Good ATS Score 2026: What Counts as Passing

There is no shared industry threshold, and automatic rejection on a percentage is rare. Knowing what a good score looks like in practice helps you understand whether your CV is likely to reach a human reviewer, and what to actually do if yours falls short.

If you want the number for your own CV, our free CV Score tool gives you an 8-point breakdown in about 30 seconds, no account needed. Then use the ranges below to read what your result actually means, and which of the 8 points to fix first.

What Score Should You Actually Aim For?

Employers who set a minimum at all pick their own, and most set none. What stops most applications is volume, not software: a popular role can draw hundreds in days, and a recruiter reads the ones their search surfaces first. On our scoring model, 70 or above gives your CV a reasonable chance of reaching a human reader for most roles.

This does not mean a score of 70 is sufficient for every role. A competitive position with hundreds of applicants sets a higher bar in practice, because the recruiter only has capacity to read a fraction of them. Getting your score as high as possible, rather than just over the line, is always the better outcome.

What Do the Different Score Ranges Mean in Practice?

The bands below are our own, drawn from CV Score data across the CVs people have checked with us. Other tools band differently, and no employer is using these numbers.

A score below 50 usually means significant gaps: missing keywords from the job description, formatting that prevented sections from being read correctly, or absent section headings. A CV in this band is unlikely to surface in a recruiter's search for the role.

A score between 50 and 69 means the CV is readable but the match to this specific job description is weak. A recruiter working through the pile might still find you, but in a competitive process you would rank below better-matched applications.

A score of 70 to 84 is where most competitive applications land. The CV parses cleanly, the key keywords are present, and the structure is readable. This is the most common band among people who have checked a CV with us, and it is the range we would aim for on any role you actually want.

A score of 85 or above means the CV closely mirrors the job description in language and structure. That is reachable when you have tailored the CV to this specific posting rather than sending a generic version.

What does your specific ATS score mean?

If you searched "is 73 a good ATS score" (and a lot of people do, judging by the queries), a 73 puts you in the functional range for most jobs, but the band you're in matters more than the exact number.

Scores in the 60s are borderline. The ATS can read your CV and has found some matches, but there are gaps in vocabulary coverage: specific terms from the job description are probably missing or appearing as paraphrases rather than the exact phrases the system is looking for. You might do fine on some roles, but in a competitive process with lots of applicants, a CV in this range ranks below better-matched ones. Usually one or two targeted edits, mostly around keywords and section headings, are enough to move you into the 70s.

Between 70 and 80, you're in decent shape. The core keywords are there, the ATS can parse your CV correctly, and your document is likely to reach a human reviewer. Most people who've done a basic tailoring pass land somewhere in this range. If you're at 73 or 77 and want to push higher, the skills section is usually where the quick wins are: check which skills the job description lists explicitly and make sure those exact terms appear in yours.

A score of 80 or above means your CV is closely matched to this specific job description. The language reflects the posting, the skills section covers the listed requirements, and the ATS has no structural complaints. Getting there isn't complicated, it just requires treating each application as its own tailoring exercise rather than sending a general version.

Why Is Your ATS Score Job-Specific?

The single most important thing to understand about ATS scoring is that it is not a fixed property of your CV. The same CV can score 82 on one role and 41 on a different role posted the same day, because the score measures how closely your CV matches the language and requirements of one specific job description. A high score on a generic "master CV" means very little. The score that matters is the one you get after tailoring your CV to each specific application.

What Actually Moves Your ATS Score?

The highest-impact improvements are using exact keywords from the job description (not synonyms), switching to a single-column layout, using standard section headings, and ensuring the specific skills listed in the job description appear in your skills section. These changes can move a score from the 40s to the 70s on the same job description in under an hour of editing.

Does your score mean the same thing on every ATS?

Not exactly. Workday, Greenhouse, Taleo, and the dozens of other platforms employers use each parse and weight a CV slightly differently, so a CV that scores well against one system's logic will not score identically against another's. What stays constant across all of them is the underlying principle: they are matching your CV's language against the job description's language, and CVs that use the same terms, headings, and a simple structure parse more reliably everywhere. Our score is a proxy for that shared logic, not a guarantee of what one specific employer's ATS will show.

Related guides

• How to improve your CV ATS score

For more on how this fits together, see How Does ATS Scoring Work? What Applicant Tracking Systems Actually Measure, How to Improve Your CV ATS Score: The Five Changes That Matter Most, and Why Your CV Gets Rejected Before Anyone Reads It: Patterns from Thousands of Applications.