email on a document you send to strangers is a disclosure of somebody else’s personal data, usually without them having agreed to it, and the only thing it achieves is the chance that they are contacted before you know an application is serious. Do not do it. Ask them first, and send the details when they are asked for.

The second half — whether to write the line at all — is a style preference, and we are happy to say ours is the weaker claim of the two. A reader who needs references will ask for them, so the sentence tells them nothing they did not assume. It is also eight words, it is harmless, and the government’s careers service suggests it. If you like the closure of ending the document on a definite note, write it. Anyone who tells you it is a mistake is overstating a preference, and we were doing that ourselves until this guide was checked against the source.

Where UK practice varies by who is hiring

The biggest mistake an otherwise well-written UK CV makes is assuming it will be the thing that is assessed. In several large parts of the UK labour market it is not, and the shape of the application changes accordingly.

The Civil Service is the clearest example and publishes its framework. GOV.UK states: "The Civil Service recruits using Success Profiles. This means for each role we advertise, we consider what you will need to demonstrate in order to be successful." A Success Profile is made up of five named elements — "behaviours", "strengths", "ability", "experience" and "technical" — and which of them a given post is assessed against is set out in the advert. Checked 2026-10-02. The practical consequence is that a great deal of Civil Service recruitment is not shortlisted from a free-form CV at all: you write statements against the elements the advert names, and where a CV is requested it is a supporting document rather than the thing being scored. Writing a beautiful general-purpose two-pager and attaching it is not an application.

Clinical and medical recruitment has the same character for a different reason — it runs against a published person specification with essential and desirable criteria, so the CV is organised as an index to evidence someone else verifies. Our medical CV guide works through what that changes, including how carefully those specifications are worded.

Graduate schemes and professional services sit at the other end. Here the CV usually is the screen, and the screen is often partly mechanical: degree classification, sometimes UCAS points, sometimes a named qualification. We have no measurement of how many employers filter this way and will not invent one, but it is common enough that leaving a classification off is read as an answer rather than an omission.

Academic applications are a different document entirely, with its own conventions on length, publications and funding, and general UK CV advice is close to useless for them.

Qualifications

Give your degree classification — First, 2:1, 2:2 — in the sectors described above, and state it plainly rather than burying it. If it is not a classification a UK reader will recognise, give the award exactly as it was issued and leave the comparison to whoever is qualified to make it; a converted grade you were never awarded is a claim rather than a fact.

A-levels and GCSEs are worth including for the first few years of a career and can be dropped once you have substantial work experience behind you. Where you do include them, the grades carry more weight than the subjects for most employers outside the few fields with a specific subject requirement.

Professional qualifications belong near the top when they are a requirement or a filter for the role: ACCA, ACA, CIMA, CIPD, PRINCE2, chartered status and so on. Say where you actually are with it, including part-qualified status and what remains, because "studying towards" leaves the reader guessing at several different situations.

Right to work, and whose job it is

This is another duty on the employer rather than a requirement on your CV, and knowing that changes how to handle it. GOV.UK’s guidance to employers is one sentence: "You must check that a job applicant is allowed to work for you in the UK before you employ them." Checked 2026-10-02. The check belongs before employment begins, not at shortlisting, which is why the question always arrives eventually and why nothing you write is itself evidence of the answer.

Whether volunteering it early helps you is a different question, and we have no data on it. Stated as a position rather than a finding: one short factual line where your status is simple to express and currently true, nothing at all where it is complicated enough to need a paragraph, and never a phrasing you could not evidence if asked tomorrow. "Holds Skilled Worker visa, valid to March 2028" is a fact about a document. "Eligible to work in the UK" is a conclusion about law drawn by the person who benefits from it, and a careful reader treats it as one.

Language and tone

• Use British spellings: organisation, specialise, analyse, programme (for a scheme), licence (the noun).
• Write in the implied first person — no "I", and not the third person either.
• Understatement travels better than overstatement in most British workplaces. Specific facts do the persuading; adjectives do not.
• Avoid American conventions that do not exist here. "Sophomore", "GPA" and "major" mean nothing to most UK readers, and a reader who has to translate your CV is a reader doing your work for you.
• Spell out an acronym the first time unless it is genuinely universal in the field. NHS and HMRC are fine; your previous employer’s internal programme name is not.

What differs from the US and from continental Europe

• Length against the US: two pages is the norm here where one is the norm there, and a US-style single page from someone with fifteen years of experience reads as a cut-down rather than a focused document.
• Vocabulary: "resume" is rarely used in UK adverts, and the two words do not mean quite the same thing. Our CV-versus-resume guide covers the distinction.
• Grades: there is no GPA here. Degree classification does the same work and is the figure to give.
• Photographs against continental practice: much of Europe expects one and the UK does not. The reasons on both sides, and what to do when you cannot tell which market you are in, are set out in our guide on CV photos rather than summarised here.
• Personal characteristics: date of birth and nationality are conventional in several European markets and are left off here, for the reason given at the top of this guide.
• Standardisation: UK employers expect far less layout uniformity than a structured European application implies, and no particular format is required.