Resume statistics 2026: what thousands of real resumes show

~5 min read · Updated October 2026

How many resumes include a photo? Do people still send Word files? Do they write from scratch? These numbers come from Folium itself: 3,855 resume downloads between 4 and 16 October 2026 and 3,181 saved resumes. They are aggregated and anonymous; the method is at the end.

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Key findings

• 48% of saved resumes include a photo. In German it’s 62%, in Italian 70%; in English, 33%.
• 87% of downloaded files are PDF and 13% are Word documents.
• 85% of people start from the resume they already have: of those who downloaded a first resume after choosing how to start, 681 imported an existing one and 124 started from scratch.
• Most imports are a PDF with selectable text (65%). 12% are a photo or a scanned PDF that has to be read with OCR.
• “Fit to one page” worked 37% of the time. In the other 63% the resume was too long to fit even at the smallest readable size.

Photo on a resume, by language

Share of saved resumes with a visible photo, by the language the resume is written in. Languages with fewer than 50 resumes are not shown.

The split follows local norms: a photo is expected in much of continental Europe and avoided in the US and the UK. Even so, a third of English-language resumes have one, often written by people applying outside the US. If you apply in the US, the UK or Canada, leave it out.

PDF or Word

Of 3,855 files downloaded, 3,355 were PDF (87%) and 500 Word (13%). PDF keeps the layout identical everywhere; Word is still requested by some recruitment agencies and online forms that want an editable file.

How people bring in their resume

Based on 1,755 imports. One in eight imports had no selectable text at all: a phone photo or a scan.

Which templates people download

Slate, a one-column template, is 31% of PDF downloads. It is also the template every new resume starts with, which explains much of that share. Among templates people switch to, Aurora leads (9.7%), followed by Halo (5.4%), Ledger (4.2%), Bento (4.1%) and Aria (4.1%). For Word downloads the order is similar: Slate, Aurora, Aria, Ledger.

How people show language levels

Of 431 people who chose a style for language levels, 30% kept Auto, 20% dots, 15% plain text (“Fluent”, “C1”), 13% a bar, 12.5% stars, and 10% no level at all.

Method

• Downloads, imports and choices: anonymous event counts from the Folium editor between 4 and 16 October 2026, with and without an account. They contain no names or resume text. An ad blocker can stop the counter, so the page reports shares, not monthly totals.
• Photos: resumes saved by account holders as of 17 October 2026, by the resume’s language. Internal accounts and resumes still using a sample photo are excluded; groups under 50 resumes are not shown.
• Who uses Folium: mostly people in Europe (France, Germany and Poland lead), which shapes these numbers. Treat them as one real sample, not as the whole market.

Frequently asked questions

How many resumes include a photo?

In Folium, 48% of saved resumes include a photo: 62% of German resumes, 50% of French ones and 33% of English ones (October 2026).

Do people still send resumes in Word?

Some do: 13% of the files downloaded in Folium in October 2026 were Word documents, and 87% PDF.

Do most people write their resume from scratch?

No. 85% of people who downloaded a first resume after choosing how to start imported one they already had.

Can I cite these numbers?

Yes, with a link to this page. They are aggregated and anonymous, and the method section explains where each number comes from.