Should there be a photo on your résumé, and where does that depend

There is no universal answer and there is a sourced answer per country. Below is what the official guidance in each place actually says, with the links.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— four places, four positions, four sources.

This question produces more confident wrong answers than any other in the subject, because people generalise from the country they learned to apply in. There is no universal convention. There are national ones, several of them are published, and they disagree.

Germany: not required, still common

The Bundesagentur für Arbeit addresses the photograph twice. Its Lebenslauf guidance says of it "Dies ist kein Muss mehr", it is no longer a must (arbeitsagentur.de). Its page on application documents is more precise about the custom: "Ein Bewerbungsfoto ist zwar keine Pflicht mehr, jedoch in vielen Branchen weiterhin üblich", no longer an obligation but still customary in many sectors (arbeitsagentur.de).

Both statements are true at once, which is why the German answer confuses people. You are not required to include one and a great many applications still do. The Lebenslauf page covers the rest of what German guidance asks for, including the date of birth, which is the other detail that travels badly.

The legal background in Germany

The reason the requirement was dropped is the Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz. Its §1 states the aim of the law as preventing or eliminating disadvantage on grounds of race or ethnic origin, sex, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual identity (gesetze-im-internet.de). A photograph makes several of those visible before anybody has read a line of the document.

That is a statement about what the law names, not legal advice, and this page is not the place to get any. What it explains is why national guidance moved from asking for a photograph to describing it as optional.

United Kingdom: not asked for

British government guidance does not ask for a photograph. The National Careers Service lists what a CV should contain, "a section for your contact details, an introduction, your education history, your work history and references", and a photograph is not among them (nationalcareers.service.gov.uk).

The same page is explicit about related details: "You should not include your age, your date of birth, whether you're married or your nationality." The nidirect service adds salary to the list of things a CV does not need (nidirect.gov.uk). Neither source addresses photographs directly, so this page does not claim they forbid one; what they do is ask for a document without the personal details a photograph carries. The UK conventions page has the rest.

United States: advised against

The clearest statement of the three. Federal equal-employment guidance says that "employers should not ask for a photograph of an applicant. If needed for identification purposes, a photograph may be obtained after an offer of employment is made and accepted" (eeoc.gov).

The same page says the information requested through the pre-employment process "should be limited to those essential for determining if a person is qualified for the job", and that "information regarding race, sex, national origin, age, and religion are irrelevant in such determinations". The guidance is addressed to employers, and the practical effect for an applicant is that a photograph is unwelcome rather than merely unnecessary. The US conventions page covers what the document does contain.

Europass: recommended

At the other end of the spread, the European Union's own CV format includes, among its quality tips, the advice to "add a professional photograph of yourself" (europass.europa.eu). Where you are filling in a Europass CV, that is the format's own recommendation. The Europass page covers where the format is expected and what it trades away.

How to decide

• If the posting asks, follow the posting. It has answered the question for that application.
• Otherwise follow the local guidance, not the habit you brought with you. A photograph on an application into the United States is a visible import.
• In Germany, either is defensible. Sector custom decides, and both choices are ordinary.
• When you cannot tell, leave it off. No published guidance anywhere asks for a photograph on a document that does not have one, and the risk is asymmetric.

A practical note about the file

An embedded image makes a document larger and can cost you elsewhere: an image-heavy file is slower to render and a scanned page has no text layer at all. That is a separate problem from the convention question and it is worth checking either way, which the ATS résumé checker does by reading the file and printing what came back out of it. Scanned and image PDFs covers the case where nothing does.

If you do include one

Where the convention allows it and you choose to, the practical requirements are unremarkable: a recent photograph, taken in reasonable light, in the register of the work you are applying for. The common failure is an image cropped from a social occasion, which reads as exactly that at the size it will be viewed.

Place it where the layout expects it rather than floating it over the text. A picture in a text box or a page header is one of the layout patterns that interferes with extraction, which is a separate problem from the convention question and a real one. The format page covers the patterns that scramble a document's text layer.