What to Include in a Cover Letter (Section-by-Section Breakdown)

A cover letter should include five things: a header with your contact information, an opening paragraph that names the role and hooks the reader, one or two body paragraphs that connect your experience to the job's requirements with specific evidence, a closing paragraph with a clear call to action, and a professional sign-off. That is the complete answer, and if you nail those five components, you will have a stronger cover letter than the vast majority of applicants.

But "include these five things" only gets you so far. The difference between a cover letter that lands interviews and one that gets skimmed and forgotten is what you put inside each section — and what you leave out. This guide breaks down every section, explains what belongs there and why, and covers adjustments based on where you are in your career.

Section 1: The Header

The header tells the reader who you are and how to reach you. Include your full name, phone number, professional email address, city and state (a full street address is no longer expected), and your LinkedIn URL if it is complete. Add a portfolio or personal website link if relevant to the role.

Skip your full mailing address, multiple phone numbers, and any email address you would be embarrassed to say out loud in an interview.

If you are submitting the letter as a standalone document, format the header to match your resume header — same fonts, same layout. Visual consistency signals attention to detail. If you are pasting the letter into an application portal text box, skip the header entirely since your contact information is already in the form.

Section 2: The Salutation

Address the letter to a specific person whenever possible. Spend two minutes on LinkedIn or the company's website to find the hiring manager's name.

Use: "Hi [First Name]," for most industries, or "Dear [First Name] [Last Name]," for traditional fields like law or finance.

Avoid: "Dear Hiring Manager" (signals you did not look), "To Whom It May Concern" (belongs in a complaint letter, not a job application), and "Dear Sir/Madam" (dated and assumes binary gender).

If you genuinely cannot find a name, "Dear [Department] Hiring Team" is better than the generic fallback. For a deeper look at why this matters, see our breakdown of the most common cover letter mistakes — opening with a generic salutation is number one on the list.

Section 3: The Opening Paragraph

The opening paragraph is the most important paragraph in the letter. It determines whether the hiring manager keeps reading or moves on. It needs to do three things in two to three sentences:

State which role you are applying for. Name the exact position. Do not make the reader guess.
Hook them with something specific. Reference something real about the company — a product launch, a recent initiative, their approach to a problem in their industry. This proves you are not sending a form letter.
Establish a connection. Give the reader a reason to care about you specifically. If someone at the company referred you, say so here.

A strong opening looks like this:

I noticed Acme's expansion into the European market last quarter — it is a smart play given how underserved the SMB segment is over there. When I saw the Regional Sales Manager opening, it aligned directly with the three years I spent building a sales team across EMEA at my current company.

A weak opening looks like this:

I am writing to express my interest in the open position at your company. I believe my skills and experience make me a strong candidate for this role.

The weak version could be about any job at any company. The strong version names a specific company decision, has an opinion about it, and connects the writer's experience to a concrete need.

For a full framework on structuring every section, our guide to writing a cover letter in 2026 covers the five rules that matter most.

Section 4: The Body Paragraphs

The body is where you make your case. One or two paragraphs, answering the hiring manager's core question: can this person actually do this job?

The mistake most people make is summarizing their entire resume in paragraph form. Your resume is attached. The body of your cover letter should do something the resume cannot: tell a story, provide context, and connect dots.

What to include in the body

One or two specific accomplishments that directly map to the role's key requirements. Read the job description. Identify the two or three most important responsibilities. Then pick accomplishments that prove you can handle them. Numbers, context, outcomes.

Not "I have experience with content marketing." Instead: "I built a content program from scratch that grew organic traffic from 12,000 to 85,000 monthly visitors over 18 months and became the team's top source of qualified leads."

The relevance bridge. After describing what you did, explicitly connect it to what the company needs. Do not make the hiring manager do this work in their head. "The part of this that is most relevant to your role: you are looking for someone to scale demand generation for a developer audience, and that is exactly the audience I built our content engine to reach."

Evidence of company-specific knowledge. A sentence within your evidence paragraph is enough. "I noticed your team recently launched a self-serve onboarding flow, which tells me you are moving toward product-led growth — an area where I have spent the last two years."

Transferable skills with explicit translation (for career changers). If your background is in a different field, spell out the connection. "Managing a restaurant kitchen taught me how to coordinate a team under pressure, hit tight deadlines with no margin for error, and optimize processes in real time — skills that translate directly to the operations coordinator role."

What not to include in the body

A prose version of your resume. If your cover letter reads like "In my role at Company X, I was responsible for A, B, C, and D," you are wasting the one space in your application that can show personality and narrative.

Every qualification from the job description. Pick the two or three that matter most and go deep. A focused letter is more persuasive than a comprehensive one. If you are not sure about the right length, our guide to cover letter length breaks it down by scenario.

Vague self-assessments. "I am a hard worker with strong communication skills and a passion for innovation" contains zero information. Replace adjectives with evidence.

Section 5: The Closing Paragraph

The closing has two jobs: express genuine interest in the role and propose a clear next step. Two to three sentences.

Include a forward-looking statement that references something specific you want to discuss ("I would love to walk you through how I built the reporting system that cut our monthly close from twelve days to four"), plus a concrete call to action ("Are you available for a brief conversation next week?"). Be confident without being arrogant.

Leave out any desperation ("I really need this job"), and do not restate your qualifications. The closing is not a summary paragraph. Move forward.

For an annotated example of a closing paragraph that led to interview callbacks, see our cover letter that landed five interviews — the breakdown explains exactly why a specific ask outperforms a generic sign-off.

Section 6: The Sign-Off

Keep it simple. "Best," "Best regards," or "Thank you," followed by your full name. Avoid anything overly stiff ("Sincerely yours") or overly casual ("Cheers") unless the company culture clearly calls for it.

What NOT to Include in a Cover Letter

Knowing what to leave out is as important as knowing what to put in. These items actively hurt your application:

Salary expectations. Unless the posting explicitly asks for them, leave salary out. Naming a number too early either prices you out of the conversation or locks you into a figure below what they were willing to pay. Negotiation happens after they decide they want you.

Negative language about your current or previous employer. "The management is terrible" might be true, but it tells the hiring manager you trash-talk employers — and they will assume you will eventually trash-talk them. Keep reasons for leaving positive or neutral: "I am looking for a role where I can focus more on X."

Generic statements that could apply to anyone. If a sentence could be copied into any other applicant's letter without changing a word, delete it. "I am a team player with strong attention to detail" is the cover letter equivalent of white noise.

Personal information unrelated to the job. Marital status, age, religion, hobbies irrelevant to the role — none of this belongs in a professional document with one purpose: getting you an interview.

Apologies or self-deprecation. "I know I do not have all the qualifications, but..." is the worst possible way to start a paragraph. Address gaps proactively, not apologetically: "While my background is in marketing rather than sales, the skills I have built in audience segmentation and lead qualification translate directly to this role."

Lies or exaggerations. A cover letter gets you an interview. The interview will expose any fabrication. Do not claim experience you do not have.

Adapting Your Cover Letter for Different Scenarios

The core structure stays the same, but the emphasis shifts depending on where you are in your career.

Entry-Level and New Graduate Applicants

Lean into what you do have: coursework, academic projects, internships, volunteer work, extracurricular leadership. The key is specificity. "I led a team of four students in a semester-long market research project for a local nonprofit, delivering a competitive analysis that the organization used to reposition their fundraising strategy" is compelling. "I completed relevant coursework" is not.

Focus on one strong example rather than listing everything. For a full walkthrough, our guide to cover letters with no experience covers the approach in detail.

Experienced Professionals

You have the opposite problem: too much to choose from. The discipline is selection. Do not try to include every accomplishment from a ten-year career. Pick the one or two stories most relevant to this specific role.

Experienced candidates can also demonstrate pattern recognition: "I have built three demand generation programs from the ground up at companies in the 50-to-200 employee range, and each time the challenge was the same: limited budget, no existing pipeline, a sales team that needed leads yesterday. Your posting describes exactly that situation." That level of insight is far more valuable than a list of job titles.

Career Changers

Your cover letter matters more than anyone else's, because your resume actively works against you. The body paragraph needs to establish that your skills transfer to the new field and explain why you are making the change. Without the transferable skills argument, you look unqualified. Without the motivation, you look like you are applying randomly.

Our career change cover letter guide has two full annotated examples that demonstrate this approach.

How Resume Tailoring Complements Your Cover Letter

Here is something most cover letter advice ignores: your cover letter does not exist in isolation. It arrives alongside your resume, and the two documents either reinforce each other or undermine each other.

When your resume is generic — the same version you send to every job — your cover letter has to work overtime. It has to explain why your experience is relevant because your resume does not make that obvious. That is a lot of weight to put on a three-paragraph letter.

When your resume is tailored to the specific job description, everything changes. Your resume already mirrors the job's language, highlights the most relevant accomplishments, and passes the ATS keyword screen. The cover letter is free to do what it does best: add personality, tell a story, explain motivation, and make the human connection that a resume cannot.

The strongest applications treat the resume and cover letter as a coordinated pair. The resume answers "is this person qualified?" The cover letter answers "is this person interesting?" Neither should be doing the other's job.

This is also why effective cover letter content starts before you write the letter. If you tailor your resume first, you know which qualifications are already front and center. Your cover letter can pick a different angle — a story behind one of those qualifications, a company-specific connection, a motivation the resume cannot convey. The two documents complement each other instead of repeating each other.

If you are applying to multiple roles, tailoring both documents sounds exhausting. It does not have to be. ApplyFaster generates a tailored resume and cover letter matched to each job description, so both documents tell one consistent, targeted story.

The Bottom Line

A cover letter is a short document with a narrow purpose: convince a hiring manager that you are worth a conversation. Everything you include should serve that purpose. Everything that does not is taking up space that something better could fill.

Get the structure right — header, opening hook, evidence-based body, specific closing, clean sign-off. Leave out the noise — salary talk, generic praise, negative commentary, resume repetition. Adapt the emphasis based on where you are in your career. And make sure your resume is doing its share of the work so your cover letter does not have to carry the whole application on its own.

That is what to include in a cover letter. Now write one that gets you in the room.

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