UK CV format: what to include in 2026

What format should a CV be in the UK

The standard UK CV is reverse chronological: your most recent job comes first, and each role goes back in time from there. Recruiters read it top to bottom in a few seconds, looking for your current title, your last employer and whether your experience matches the advert. Put the things they look for where they look first.

A UK CV is a document about your work, not about you as a person. It has no photo, no date of birth and no personal details beyond how to contact you. That is the main difference from CVs in much of Europe, and the most common mistake people make when they move to the UK.

Two other formats exist. A skills-based (functional) CV groups your experience by skill rather than by job; it can help after a career change or a long gap, but many recruiters find it harder to read, because they cannot see what you did where. A hybrid CV opens with a short list of skills and then gives your work history in date order. If in doubt, use reverse chronological.

Length and layout

Keep it to 2 sides of A4. A graduate CV often fits on 1 page; senior executive roles and academic posts can run longer, but for most jobs 2 pages is the limit UK recruiters expect. If you are over, cut older roles to one line each before you cut anything recent.

Use one column, a plain font such as Arial or Calibri at 10 to 12 points, clear headings and enough white space to scan. Dates go on the right or directly after the job title, in the same format every time: the month as a word, the year in full, and "present" for your current job.

Save it as a Word document or as a PDF made from a text document, not from a scan or an image. Name the file after yourself, for example "Priya-Shah-CV.pdf", so a recruiter can find it again.

What not to put on a CV in the UK

Leave these out. UK employers do not expect them, and several of them relate to characteristics protected by law.

• A photo. Not expected outside acting and modelling.
• Your date of birth or age. Age is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 (GOV.UK (opens in a new tab)). Employers must not discriminate when they recruit, so there is no reason to give it.
• Marital status, children, religion, nationality. Being married or in a civil partnership, religion or belief, race and nationality are also protected characteristics (GOV.UK (opens in a new tab)). The government's guidance explains who the Act protects and how (GOV.UK (opens in a new tab)).
• Health or disability. Employers must not ask about health or disability during the application or interview stages, apart from a few exceptions such as adjustments for the interview (Acas (opens in a new tab)). You decide whether and when to mention it.
• Salary history, references and the reasons you left. These come later, if at all. "References available on request" is no longer needed: employers assume it.
• Your full postal address. Your town or city is enough.

One thing worth adding if you are moving from abroad: a line that says whether you have the right to work in the UK. Employers must check it before you start, and the process differs for British and Irish citizens and everyone else (GOV.UK (opens in a new tab)). A clear line such as "Right to work in the UK: settled status" saves a recruiter the question.

Sections in order

1. Name and contact details. Phone, email, town, and a LinkedIn profile or portfolio link if it adds something.
2. Personal profile. 3 or 4 lines on what you do, your level and what you are looking for. Write it for this job, not for every job.
3. Work experience. Job title, employer, place and dates, then 3 to 6 bullet points per role. Start each bullet with a verb and end with a result: "Cut invoice processing time from five days to two" beats "Responsible for invoices".
4. Education. Degree, institution and year; A levels or equivalent only if you are early in your career.
5. Skills. Tools, languages and certifications, named the way the adverts name them.

Hobbies and interests are optional. Include them only when they say something relevant about you, such as volunteering in the field you are applying to.

The skills section matters more than it looks, because recruiters and their software search for the words in the advert. Here is what live UK job ads look like, counted from the ads CVtly reads every hour:

Use these as a check, not as a list to copy. Only name a skill you can talk about in an interview with an example.

An example UK CV

Here is the shape of a UK CV with every section in its usual place, short enough for one page. The person and the employers are invented. Keep the order and the kind of detail, and replace every line with your own facts.

Priya Shah
Manchester · email address · mobile number · LinkedIn profile
Right to work in the UK: settled status

Profile
Marketing manager with six years in business-to-business software. I plan and run campaigns across email, paid search and events, and report results to the sales team every week. Looking for a senior marketing role in a growing software company in the North West.

Work experience
Marketing Manager, Northbridge Software, Manchester · Month Year to present

• Cut the cost per lead by a third by moving budget from display adverts to paid search.
• Launched a webinar series that now brings in one in four new sales leads.
• Manage two marketing executives and an agency budget agreed every quarter.

Marketing Executive, Calder Events, Leeds · Month Year to Month Year

• Ran the trade show calendar, from booking stands to following up every lead within two days.
• Wrote the monthly customer newsletter and grew its mailing list by half in eighteen months.

Education
BA (Hons) Business and Marketing, University of Leeds · Year

Skills
HubSpot, Google Ads, Salesforce reports, copywriting, event planning · French (B2)

Notice what is missing: no photo, no date of birth, no full address and no list of referees. The current role and its results sit in the top half of the page, where a recruiter looks first.

Writing for an applicant tracking system

Many UK employers, large ones especially, sort applications in an applicant tracking system (ATS), software that extracts the text of your CV and stores it as fields. A recruiter then searches those fields. If the software cannot read part of your CV, that part does not exist for the recruiter.

Three habits keep your CV readable:

• Put everything in the body of the document. Text in page headers, footers, text boxes and tables is often skipped.
• Use standard section headings such as "Work experience", "Education" and "Skills", so the software knows where each part starts.
• Use the exact words of the advert where they are true for you. If the ad says "stakeholder management", write that, not a synonym.

You can see what a system reads from your file with the free CV check: it shows the extracted text, the parts it may skip and the skills UK adverts ask for that your CV does not name.

Europass and the UK

Europass is the European Union's CV builder. It is free to use, and you can create a CV and download it (Europass (European Union) (opens in a new tab)). Nothing stops you from sending a Europass CV to a UK employer.

It is rarely the best choice, though. The Europass layout includes fields that a UK CV leaves out, such as a photo and date of birth, and its long, form-like structure is less familiar to UK recruiters than the plain reverse chronological CV. If you have a Europass CV, use it as a source: copy the content into a UK layout, remove the personal fields and shorten it to 2 pages.

The same applies to a CV written for France, Germany or Switzerland. Translate the content, change the format, and read it once more as a UK recruiter would: does the first half of page 1 say what you do and why you fit this job?