How Long Should a CV Be?
3 min read·Updated 30 Oct 2025
Two pages. That is the answer for the overwhelming majority of applications, and the rest of this guide is mostly about how to get there when your experience does not obviously fit.
The reason is not a rule someone invented. It is that a reader gives a CV a first pass of a few seconds and a second pass of a couple of minutes. Beyond two pages, material is not being read — it is being skimmed past, and it dilutes the parts that would have been read.
Length by career stage
- Student or recent graduate: one page. You do not yet have two pages of relevant material, and padding is obvious.
- One to five years of experience: one to two pages. Two is fine if it is full of substance.
- Five to fifteen years: two pages. This is the standard professional CV.
- Senior and executive: two pages, occasionally three if you have significant board or programme experience that genuinely needs the space.
- Academic: as long as the record requires. Four to eight pages early-career, considerably longer later. The conventions are entirely different.
- Clinical and medical: four pages upwards. Training applications are scored against categories that all need to be present.
How to cut a CV that is too long
People almost always try to cut in the wrong place. The instinct is to shrink the font, reduce the margins and tighten the line spacing, which makes the document unpleasant to read while saving perhaps fifteen per cent. The material to cut is almost always older content given more space than it deserves.
- Collapse anything older than about ten years to a single line: job title, employer, dates.
- Remove any role that is not relevant and does not explain a gap.
- Cut every bullet point that describes a duty rather than an achievement. This usually removes a third of the text on its own.
- Delete the interests section unless something in it is genuinely relevant or genuinely interesting.
- Remove "references available on request", any personal details beyond city and contact details, and any skill you would not want to be tested on.
- Only then adjust spacing — and switch to a denser layout rather than shrinking the type.
The one-page question
One page is a strict requirement in some contexts — most US commercial roles, most consulting and investment banking applications, and many graduate schemes. Where it is required, it is genuinely required, and a two-page submission signals that you did not read the instructions.
Where it is not required, one page is not automatically better. A one-page CV from someone with twelve years of experience usually means the interesting detail has been cut.
Making a second page work
If you use two pages, use them properly. A second page with three lines on it looks like an accident. Either fill it to at least half, or cut back to one.
Put your name on the second page. Printed CVs get separated, and a page two with no identifying detail is a page two that gets thrown away.
Questions
Does an applicant tracking system care about length?
What if the application form asks for a specific length?
Put this into practice
The editor keeps your CV as structured content, so the section order and wording decisions in this guide are easy to apply and easy to change again.