A cover letter is the one page of your application where you get to speak in your own voice. Your resume lists what you did; the cover letter explains why it matters to this employer, for this role. Below you’ll find free cover letter templates editable in Microsoft Word, and — further down — ten complete sample cover letters written out in full for different jobs and situations: graduates with no experience, administrative assistants, customer service, teaching, nursing, accounting, sales, career changers, people returning after a break, and speculative letters sent where no job was advertised. Read the sample closest to your situation, then download the matching template and replace the details with your own.

What a Cover Letter Is Actually For

Most cover letters fail in the same way: they restate the resume in prose. The reader already has the resume. What the letter has to do is connect the two things the resume can’t connect on its own — what the employer said they needed, and the specific thing you have done that proves you can do it.

That means a good cover letter is short, concrete, and unmistakably written for one job. Three quarters of a page is plenty. Four paragraphs is plenty. If you could send the same letter to another company by changing only the company name, it isn’t finished yet — and recruiters recognise a recycled letter in about four seconds, because it names no detail that could only come from the job advert in front of them.

One thing a cover letter does not have to do is get past a robot. Applicant tracking systems are searchable databases of applications, not automatic rejection machines; a human decides. The practical risk is mis-parsing — a letter inside a table, a text box, or a scanned image can come through the system garbled or empty. Plain paragraphs in a normal Word document avoid that entirely, which is how every template on this page is built.

The Four Paragraphs

1. The opening — name the job and why you’re writing. One or two sentences. State the exact job title and where you saw it, and give the single strongest reason you’re a fit. Skip “I am writing to apply for the position of…” as a whole opening paragraph; it uses your best line of the page to say nothing.
2. The proof paragraph — one specific result. Take the main requirement in the advert and answer it with something you actually did, with a number or an outcome attached. “I have excellent communication skills” is an assertion. “I handled around 60 customer calls a day and kept our team’s satisfaction score above 94%” is evidence.
3. The fit paragraph — why them. Name something real about the organisation: the service they run, the market they’re in, a recent expansion, the fact that they work with the exact client type you’ve worked with. This is the paragraph that proves the letter was written for one employer.
4. The close — ask for the interview. Say you’d welcome the chance to discuss it, note that your resume is attached, and thank them. One short paragraph. Confident, not apologetic.

Above those four paragraphs sits a plain heading block: your name, phone, email, and city; the date; and the employer’s name and address. Below them: “Sincerely,” your name, and — if you’re printing it — a signature.

Free Cover Letter Templates in MS Word

Every template below opens in Microsoft Word (or a free alternative such as LibreOffice or Google Docs). Replace the bracketed details, keep the paragraph structure, and save as PDF before sending unless the employer asked for Word. All files use ordinary paragraph text — no tables, no text boxes, no images — so they parse correctly through any application system.

Standard Cover Letter Template

The four-paragraph structure with a plain heading block and signature line — the default choice for any office, professional, or public-sector application.

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Modern Cover Letter Template

A letter styled to match our modern resume templates — same heading band, same typeface — so the two pages look like one application.

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Simple Cover Letter Template

Plain text, no styling at all — for employers who ask for a letter in the body of an email, and for application portals that strip formatting.

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Ten Sample Cover Letters

Each letter below is complete and ready to adapt — the names, companies, and figures are examples, so replace every one of them. Under each letter is a short note on what it is doing and why, so you can copy the technique rather than just the words. If your situation isn’t listed exactly, use the closest one: the structure is identical in all ten.

1. Sample Cover Letter for a Graduate With No Experience

What it does: never apologises for the missing years. A graduate’s letter works by treating coursework, projects, and part-time jobs as real evidence — the dissertation is described like a client engagement, because it was one, and the warehouse summers are used to show practical grounding rather than listed as filler. The “why them” paragraph names one concrete part of the employer’s operation. Note what is absent: no “although I lack experience,” no “I am a hard-working and passionate graduate.” Say what you did and let it count.

2. Sample Cover Letter for an Administrative Assistant

What it does: answers the advert line by line without saying so. Administrative roles attract very high application volumes, and most letters list the same adjectives — organised, reliable, detail-oriented. This one lists tasks and then attaches two outcomes with numbers to them, which is what separates it in a stack of forty. The software sentence ends with evidence of learning a new system, because “quick learner” on its own is worth nothing.

3. Sample Cover Letter for a Customer Service Role

What it does: uses the metrics the role is actually measured on — contact volume, resolution rate, satisfaction score, handling time — because a customer service manager reads those numbers daily and can place a candidate instantly. The last line of the proof paragraph is the most important one in the letter: it shows judgement, not just willingness. The “why them” paragraph is built on a visible business change, which anyone can find in five minutes of reading the company’s own site.

4. Sample Cover Letter for a Teaching Position

What it does: reads like someone who has read the school’s documents, because they have. Teaching applications are usually sifted by a head teacher against a person specification, so the letter leads with phase and experience, gives one piece of curriculum work in detail with attainment data, and adds the wider-school contribution that heads quietly weigh heavily. Offering to teach a lesson is a strong close in education and nowhere else. Adapt the data to your own subject or phase — but do include some.

5. Sample Cover Letter for a Nurse

What it does: puts the things a clinical recruiter must verify where they can be found in one glance — registration, band, ward type, caseload, named competencies. Clinical letters are the one case where listing skills plainly is correct, because those skills are the person specification. The quality-improvement example earns its place by having a number, and the closing line about pre-employment checks signals someone who has been through the process before. Keep your own registration number on the letter only if the employer asks for it on the application.

6. Sample Cover Letter for an Accountant

What it does: leads with the qualification and the exact scope match, then proves competence with the two things finance hiring managers care about — a faster close and a costing error found. Both are specific enough to be asked about at interview, which is the point: write only claims you want to be questioned on. The systems sentence names the ERP, because in finance recruitment the system is often a hard filter.

7. Sample Cover Letter for a Sales Role

What it does: a sales letter is itself a sales call, and it is judged on whether the numbers are there. Target versus achievement goes in the first paragraph, not the fourth. The proof paragraph then shows how the number was made — outbound versus inbound, win rate, deal size, and one piece of self-directed market thinking — which is what distinguishes a seller from someone who inherited a good patch. Attaching the target-versus-achievement record is a strong, unusual move and works in sales specifically.

8. Sample Cover Letter for a Career Change

What it does: answers the question the reader is already asking — why are you changing? — in the first paragraph, and answers it with evidence of commitment (the qualification) rather than feeling. It then translates the old job into the new job’s language instead of leaving the reader to do the translating. The unusual move is the honest sentence naming what the candidate hasn’t done: it costs nothing, because the gap is obvious from the resume anyway, and it buys credibility for everything else on the page. Career-change letters that pretend there is no gap read as naive.

9. Sample Cover Letter After a Career Break

What it does: names the break in one plain clause in the opening paragraph and then never mentions it again. That is the whole technique. An unexplained three-year gap makes a reader uneasy; a stated one in nine words costs nothing. The letter spends its real space on the five years of evidence, and the sentence about keeping licences and certification current answers the only legitimate concern an employer has — currency, not capability. Note the explicit statement of availability, which matters after a break.

10. Sample Speculative Cover Letter (No Advertised Vacancy)

What it does: earns its own existence in the first three sentences. A speculative letter has no advert to respond to, so it must supply the reason itself — here, a specific announced change in the business and a named risk that comes with it. Three paragraphs instead of four, because nobody asked for this letter. It is addressed to a person with the authority to create a role, it asks for a conversation rather than a job, and it ends with a stated intention to follow up, which roughly doubles the response rate on cold letters. Never send one of these to “Dear Sir/Madam” — a speculative letter with no named recipient has no reader.

Who to Address It To

Use a name whenever you can find one. “Dear Ms. Partridge” tells the reader the letter was written for them; “Dear Sir/Madam” tells them it wasn’t. The advert itself often names the hiring manager or the person to contact; if it doesn’t, the company’s own team or about page frequently does, and for a small employer a single phone call to reception asking who the application should be addressed to usually settles it in under a minute.

If you genuinely can’t find a name, use the role: Dear Hiring Manager, or better, Dear Head of Finance. Avoid “To Whom It May Concern” — it is dated and reads as a form letter. And when you do have a name, get the spelling and the title right; “Dear Mr. Nair” to a woman called Priya undoes everything the rest of the page was trying to do. If you can’t tell from the name, drop the title and write “Dear Priya Nair”.

What to Leave Out

• Your resume, retold. If a sentence only repeats a line from the resume, cut it. The letter exists to add interpretation, not duplication.
• Salary, unless they asked. If the advert requires salary expectations, give a range in the closing paragraph and say it is negotiable. Otherwise leave money out entirely.
• Reasons you left previous jobs. There is no version of that paragraph that helps you on paper. It is an interview conversation.
• Apologies and hedges. “Although I only have two years’ experience,” “I may not have every requirement, but.” You are inviting the reader to agree with you.
• Personal details with no bearing on the job — date of birth, marital status, religion, a photograph, a national ID number. In many countries employers are not permitted to consider these, and including them creates a problem for the recruiter rather than an advantage for you. (Where local convention genuinely expects a photo or ID number on applications, follow local practice.)
• Flattery with nothing behind it. “Your company is a global leader in innovation” names no fact and could be addressed to anyone.
• A second page. One page. Three quarters of one is better.

Email or Attachment?

Follow the advert. If it asks for a letter and resume attached, attach both as PDFs (unless Word is specified) and keep the email itself to two lines: the role you’re applying for and a note that the documents are attached. If it asks you to apply through a portal, paste the letter into the field the portal provides — plain text, no indents, a blank line between paragraphs — and use the Simple template above, since portals strip formatting and a styled letter can arrive as a block of run-together text.

If there’s no instruction, put the letter in the body of the email and attach only the resume. Almost nobody opens two attachments, and a letter the recruiter has to download is a letter that may never be read. Use a subject line that identifies you and the job: Application: Warehouse Supervisor — Sarah Malik. Name your files the same way — Sarah-Malik-Cover-Letter.pdf, not coverletter_final_v3.docx, which is what a recruiter sees in a folder of two hundred files.

Speculative Applications: When They Work

A cold letter sent to a company with no vacancy is mostly ignored — but the ones that work share three features, all visible in sample 10 above. They are addressed to a named individual senior enough to create a role. They give a specific, current reason for writing: an expansion, a new site, a contract win, a product launch, something the company itself announced. And they ask for a short conversation rather than a job, which is a request a busy person can actually say yes to.

Send them in small numbers to carefully chosen employers, and follow up once by phone about a week later. Fifty identical speculative letters produce nothing; five researched ones with a follow-up call produce interviews more often than most people expect — because you are the only applicant in a process that hasn’t started yet.

Before You Send It

• Is the company name right, everywhere? Pasting from a previous application is the single most common fatal error in cover letters.
• Is the job title exactly as advertised, including the reference number if there is one?
• Is there at least one number or named outcome in the second paragraph?
• Does one sentence name something specific about this employer that couldn’t apply to a competitor?
• Does it fit on one page with normal margins and 11 or 12 point type?
• Have you read it aloud? Every awkward sentence announces itself when spoken.
• Are your phone number and email correct — and is the voicemail on that number one you’d want a recruiter to hear?
• Is the file named with your own name and saved as PDF?

Then pair it with the resume it belongs to: see our free resume templates, the modern resume designs that match the Modern letter above, and reference list templates for the page employers ask for next.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should a cover letter be?

One page, and most good ones are three quarters of a page — roughly 250 to 350 words in four short paragraphs. Length is not evidence of effort; a reader working through forty applications will reward the letter that makes its case fastest.

Do I really need a cover letter if it’s optional?

Write one. “Optional” in practice means most applicants skip it, which is precisely why sending one helps — it is the only part of the application where you can explain why this particular job, and it is frequently what decides between two similar resumes. The exception is a portal that offers no sensible place to put it.

What should the first line of a cover letter say?

The job title, where you saw it, and your single strongest reason for being a fit — all in one or two sentences. Don’t spend the opening paragraph announcing that you are writing to apply; the reader can see that.

How do I write a cover letter with no experience?

Treat coursework, final-year projects, volunteering, and part-time work as real evidence, and describe one of them in the same detail you would give a job: what you did, over what period, and what came out of it. See sample 1 above. Don’t open by apologising for the gap — it draws attention to the one thing you’d rather the reader moved past.

Should a cover letter be addressed to a person or to “Dear Sir/Madam”?

To a person wherever one can be found — in the advert, on the company’s team page, or by phoning reception and asking. If no name exists, use the role (“Dear Hiring Manager”) rather than “To Whom It May Concern.”

Should I send my cover letter as a PDF or a Word file?

PDF unless the employer asks for Word, because a PDF looks the same on every machine. Some older application portals handle .docx more reliably, so if the portal specifies a format, use that one. Either way, name the file with your own name and the document type.

Will an applicant tracking system reject my cover letter?

No — these systems store and search applications; they don’t sift them automatically, and a person makes the decision. What they do badly is read letters built inside tables, text boxes, headers, or images, which can arrive garbled. Plain paragraphs in a standard document, like the templates here, avoid the problem.

Should I mention salary expectations in a cover letter?

Only if the advert asks. When it does, give a range in your closing paragraph and note that it’s negotiable. Volunteering a figure unprompted can price you out before anyone has met you, or anchor you low.

How do I explain a gap in my employment?

In one plain clause in the opening paragraph, then move on — “I took a two-year break to care for a family member and am now returning to full-time work.” No detail, no apology. Then show that your skills are current. Sample 9 above does exactly this.

Can I use the same cover letter for several jobs?

You can reuse the structure and your proof paragraph, but the job title, company name, and the sentence about why this employer must be rewritten every time — and if you reuse a letter, check the company name three times. Sending a letter addressed to a competitor is the one mistake no amount of good writing survives.