Set resume margins between 0.5 and 1 inch on all sides, line spacing at 1.0 to 1.15, and leave visible space between roles. Recruiters scan in vertical sweeps; white space is what makes the sweep land on your titles and numbers. A page crammed edge-to-edge reads as noise and gets skimmed, not read.
One-inch margins are the traditional default, and half an inch is the practical floor. Between those, choose based on content volume: a mid-career resume fighting for one page can drop to 0.6 inches without looking cramped, while a lighter early-career page should stay closer to a full inch so the content does not float in emptiness.
Below half an inch, three things go wrong. Printers clip content, because many cannot print to the edge. The page visibly signals that you could not prioritize — a recruiter recognizes crammed margins instantly, and the message is the opposite of the one you intended. And PDF viewers on laptops render your lines uncomfortably long, which slows the exact people you are trying to make fast.
Body text sits best at 1.0 to 1.15 line spacing; 1.5 wastes a third of your page. The spacing that actually buys scannability is between blocks, not lines: 6 to 10 points after each role, a touch more before section headings, and enough separation that each job reads as its own visual unit. A recruiter deciding where to look next uses those gaps as navigation.
Be consistent to the point of pedantry. If one role has 8 points of space after it and another has 14 because you nudged something at midnight, the page looks subtly broken even to readers who cannot say why. Set spacing in styles or your builder's controls once, and never hand-adjust with empty lines — stray blank paragraphs are also where PDF-to-text parsing produces phantom line breaks.
The instinct under page pressure is to shrink margins, drop font size, and tighten spacing until everything fits. Resist all three. The resume is not a container for your history; it is an argument about relevance, and white space is how the argument breathes. Cutting a weak bullet always beats compressing ten mediocre ones.
A useful test: hold the page at arm's length, or zoom to 50 percent. You should still see clear bands — name, sections, roles — with air between them. If it looks like a uniform gray block, a recruiter's eye has nowhere to land, and your strongest line is buried at the same visual weight as your weakest.
Yes — half an inch is the accepted floor and common for one-page resumes with real content pressure. Going below it risks printer clipping and signals cramming. If 0.5 inches still is not enough, cut content instead.
Between 1.0 and 1.15 for body text, with 6–10 points of extra space after each role and before headings. Block spacing, not line spacing, is what makes the page scannable.
Yes, mechanically: recruiters scan in seconds, and gaps between sections are what let their eyes land on titles, employers, and numbers. A page with no white space gets skimmed shallowly, so strong content in a dense layout underperforms.
The free scorer flags density and layout problems that make resumes hard to scan — run yours through before your next application.
