How Long Should a Cover Letter Be? A Practical Answer

A cover letter should be 250 to 400 words. That is three or four short paragraphs, sitting comfortably on one page with white space left over. Past 400 words you are carrying background nobody asked for. Under about 150 words you rarely say enough to be worth reading.

The short answer, by format

The number moves with where the letter lands.

Inside a standard letter, budget 40 to 60 words for the opening, 120 to 220 for the middle where the evidence lives, and 40 to 60 for the close. If the opening is eating 120 words, the problem is the opening, not the length. Our guide to cover letter opening lines covers that paragraph in detail.

Why the one-page convention exists

No standards body set this rule. It hardened because it suits both sides.

For the reader, the letter is a supporting document. The resume carries the record: dates, titles, tools, scope. The letter says why that record is aimed at this job. A small job done in two pages reads as a misjudgement of what was asked, and hiring managers read these in batches, often on a phone between other work.

For the writer, the limit does the work. Choosing your two strongest examples is the task. A letter running to a page and a half is usually one where that choice was never made, so everything went in as insurance.

A letter is rarely too long because of its size. It is long because it has not decided what it is about.

What to cut first when you are over

Work down this list and stop when you are inside a page.

1. The autobiography opening. "Ever since I began my career I have been passionate about..." Forty words that tell the reader nothing usable.
2. The career narrative. Degree, first job, second job, in order. A prose version of the resume they already have open.
3. Praise that fits any company. "An innovative industry leader committed to excellence" survives a find-and-replace of the company name, which is why it earns nothing.
4. Adjectives about yourself with no evidence. Attach the example that proves "detail-oriented" or delete the word.
5. Explaining the job to the person who wrote the posting.
6. The second example of the same strength. Keep the one with the better outcome.
7. What you hope to learn. Worth saying in the interview, where it is a conversation rather than a claim.
8. Throat-clearing at the close. Forty words of gratitude compress to fifteen with no loss of warmth.

Sentence-level swaps get you a surprising distance on their own:

• "I would like to take this opportunity to express my strong interest in the Customer Success Manager position advertised on your careers page" (22 words) becomes "I'm applying for the Customer Success Manager role" (8).
• "Thank you very much for taking the time to review my application, and I look forward to the possibility of speaking with you further" (24) becomes "Thanks for reading. I'd welcome the chance to talk it through" (11).

Two swaps, 27 words saved, and the letter got more specific rather than less. That is the pattern: cutting usually raises quality, because what goes first is the material carrying no information.

A letter cut in half

Nothing in this first version is wrong. It is simply twice the size it needs to be.

The first letter is 291 words. The second is 170. What came out:

• The career-history paragraph, which retold the resume attached to the same email.
• The duty list. Duties describe the job, not the person doing it. Two outcomes replaced it.
• The company praise, replaced by one clause tying the applicant's segment to the posting's.
• The self-description. "Highly motivated, detail-oriented" left; a retention figure arrived.
• The growth paragraph and half the closing.

The shorter version says more. It names two results the original never mentioned and volunteers a missing tool honestly. Use your own true figures: numbers you cannot stand behind in an interview are worse than no numbers at all. Several of the habits stripped out here appear again in our guide to common cover letter mistakes.

Where the one-page rule genuinely changes

Academic and research applications

A faculty or postdoctoral cover letter is a different genre with the same name. It often carries the research narrative, the teaching approach and the fit with the department, and search committees expect to read all of it. One and a half to two pages is normal for teaching-focused posts, and research-intensive posts run longer. The advertisement usually says what it wants, sometimes down to the sections, so follow it exactly. Administrative roles at a university follow the ordinary rules, not the academic ones.

Government and public sector

Public sector hiring is usually driven by an announcement listing the required documents and the specific experience being screened for. Submit exactly what is listed and no more: an unrequested letter is rarely a bonus and sometimes is not read at all. If a letter is accepted, keep it to a page and use the announcement's own terminology for the experience it names, because that wording is the standard your application is measured against. Public sector resumes are often long by design, with hours per week and detailed duties, but that length belongs to the resume.

Creative, agency and portfolio roles

When a portfolio does the persuading, the letter's job shrinks. A distinctive note of 150 to 250 words pointing at two pieces of work and saying why they are relevant beats a page of prose. These postings also tend to ask something specific, such as "tell us about something you made that you are still proud of." Answer that question, at roughly the length implied, rather than sending a standard letter that ignores it.

Anywhere a limit is stated

If the form says 200 words or 1,500 characters, that is the length. Coming in comfortably under the limit with something tight is fine. Getting under it by stripping spaces is the kind of thing that gets noticed.

Email body versus attachment

These are two documents, and treating them as one is the most common length mistake we see. Applying through a form or an applicant tracking system, the letter is an attached PDF at 250 to 400 words. Emailing a named person, the letter is the email, because nobody wants to open an attachment to find out whether they care. If you do both, the email must not be a copy of the attachment.

That is 83 words doing the same work, because an email inherits its context from the subject line and from the fact that a human chose to open it. Keep it short even when only a generic careers address is given. The structure underneath both versions is the one we walk through in how to write a cover letter.

A length check before you send

• It fits on one page at 11pt with one-inch margins, without shrinking anything.
• No paragraph runs longer than six lines on a laptop screen.
• Nothing in it appears near-verbatim as a resume bullet.
• Every claim about you has a specific example beside it.
• You can read it aloud in under two minutes.
• Deleting any remaining sentence would lose information the reader needs.
• The closing is under 25 words.

One extra pass matters when you are cutting rather than writing: check that the terms the posting leans on are still there afterwards. It is easy to delete the one sentence carrying the phrase the screening was built around. SwiftCover flags which of a posting's keywords are missing from a draft, which turns that into a few seconds of checking rather than a guess. Writing to length is easier than trimming to it, and a draft built against the posting from the start tends to land near 300 words on its own.

Common questions