Whether to put your address on a résumé, and what this builder asks for instead

The full postal address is a convention from an era when the reply arrived by post. What the reader now needs from it is one fact, and one fact is what it should carry.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— city and country. the street helps nobody.

The full postal address on a résumé is a survival from when the answer came back by post. Nobody is posting you a reply. What a reader still wants from that line is one fact, which is roughly where you are, and the résumé builder asks for exactly that and nothing more.

What the identity editor contains

Full name and target role, both required. Email required, phone and location optional. Then LinkedIn, GitHub and a portfolio website, each rendered only when it has a value, and any further links you name. There is no street, no postcode and no postal address field, which is a position taken by omission.

What the checker looks for

The ATS résumé checker's completeness dimension runs seven checks with fixed point values. Identity carries ten, a syntactically valid email fifteen, a plausibly formatted phone number five. There is no address check anywhere in it, so leaving the street off costs nothing measurable. The whole dimension is set out in how the ATS score is calculated.

Where a full address is genuinely required

Where the system says so. The United States Department of Labor's guidance on writing a federal résumé asks for your full name, mailing address, day and evening phone numbers and home email, together with the job announcement number, title and grade (dol.gov). That is more than a private-sector header carries, and an instruction on a posting outranks any general rule.

Where convention still lists it

Germany. The Bundesagentur für Arbeit names "Adresse" among the personal details a Lebenslauf carries, alongside name, telephone number, email address and date and place of birth (arbeitsagentur.de). Where you are writing a Lebenslauf, that is the convention, and applying in Germany goes through the whole set with sources.

The British position, and what it omits

The National Careers Service lists what a CV should contain: a section for contact details, an introduction, education history, work history and references (nationalcareers.service.gov.uk). It does not specify what contact details means, and it is explicit about what to leave out: age, date of birth, marital status and nationality. The nidirect service adds salary to the list of things a CV does not need (nidirect.gov.uk).

The practical argument for a city

A commute is a real question and the reader is entitled to it. A city and a country answer it. For a remote role, the same line can carry the overlap hours instead, which is covered in remote-first applications. A street address answers a question nobody asked and hands over a piece of personal data to every system the file passes through.

The data argument, briefly

A résumé is forwarded. It goes into an applicant system, an agency database, an email thread and occasionally a shared drive, and each copy carries whatever the header carried. A street address is the one field on that page with no application value and a real second life, and leaving it off is the cheapest privacy decision available in this whole process.

The same reasoning is why this product keeps your work in the browser rather than in a database it owns, and why the only email it asks for is the one that claims a portfolio address. What is sent and when is listed in full in why there is no account, and it is a short list.

The decision

City and country by default. A full address where the system asks for one or the convention requires it, with the source on the posting rather than on a blog. Nothing on this page is legal advice and nothing here predicts what any employer does with a line of a header. The header guide has the rest of the fields, and everything in the product is free with no account and no watermark.

There is one more field worth mentioning beside the location, because it is the one people forget to check when they move. The completeness rule looks for a syntactically valid email address, worth fifteen of that dimension's hundred points, and for a plausibly formatted phone number, worth five. A university address that has expired or a number with an old country code will still pass those checks while being useless to the person trying to reach you, so the machine cannot help here. Read the header out loud before you export, and make sure every line on it is one somebody could actually use today.