What goes in a cover letter header, and how to write the date

The top of the letter is four lines of administration. It is also the only part that decides whether a reply can reach you, so it is worth two minutes.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— spell the month out and the question disappears.

The header is the part of a cover letter nobody enjoys and everybody copies from the last one. That is exactly why it goes wrong: the contents are mechanical, so they get carried forward from an application made two months ago to an employer who is not this one.

Your own details

• Your name, in the form you use professionally and the same form as on the résumé.
• An email address you read. This is how a reply will come, so it goes first.
• A phone number with the country code if you are applying across a border.
• A city, or a city and country. Enough to answer the question of where you are, which is a real question for hybrid and on-site roles.

That is the whole list. A full postal address is a tradition rather than a requirement in most sectors, and it takes a line that could be empty space. The same reasoning applies on the résumé, and the header page there goes through what a parser can and cannot read out of the top of a document.

The date

One line, and the date you actually send it. The trap is numeric formats: the same six digits are read as two different days on either side of the Atlantic, and a reader who notices has been distracted by your header for no reason. Spelling the month out removes the ambiguity in every locale. The letters rendered on this site use a spelled-out month for exactly that reason.

This is the same discipline that date formats on a résumé asks for, where a mixed or shortened date costs real points in the readability check.

The recipient block

The hiring team or the named person, the company, and where the design places it, the role. This block is what makes the letter correspondence rather than a statement, and it sits under the date and above the greeting. Addressing the letter covers finding the name and what to do when the employer is hidden behind an agency.

The role belongs here or in the opening sentence, and naming it once in either place is enough. Employers running several vacancies at once need it named exactly as the posting names it.

The two mistakes that matter

The first is a stale detail: an old phone number, a university email address that expires, another company's name left in the recipient block from the previous application. The last of those is the only fatal error in this document, and it happens almost entirely to people adapting a letter rather than writing one.

The second is a mismatch with the résumé. If the letter gives one email address and the attached document gives another, a reader has to decide which one you meant, and some of them will not bother. Check the two documents side by side before you send. It takes ten seconds and it is the highest-value ten seconds in the process.

How the builder handles it

In the cover letter builder, the header is drawn from the same material as the letter: the name and contact details come from the evidence you connected, and the recipient block from the company and role you entered at the details step. The date is the date of the draft. Because the header is generated from those fields rather than typed into the body, a stale company name from a previous application does not survive into the new letter.

The check step then reports the named opportunity it found in the draft, the role and the company together, which is a second place to catch a header pointing at the wrong employer before it leaves your machine.

Where the design comes in

The 12 designs place these blocks differently: a plain rule under the name, a high-contrast masthead, a serif dateline, a column of metadata beside the text. The gallery at cover letter designs renders each one as a whole letter at full size, so you are choosing a placement you can see rather than a name in a list.

None of them change what the blocks contain, and switching between them rewrites nothing you wrote. A conservative employer and an editorial one can receive the same letter on different paper, which is the only sense in which a design is a decision at all.

What the header will not do

It will not make a thin letter read better, and it is not where a reader forms an impression. It has one job, which is to make the letter answerable and correctly addressed, and it either does that or it quietly costs you the application. Get it right once, let the builder carry it, and spend the attention on the part of the letter that argues.

The file the header ends up in

Most letters arrive as a PDF attached beside a résumé, and the two files sit in a folder together with whatever names you gave them. A file called letter.pdf is a file a recruiter cannot find again a week later.

Name it with your own name and what it is, in that order, so that an alphabetical folder puts your two documents side by side. This is the same discipline file names and formats covers for the résumé, and it matters for exactly the same reason: the header identifies the letter to a person, and the file name identifies it to a filing system.