Free ATS Score Checker: Check Your CV in 30 Seconds

An ATS score checker tells you how CV-parsing software would read your CV before you send it anywhere. Ours does this for free, in about 30 seconds, with no account or card required.

Upload your CV to the CV Score tool and you'll get a percentage score plus a full breakdown across eight checks: formatting, section structure, contact details, quantified results, skills, experience descriptions, generic phrases and summary quality. Each one carries its own weighting rather than getting lumped into a single vague number, so you can see exactly where the points are coming from and where they're not.

How the score is actually built

Formatting and technical compatibility carries the most weight of any single check, worth a fifth of your total score, because it decides whether an ATS can read your CV at all before it even gets to judge the content. A clean, single-column layout in a standard font scores full marks here. Multi-column templates, Canva exports and text boxes lose points, sometimes most of them, because a lot of parsing software simply can't extract text from that layout correctly.

Section structure, quantified results and experience descriptions each carry the next largest share. Section structure checks whether the five sections an ATS expects, contact details, summary, experience, education and skills, are all present and labelled in a way the system recognises. Quantified results looks specifically at your most recent roles and checks whether at least a couple of them include a number: a percentage, a headcount, a budget, anything that turns "responsible for the team" into "managed a team of 12." Experience descriptions checks that those roles have enough actual description behind them, not just a job title with nothing underneath.

Skills quality, contact completeness and summary quality each add a smaller, equal share. Skills quality rewards a focused list: roughly eight to fifteen skills scores best, since a handful looks thin and thirty reads as keyword stuffing. Contact completeness checks that your name, email, phone number, location and LinkedIn URL are all there, missing your LinkedIn specifically will always flag a warning, even if everything else is complete, because it's one of the most common and easiest things to fix. Summary quality looks for a proper professional summary of a few sentences rather than one line or nothing at all. Generic, overused phrases like "hardworking" or "team player" cost you a small amount each time they show up, since they take up space without telling an ATS or a recruiter anything specific about you.

Why the breakdown matters more than the headline number

A single percentage tells you something's off. It doesn't tell you what. Two CVs can both score 61% for entirely different reasons, one because of a two-column template a parser can't read, the other because the experience section is all job titles with no detail underneath. The breakdown separates those cases out, so you fix the actual problem instead of rewriting content that was already fine, or reformatting a document whose real issue was thin bullet points.

Checking a CV with no job in mind yet

The free checker works on its own, without a job description, because it's measuring general CV quality and ATS compatibility rather than matching you against one specific posting. That makes it useful early on, before you've picked a role to apply for, or if you're just keeping your CV in good shape between applications. Once you've added a real job to your tracker, Gap Analysis compares your CV against that job's exact wording and flags the specific keywords it's missing, on top of the general checks here.

What to do with a low score

Start with whichever of the eight checks is lowest, not with whichever feels most important. Formatting problems, tables, columns, graphical headers, usually need a layout change rather than new content, and that single change can move your score more than an hour spent rewriting bullet points. A thin skills section or missing numbers in your experience bullets are quicker edits: adding a figure to two or three bullets, or trimming an overloaded skills list down to the ones that actually matter for the roles you want, tends to move the needle fast. Most CVs gain several points within a few minutes of targeted changes once you know which check to aim at.

Related guides

• What is a good ATS score?
• How is my ATS score calculated?

For more on how this fits together, see Good ATS Score 2026: What Counts as Passing, How Is My ATS Score Calculated? The 8 Factors, Explained, and How Does ATS Scoring Work? What Applicant Tracking Systems Actually Measure.