Two-Page Federal Resume Template

USAJOBS will not let you upload or build a federal resume longer than two pages. That is not a style preference — it is a control at the point of application, and the long-form federal resume it replaced is now prohibited. This template is built to that limit: it carries every field USAJOBS requires, applies the formatting USAJOBS recommends, and leaves out the two fields most templates still waste page space on.

The two-page limit, from the source

The USAJOBS Help Center states it plainly:

“Federal agencies only accept resumes up to two pages in length to comply with the Merit Hiring Plan. USAJOBS will not allow you to upload or build resumes longer than two pages, and you will need to update the resumes in your profile before applying to a job.”

USAJOBS Help Center

The instrument behind it is the OPM Merit Hiring Plan of 29 May 2025, issued under Executive Order 14170. The Plan is blunter still about what it replaced:

“Limit resume length to 2 pages and prohibit the present longform Federal resume.”

OPM, Merit Hiring Plan, 29 May 2025

A transition period ran until 27 September 2025, after which applicants have been required to fit the two-page limit before applying. So a five-page federal resume is not merely long any more; the format it was written for has been withdrawn.

What happens if you go over

This gets misreported in both directions, so here is OPM’s own answer. Asked whether applicants would have to certify compliance and be disqualified if they did not, OPM said:

“No. USAJOBS is building a technical solution that will prevent applicants from applying to Federal jobs with a resume longer than 2 pages. … If an applicant does not comply with submitting all the required documentation as stated in the announcement, they will be removed from further consideration.”

OPM, Merit Hiring Plan FAQ, Q30

Two things follow. There is no length certification and no length-based disqualification, because the system stops the submission instead. But there is a removal-from-consideration consequence, and it attaches to failing to submit what the announcement requires. The announcement is the controlling document, and OPM tells agencies to state their formatting and documentation requirements in it.

What USAJOBS requires

Contact details at the top: full name, email address, phone number. Then, for each relevant work experience, USAJOBS lists exactly these:

• Employer name
• Job title
• Start and end dates, including the month and year
• The number of hours you worked per week
• Brief descriptions that show you can perform the tasks at the required level listed in the job announcement
• Series and grade — federal jobs only

USAJOBS even publishes the shape of an entry — Program Analyst GS-343-11 / January 2009–present / 40 Hours/week — and its own formula for the bullets underneath: “Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z].” The template uses both, because matching the format the reviewer expects costs nothing.

For education: name of school or institution, completion date, degree type and GPA, included when the announcement requires position-specific education, a licence or a certification.

And the instruction that decides more applications than any formatting choice:

“Use similar terms and address every required qualification. For example, if the qualifications section says you need experience with MS Project, you need to use the words MS Project in your resume.”

USAJOBS Help Center

That is the opposite of the standard resume advice to vary your vocabulary. On a federal application you should use the announcement’s own words.

What it does not require

Salary and supervisor name and phone number are not on the list. Neither is a photo, a full street address, or your date of birth. A great deal of currently circulating advice, and most federal resume templates you can download elsewhere, still include salary and supervisor fields for every role.

They were conventions of the long-form federal resume — the format the Merit Hiring Plan prohibits. Under a hard two-page cap they are worse than merely unnecessary: two lines per role, across five roles, is most of a section you could have spent evidencing specialized experience. This template omits them deliberately.

USAJOBS separately lists what to actively leave out: classified or government sensitive information, your Social Security Number, photos of yourself, personal information such as age, sex or religious affiliation, and encrypted or digitally signed documents.

Font, margins and file type

OPM’s FAQ said USAJOBS would publish formatting guidance, and it has. Verbatim:

“We recommend using a sans-serif font size like Lato, if available. Other recommended options are Calibri, Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Open Sans, Source Sans Pro, Roboto or Noto Sans. Make your page margins 0.5 inches. Consider using 14-point size font for titles and 10-point for the main text in your resume.”

USAJOBS Help Center

On file type: a standard 8.5 by 11 inch page, 5 MB or less, and USAJOBS recommends uploading as PDF to preserve your formatting and page count. It also accepts DOC, DOCX, RTF, TXT, ODT and several image formats, but not PDF portfolio files.

Worth knowing: these are recommendations. OPM is explicit that USAJOBS “will not restrict uploaded resumes to specific font types, sizes, or margins” — only the two-page limit is enforced. Which means font and margin are the levers you control to make the content fit, not compliance boxes. The individual announcement may still set its own instructions, and those you follow.

The template

This is the full text of the file, so you can read it or copy from it without downloading anything. The italic lines are instructions to you and are meant to be deleted before you submit.

The choices that buy you the space

How long the finished resume runs depends on how many roles you add, so the template cannot promise a page count on your behalf. What it can do is start you with as much usable space as the guidance allows, and the choices behind that are worth stating rather than hiding:

• 0.5 inch margins and 10pt body text, per the USAJOBS recommendation, are already set in the file. The common 1 inch margin costs roughly a fifth of your usable width.
• No salary or supervisor lines, which USAJOBS does not require. Two lines per role recovered.
• No summary, objective, photo or skills matrix. None is required, and each competes with the experience descriptions that actually get rated.
• Single column, no tables, no graphics. Beyond parsing safety, a column layout wastes the gutter and makes page count unpredictable.
• Two experience entries, not six. Copy the block for each relevant role. USAJOBS advises removing or deprioritising outdated or unrelated experience — under a cap that stops being tidiness and becomes the strategy.
• Arial rather than Lato. Lato is USAJOBS’ first suggestion but is not installed by default on Windows or macOS, so Word substitutes another face, the line wrapping shifts and your page count changes. Arial is on the same recommended list and is present everywhere. If you have Lato, switch to it and re-check the page count.

One check before you apply, using USAJOBS’ own review questions: can a reviewer see your main credentials in 10 to 15 seconds, and have you sold yourself in the top quarter of the first page?

The documented exceptions

“Always two pages” is not quite right, and two exceptions are on the record.

Placement resumes. Agencies may consider applicants with resumes longer than two pages for placement from existing Talent Programs and Reemployment Priority Lists, because those are placement resumes rather than hiring resumes. OPM is clear that hiring resumes submitted for job announcements must comply.

Judicial and legislative branch agencies. USAJOBS restricts all resumes to two pages, so an agency in those branches wanting longer resumes has to add instructions to the announcement explaining how to submit one.

On excepted service and non-Title 5 systems: the Merit Hiring Plan is scoped to Title 5, and OPM says agencies operating outside it should align to the greatest extent practicable. But the USAJOBS upload control applies to all resumes, so in practice the two-page limit is what you build to unless a specific announcement says otherwise.