Should You List Your Address on Resume? | Address Format for Resume

It’s not one of the most talked-about sections on your resume. In fact, you may not even need to include it at all! But if you’re wondering whether or not to include your address on a resume, we can guarantee you’re not alone.

That’s why we’ve put together this definitive guide to listing your address on your resume. We’ll cover whether you need it, how you should format it, and where it should go in the context of the rest of the document. That way, if you decide to include a contact address, you’ll know exactly how to do it!

On this page, we’ll cover the following points:

• Whether it’s necessary to include your address on your resume
• The pros and cons of including your address
• How to include your address on your resume
• Some great ways to format your address for your resume, with examples

Should You Put Your Address on Your Resume?

So is it actually necessary to put your address on your resume? Unfortunately, that question doesn’t come with a definitive answer.

In the past, it was normal to include a mailing address on your resume. That’s because other forms of contact, like telephone or email, were much less widely available. It can be easy to forget that the fast, efficient methods of contact we have today are fairly recent developments!

But now that employers can reach you at any time with a quick email, they don’t normally need to waste time with the postal service. This means that the primary reason why people used to include addresses on their resumes—for contact purposes—is now mostly obsolete.

Still, putting your address on your resume won’t hurt your application. If you decide to do it, it won’t leave you looking old-fashioned or behind the times! In fact, we’ll cover a few reasons why you might want to do it below.

Pros of Listing Your Address on Resume

Listing your address on your resume may not be strictly necessary, but it definitely has some advantages! Here are the pros of listing your address on your resume:

• It could boost your application—if you live close to your workplace, it may give your employer confidence that you’ll be able to turn up on time.
• If your employer requires background checks, including your address on your resume will give them an important piece of information for that process.
• Including your address may give your resume an advantage against ATS software—though this is unproven!

Cons of Listing Your Address on Resume

The advantages are all very well—but it’s important to consider why you may not want to include your address on your resume. To help you make your decision, here are the cons:

• Most employers won’t use a mailing address to contact you—they’ll email you or call you instead.
• An address takes up valuable space on a resume, which may mean you have to exclude other, more important information.
• If you live far away from the place where you want to work, it could put off a potential employer.
• If you live in a neighborhood with a bad reputation, hiring managers may apply unconscious bias and treat your application less favorably.

How to List Your Address on Your Resume

If you do include your address on your resume, you should treat it like any other piece of contact information. In most cases, that means it should be listed in your header, at the very top of your resume. Include it alongside your email address and contact phone number, for a cohesive overall look.

Depending on your resume format, you may have listed your contact information somewhere else. For example, if you’re using a two-column format, your contact details may appear in the narrower of your two columns. In that case, you can include your address there, too.

It’s more important to know where your address shouldn’t go than where it should! It shouldn’t be mixed in with any other sections on your resume, where it might look confusing and lead to misunderstandings. It shouldn’t appear at the very end of your resume, where it will look like you’ve tacked it on at the last minute. And it shouldn’t be separate from your other contact information—remember, that was the original reason for anyone to list their address on their resume at all.

The Best Address Format for Resume

When choosing the right format for your address, you need to consider two important things. The first is the layout of your resume, and how you want your address to fit into it. The second is your comfort with sharing your address. Remember, it’s always optional—but if you do want to include it, here are some formats you can choose from:

• A one-line address, in which you use commas instead of line breaks to distinguish between each part of your address
• A multi-line address, where you use line breaks and allow your address to take up multiple lines’ worth of space
• An abbreviated address, where you only include your city, state (or province), and zip code

If you’re including your address in a header that spans the width of the page, or as part of a single-column resume layout, use a one-line address format. That way, it won’t stretch out your header and take up too much room on the page.

If you’re including your address in a second column, use a multi-line address format. Because a second column format makes for narrower fields to input information, you can get away with taking up more vertical space—in fact, it looks better that way.

Finally, if you’re worried about including every detail of your address on your resume—for any reason!—you can use an abbreviated address. That way, you’ll still be able to give hiring managers a clear sense of where you are, without getting into the specifics.

How to List Your Address on Your Resume – Examples

Want to see how it’s done? Here are just a few ways you can list your address on your resume!

The One-Line Address

This is a great way to keep your address from taking up too much space on your resume. It contains all the necessary information, but it doesn’t pull focus away from the more important elements on the page!

The Multi-Line Address

This is a more traditional-looking way to write out your address. If your resume format has enough room for it, this is a universally-recognized way to include the information.

The Abbreviated Address

It might seem basic, but this may very well be all you need! Even better: it doesn’t take up too much space, and it doesn’t require you to share the specifics of your personal address before you’re ready.