How long should a cover letter be?
Updated:
In short
One A4 page, and about 290 English words of it. Switzerland prescribes the parts of the letter but not its length: the federal jobseeker guidance requires a sender address, a recipient address, a date, a subject line, a salutation, a closing and a signature. Measured on A4 with 2.5 cm margins at 11 pt and 1.15 line spacing, those mandatory parts take 42.5 percent of the text column. Twenty-four lines are left for the argument.
That is a smaller budget than the advice most English-language guides give. The common figure is 350 to 400 words, which comes from a letter format with a much lighter head: a return address block and a date, no separate recipient block, no bold subject line. Add the Swiss furniture back and 400 words no longer fit on one page.
Twenty-four lines divide neatly into four paragraphs of about six lines, roughly 72 English words or four sentences each. If your draft is longer, the fix is not a smaller font — it is one fewer claim.
Free text after the formal letter parts required by arbeit.swiss. A4, 2.5 cm margins, Arial, 1.15 line spacing, four body paragraphs. Word lengths measured on the English-language prose of the live adverts on SwissJobs.app, August 2026.
- The rule you are looking for does not exist in writing. arbeit.swiss, run by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, lists the formal elements of the letter and says nothing at all about its length. On the same page it does give a number for the CV: it «should be no longer than three pages». The omission is the answer — length is settled by the format, not by a rule.
- Half the page is spoken for. In the lean version — four sender lines, three recipient lines, no enclosures line — the head and foot take 42.5 percent of the text column and leave 24 lines. Add a phone number, a named contact and an enclosures line and it is 47.6 percent, 21 lines, about 247 English words.
- Point size is the only lever with real leverage. At 10 pt the same page carries 375 English words, at 11 pt 289, at 12 pt 226. Half a point matters too: 10.5 pt gives you 325, 11.5 pt drops you to 245. Below 10 pt the gain stops being worth it on a letter somebody may print.
- Line spacing costs more than it looks. Single spacing fits 351 words, 1.15 fits 289, 1.3 fits 238 and 1.5 fits just 163. One-and-a-half spacing is an academic convention, not a business-letter one, and it is the usual reason a letter suddenly runs to two pages without gaining a sentence.
- Write it in the language of the advert, and the budget changes. Of the live adverts on SwissJobs.app whose language we can identify, 56.1 percent are in German, 27.2 percent in English, 13.1 percent in French and 2.2 percent in Italian. The same page holds 289 English words but only 228 German ones — if you switch languages, re-measure rather than re-translate.
The Swiss letter carries more furniture than the American one
A Swiss motivation letter is a business letter, and the federal jobseeker guidance is specific about what a business letter contains: your postal address, the company postal address, the date, a subject heading, an opening salutation, a closing greeting and a signature. None of those parts makes an argument. Together they occupy a large, fixed share of the sheet.
We measured that share on the template SwissJobs.app uses for its own letter export: A4, 2.5 cm margins on all four sides, body text at 11 pt, 1.15 line spacing. That gives a text column 160 mm wide and 247 mm tall — 453.5 by 700.1 typographic points. One line of text is 14.55 pt tall, so a completely full page would hold about 48 lines.
The head takes four of them for the sender block, a blank line, three for the recipient block, another blank line, then place and date, the bold subject line and the salutation. The foot takes the closing and the signature. Between those blocks sit the standard spacings that make a letter look like a letter rather than a memo. The total is 298 points, or 42.5 percent of the column.
This is where the American one-page rule and the Swiss one-page rule diverge. A US-style letter usually has no separate recipient address block and no subject line, so the same page leaves noticeably more room. Somebody applying in Switzerland with a letter that worked in London or Chicago will find it running over, and the overflow is not their prose — it is the format.
What twenty-four lines actually buys
Twenty-four lines at roughly 12.6 English words per line is 289 words. Split across the four paragraphs that are conventional here, that is about six lines and 72 words each, or four sentences of business prose. It is a tight brief, and it is worth treating as the brief rather than as a limit you occasionally exceed.
Four sentences hold one idea properly: a claim, the evidence for it, and what it means for the employer. Paragraph one names the role and why you are reading the advert. Paragraph two takes a stated requirement and puts one entry from your CV next to it. Paragraph three does the same with a second requirement. Paragraph four gives your availability, your workload preference and the request for an interview.
What has no room in that budget: a summary of your CV, praise for the company, a list of adjectives with nothing behind them, a paragraph about your personality. Each of those consumes one of the four slots, and all four are already spoken for.
Cutting to fit is easier than it sounds because most drafts contain one paragraph that repeats the CV. Delete it first. The recruiter has the CV attached; what they do not have is your reading of which two requirements matter and why you meet them.
The advert rarely gives you 400 words of material
A cover letter answers an advert, so the useful question is how much the advert asks. Across the live adverts on SwissJobs.app, 27.2 percent state no language requirement at all, 52.7 percent state exactly one, and 20.1 percent state two or more. 90.5 percent state an employment type, and 91 percent of those are full-time — a fact you can acknowledge in half a sentence.
The job title carries most of the remaining information, and it is short. The median advert title runs to five words and 40 characters; a quarter manage with three words. There is not a great deal in a typical Swiss advert that a letter can respond to specifically, which is precisely why a long letter reads as padding.
This also explains a common failure. Applicants who cannot find enough in the advert to fill a page start filling it with themselves instead: enthusiasm, values, a narrative about why they chose the profession. That material is not checkable, and an experienced reader discounts it. Two verifiable matches beat six paragraphs of motivation.
The reverse case is real too. Some adverts — senior roles, regulated industries, bilingual positions — do list eight or ten requirements. You still get 24 lines. Pick the two that the applicant pool is most likely to fail on, answer those, and let the CV carry the rest.
The subject line is the one part whose length you do not control
The subject line is required, and it normally carries the job title exactly as the advert states it. We measured every live advert title in our index: the median is five words and 40 characters, but 18.3 percent run past 60 characters and the longest tenth need nine words or more.
Put an English opener such as «Application for the position of» in front of that title, set the line in bold at 11 pt, and it will not fit on a single line for 25.5 percent of adverts. When it wraps, you lose one of your 24 lines — about 13 words, or a whole sentence of argument.
The answer is not to truncate the title. The subject line is how an HR inbox matches your application to the right vacancy, and a shortened title risks a misfile to save a line. The answer is to budget for it: with a long title, plan on 23 lines instead of 24 from the start.
A shorter opener helps more than you would expect. German gets the most compact subject line of the four languages, and only 11.0 percent of titles overflow it; French overflows for 19.4 percent and Italian for 27.1 percent. In English, dropping «the position of» is usually enough to bring the line back.
Typeface and spacing: what each choice costs
Point size first, because it moves the most. Going from 11 pt to 10 pt adds four lines and 86 English words. Going from 11 pt to 12 pt removes three lines and 63 words. A single point is roughly a fifth of everything you have to say, which is why arguing about it is not pedantry.
Line spacing next. Single spacing gives 29 lines and 351 words; 1.15 gives 24 lines and 289; 1.3 gives 20 lines and 238; 1.5 gives 15 lines and 163. Most word processors default to something between 1.08 and 1.15, and most people who end up on two pages changed it without noticing.
Paragraph count is a quieter cost. Each extra paragraph spends twelve points of spacing plus, on average, one part-empty final line. Three paragraphs fit 305 English words, four fit 289, five fit 264 and six fit 242. Splitting a paragraph in two to make the page look airier costs you about twenty words.
Typeface matters least of the four but is not free. At 11 pt, Times New Roman carries 316 English words, Arial 289, Georgia 291 and Verdana only 225 — Verdana is built wide and gives away a fifth of the page. Arial Narrow carries 352 and looks exactly like what it is, which is the argument against it.
Nobody official will give you a number
If you want an authoritative length, there is not one. The arbeit.swiss application-tips page calls the letter your personal calling card, sets out the formal elements it must contain and stops there. The careers-guidance page at berufsberatung.ch lists it as part of the classic application dossier alongside the CV, work references and diplomas, and is equally silent.
The silence stands out because the same official page does give a page limit for the CV, and repeats it in every language version. The English version reads that the CV «should be no longer than three pages». Where the letter is discussed, there is no equivalent sentence.
The likely reason is that the format already decides it. A business letter with a full head and foot is a one-page document, because a second page would carry body text with no letterhead above it and would visibly be too much. The rule is implicit in the form, and the form is the part that is written down.
So treat one page as a hard ceiling and 24 lines as the working target. Coming in at 20 lines is not a shortfall; a letter that leaves white space at the bottom has never cost anyone an interview, and a letter that spills onto a second page announces the overflow the moment the PDF opens.
The page arithmetic comes from the template SwissJobs.app uses for its own letter export: A4, 2.5 cm margins on all four sides, 11 pt body text, 1.15 line spacing, twelve points of space after each paragraph, and the formal elements in the order arbeit.swiss lists them. Word counts were computed from the real metrics of the installed font files — advance widths only, no kerning — and averaged over the German, English, French and Italian prose of the live adverts on SwissJobs.app as at 22 August 2026. Lines are broken greedily from the left with no hyphenation, as a word processor does by default.
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What our job index says about the Swiss market
Computed live from our own index, not quoted from a study. Shares only, as of today.
Language the advert is written in
- Deutsch
- 60%
- English
- 23%
- Français
- 13%
- Italiano
- 3%
Of adverts that state a language requirement, the share asking for
- Deutsch
- 70%
- English
- 43%
- Français
- 21%
- Italiano
- 3%
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