How to use the resume and cover letter word counter
Resumes and cover letters are judged on length long before anyone weighs the content. A cover letter that runs past a page rarely gets read to the end, and a resume summary that sprawls pushes your achievements below the fold. Paste a section here to see its word count, character counts and how it sits against the length you are aiming for.
The target defaults to 400 words, a common working figure for a one-page cover letter, and it is editable because the right number depends on the role. Senior technical applications often justify more; a short outreach note needs far less. Treat the target as your own budget rather than a rule imported from somewhere else.
Applicant tracking systems read plain text, so the structure that survives parsing is simple: short paragraphs and clean bullet lines. The bullet line count here tallies lines beginning with a hyphen, asterisk or bullet character, which gives a quick sense of whether a section is a readable list or a wall of prose.
Characters are counted by grapheme, with spaces and without, since some application forms cap the raw character count of a field. Everything is processed in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most hiring guidance lands somewhere between 250 and 400 words, which fits comfortably on one page. The target box is editable so you can match a specific posting rather than a generic figure.
Applicant tracking systems parse plain text best, and recruiters skim bullets rather than paragraphs. The count is a quick check that each role in your resume is a tight list instead of a dense block.