The short version: Put your city and country (or city and state/region) on your resume, never your full street address, and if you are applying for remote or out-of-area roles, say so directly next to it. That one line has quietly become one of the most common reasons good candidates get skipped over, and almost nobody tells you why.
Related reading: How to Write an Email When Sending Your Resume for a Job.
Why the address line matters more than people think
Most resume advice treats the address line as an afterthought, something you copy from an old template without a second thought. I used to think that too, until I spent a stretch of my own rebuild years coaching people through job hunts alongside my usual marketing and AI consulting work, reading hundreds of CVs that clients sent me for feedback. The address line came up as a problem far more often than the summary paragraph, the skills section, or anything on page two.
Here is what is going on. Recruiters and hiring managers scan a resume for around six to eight seconds on that first pass, according to widely cited eye-tracking research from resume screening studies. In those few seconds, your address is one of the first things their eye lands on, right up there with your name and job title. It gets read as data before anything else about you does. That means it is doing silent work, for or against you, before a single sentence of your experience gets a proper look.
That silent work can cut two ways. A local address near the office can quietly reassure a hiring manager you will show up for an in-person interview and not disappear after a two hour commute puts them off. A full address in the wrong postcode, or an address in a different country entirely with no context, can get you filtered out before a human even opens the file, especially if the job listing did not mention remote or relocation support.
What to put on the address line
Forget the full postal address. You do not need your house number, your street name, or your postcode on a document that is going to sit in an applicant tracking system, get forwarded by email, and possibly get shared with three other people at the company. Here is what I tell clients to use instead:
- City and country, for international or remote applications: "Manchester, UK" or "Tel Aviv, Israel"
- City and state, for US applications: "Austin, TX" or "Portland, OR"
- City and postcode area only, if the role is local and commute matters: "Bristol, BS1 area"
- "Remote (UK-based)" or "Open to relocation" added directly after the city, if that is true and relevant
That is it. No house number, no street, no full postcode. It fits on one line, it answers the practical questions a recruiter has (which time zone, which country, roughly how far), and it does not hand a stranger your home address before you have even had a phone screen.
A quick step-by-step for the resume header
Here is the exact order I recommend for the top of a resume, whether you are building it from scratch or fixing an old one:
- Full name, larger font, top line
- Phone number, the one you answer
- Professional email address, ideally firstname.lastname format, not an old nickname from 2009
- City and country or city and state, no street address
- LinkedIn profile URL, cleaned up (remove the string of numbers if you can edit it)
- Portfolio or website link, only if it is relevant and current
Six lines, sometimes squeezed into two by putting phone, email, and location on one horizontal row separated by a vertical bar or dot. That whole header should never run more than two lines. If you find yourself adding a third line, something on it does not need to be there.
If you are pairing your resume with an application email, the same rule applies to consistency: keep the location format identical in both places, and if you want the full mechanics of how to structure that message, this guide on how to write an email to send your resume to an employer walks through it line by line.
The story I keep coming back to
A client, I will call him James since he would rather not be named, came to me two years ago after sending out around forty applications for marketing coordinator roles in London with almost no callbacks. He lived in Reading, about forty minutes out by train, and his resume listed his full address, street number and postcode included, right at the top in a bold header font he was quite proud of.
We changed exactly one thing that week: the address line went from a full street address in Reading to "Reading, UK (40 mins to Central London, open to hybrid or remote)". Nothing else on the resume changed. Same experience, same skills section, same everything. Within three weeks he had two phone screens booked. He later found out from a recruiter friend that his original address had been read by an internal recruiter as "too far for daily commute" and quietly moved to the reject pile without anyone opening the rest of the document. The postcode alone had made the decision before his experience got a look in.
That is the uncomfortable bit nobody likes to say out loud: your address gets used to guess things about you that have nothing to do with your ability to do the job. Commute assumptions. Cost of living assumptions used to guess your salary expectations. Sometimes, quietly, age assumptions based on which part of a city or town you list. None of that is fair, and none of it is something you can control once someone has decided to make the guess. What you can control is giving them less to guess with in the first place.
UK versus US formatting, and why it is not the same
If you are applying across borders, which is increasingly common given how much recruiting has gone remote, the conventions differ:
- UK CVs traditionally include city and sometimes county, but full postcodes have fallen out of favour over the last decade as data privacy awareness has grown. GDPR has made hiring teams more careful about holding personal data they do not need, and a full address is exactly that kind of data.
- US resumes commonly use "City, State" only. Full street addresses on US resumes have been disappearing steadily since online applications became the norm, mostly because Applicant Tracking Systems like Workday and Greenhouse ask for the full address separately in the online form anyway, making it redundant on the document itself.
- Israeli CVs, where I also do a fair amount of work, tend to include city only, sometimes with a note on national service status, which is its own separate topic entirely.
If you are applying to companies across more than one of these markets, which happens constantly with remote and hybrid roles now, default to city and country. It reads cleanly everywhere and it never looks out of place.
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What changes for remote roles
Remote hiring has made the address line more complicated, not less, because now it is doing double duty: it tells a recruiter roughly where you are for time zone and legal reasons, and it can also accidentally disqualify you.
Here is the part most articles on this topic skip entirely. If a company can only legally employ people within a specific country because of tax and payroll rules, and your address line shows a different country, some recruiters will filter you out automatically, sometimes through a simple keyword scan, before reading a word of your experience. This happens constantly with companies hiring for roles advertised as "remote" that mean "remote within the UK" or "remote within the US, must be authorised to work." The word "remote" in a job title is not a promise you can work from anywhere. It is worth checking a listing twice before assuming your location will not matter.
If you are hunting specifically for roles that are open to a wider range of locations, it is worth looking at lists built around that exact filter rather than guessing from a job title alone; this roundup of remote jobs that are hiring right now is a decent place to start, and if data entry or admin-style remote work is more your lane, this breakdown of remote data entry jobs is blunt about which of those postings pay and which do not.
My general advice for a global remote application: use city and country, and add "open to remote, any time zone" or "open to remote, UK/EU time zones" directly after it, whichever is true. That single addition does more for your callback rate than almost anything else you can change on the page.
Mistakes I see constantly
- Listing a full street address and postcode out of pure habit, copied from a template made in 2015
- Using an old address after moving, which then confuses a recruiter about your actual location and commute
- Adding "Address available on request" as a line, which wastes space saying nothing
- Putting the address in a header or footer that some Applicant Tracking Systems cannot read at all, meaning it effectively disappears from the file the recruiter opens
- Formatting the location differently on the resume than on LinkedIn or the cover letter, which makes a hiring manager wonder which one is out of date
That last point matters more than people assume. If you are also sending a designed cover page alongside your resume, keep the location line identical across both documents. This guide on how to design a resume cover page that gets noticed covers the layout choices that make a cover page look intentional rather than mismatched, and consistency in something as small as your city line is part of that.
What if you are between locations or job hunting quietly
If you are currently employed and job hunting on the side, or between homes, or simply not ready to commit to a fixed location on paper, "City, Country" still works fine, use whichever city you are based in most of the time. There is no requirement to list a future address, a family address, or anywhere you are not currently living. If you split time between two places, list the one closer to where the roles you are applying for are based, and mention the flexibility in a cover letter rather than cramming it into the header.
I will add one more thing here because it comes up constantly with clients who are also exploring flexible or freelance work alongside a traditional job search: if you are building out a resume for virtual assistant, admin, or freelance-style remote work through a platform, the address expectations shift again, since some of those listings do want to know your country for payment and tax reasons. This guide to finding real virtual assistant work through Indeed covers what those listings expect in an application, address included.
Frequently asked questions
Should I put my full address on my resume?
No. Use city and country, or city and state in the US, and leave the street address and postcode off entirely. Applicant tracking systems and most application forms collect your full address separately, so it is redundant on the document itself, and leaving it off protects your privacy without costing you anything.
Does leaving my address off a resume look suspicious?
No, it is standard practice now. Recruiters expect city and country as the minimum and rarely expect more. Leaving off a full street address will not raise any flags; leaving off the city entirely can, since it tells them nothing about time zone or commute.
What do I put if I am applying for a fully remote job in a different country?
List your current city and country, then add a short note such as "open to remote, any time zone" or specify the time zone range the role requires. Check the job listing carefully first, since many roles labelled "remote" require you to be based in a specific country for tax or legal reasons, and your address line will be checked against that.
Should students or new graduates include a university address instead of home?
Use whichever city you will be available to work from once hired, not necessarily where you are studying now if you are due to move. If you are staying in the same city after graduating, that city is the right one to list; if not, note your home city and add a line in your cover letter about your move date.
Sources worth reading
Related reading: How to Write a Powerful Executive Resume in 7 Steps and How to Write Your Job Duties Clearly on a Resume.
