How Long Should Your Cover Letter Be?

One page. Unless the advertisement or the application pack says otherwise — and in Australian government and large corporate processes it says otherwise more often than people expect.

That is the whole answer. The rest of this page is about the exception, because the exception is where applications are lost.

What one page holds

A letter on a page — date, addressee, salutation, sign-off — leaves room for roughly 350 to 450 words of argument. Three or four paragraphs. If you are writing seven hundred and shrinking the type to make it fit, you have not written a cover letter. You have written something else and formatted it into a disguise.

“Can a cover letter be two pages?”

This is the version people actually ask, and it usually has the wrong shape underneath it.

If you have been asked for two pages, you have probably not been asked for a cover letter. You have been asked for selection criteria responses, a statement of claims, or a pitch — a different document doing a different job. A letter argues why you are worth reading. A criteria response proves, criterion by criterion, that you meet a published standard, and a panel scores it against that standard.

Confusing the two costs you at both ends. Send a one-page letter where criteria responses were requested and most criteria score as not addressed. Send four pages of criteria prose where a letter was requested and you have told the reader you do not follow instructions.

The limit is the instruction, not a suggestion

The Australian Public Service Commission is blunt about it. On pitches: “Remember to stick to the word limit—are they asking for a one or two page pitch or 1,000 word limit?” On criteria: “If a word or page limit is set, make sure you stick to it.”

Western Australia’s guidance is a useful warning that the request itself varies: “you may be asked just for a cover letter addressing only a few selection criteria, or to address all selection criteria.” It tells applicants to read the advertisement “to make sure you follow things such as word limits, fonts and deadlines.”

Neither is inviting a judgement call. Where a limit is published it is a scored requirement, and exceeding it is a mark against you before anyone has read a sentence. This is why we write these documents to the length the pack specifies — one page, two, or more where the criteria run long — rather than to a house preference.

When nothing is specified

Most private-sector executive advertisements publish no limit at all. Then it is one page, and one page is generous.

In nearly ten years of writing these for Australian executives, we have not seen a second page win a role the first page had lost. What the second page contains is almost always the CV, restated.

There is a market reason to be disciplined about it. SEEK’s Employment Report for July, released 12 August 2026, has applications per advertisement rising for seven consecutive months and now at the highest level SEEK has recorded, against job ad volumes six per cent below a year ago. Your letter is being read alongside more competitors than at any point in the data, by someone with less time each.

The failure that actually happens

Almost nobody’s letter is too short. The common fault is a full page that could be sent to any employer, and the fix is not length — it is writing something specific enough to be checked. One page of facts a reader can verify beats three pages of positioning, and it beats them in less of the reader’s time, which is the resource actually under pressure.

If you want the longer argument about where effort belongs in an application, the strategy piece covers it.

Sources

• Australian Public Service Commission, Applying for an APS job: cracking the code, apsc.gov.au — read 19 August 2026.
• Government of Western Australia, Applying for a job in WA’s government sector, jobs.wa.gov.au — read 19 August 2026.
• SEEK, Employment Report — July, released 12 August 2026.