ATS scores · original research
What is a good ATS score? 70, 80 and 85 compared on 1,085 real checks
A good ATS score is 85 or higher, but there is no pass mark. In our data an 85 is above 62.2% of resumes, 80 is the median, and a score under 70 usually means a formatting problem rather than a wording problem.
Across 1,085 real resume checks on ResumeAtlas (March 2026 – June 2026), the median ATS score was 80; 37.8% scored 85 or higher and 12.5% scored below 70. Employers' systems do not grade you with a number like this. The score shows how reliably your file is read.
Score under 70, or details missing?
That is usually the file format, such as columns, tables or text boxes. Check my resume's ATS parsing — free, no signup.
Score is fine but no replies?
That is usually the fit with the job. Check my resume against a job description, also free.
Last updated: October 25, 2026
Where your number sits
Every “good ATS score” article on the web quotes a threshold — 70, 75, 80 or 85 — and none of them says how many resumes actually clear it. This is the distribution behind the blended ATS score ResumeAtlas assigned in 1,085 resume-vs-job-description analyses between March 2026 – June 2026. The right-hand column is the one that answers “is mine good”: the share of resumes at or above each band.
| Score | Share of resumes | At or above this band |
|---|---|---|
| 90–100 | 27.6% (300) | 27.6% |
| 80–89 | 27.7% (301) | 55.4% |
| 70–79 | 32.1% (348) | 87.5% |
| 60–69 | 4.5% (49) | 92% |
| 50–59 | 0% (0) | 92% |
| 40–49 | 3.3% (36) | 95.3% |
| 30–39 | 2.2% (24) | 97.5% |
| 20–29 | 1% (11) | 98.5% |
| 10–19 | 0.9% (10) | 99.4% |
| 0–9 | 0.6% (6) | 100% |
n = 1,085 analyses, 2026-03-26 to 2026-06-19. Median 80; middle half of resumes scored 72–90. Bands with 0% are real: the model's scores cluster around round numbers, so some ten-point ranges are empty.
Is 70 a good ATS score?
Workable, not strong. 87.5% of resumes scored 70 or more, so a 70 is below the median of 80. Below 70 is where formatting problems cluster; fix the file first.
Is 75 a good ATS score?
Below average. A 75 is above 31.2% of the resumes we scored and below the median of 80. The file reads, but layout or section problems are costing points.
Is 80 a good ATS score?
Average — it is the median. An 80 is above 44.6% of resumes and 55.4% scored 80 or more. Mid-pack, not a pass; the fixes left are usually small.
Is 85 a good ATS score?
Yes. Only 37.8% of resumes reached 85; a 90 puts you in the top 27.6%. Past this point, stop polishing the score and work on fit.
Is a 90 ATS score good?
Yes, but it is not a golden ticket. 27.6% of resumes reached 90. It says your file reads well, not that you fit a given job.
“ATS score” means three different things
The reason one tool gives your resume a 60 and another an 85 is usually not that one of them is broken. They are measuring different things and calling both an “ATS score”. Three numbers travel under that name, and you should know which one you are looking at before you react to it.
| Score | What it measures | In our data | A low number means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parse score | Whether a hiring system can read your name, contact details, section headings, jobs with dates, skills and education from your file. It depends on the file alone. | Median 84 across 218 submitted resumes; 16.1% below 70, 48.2% at 85+. | Formatting is losing content before anyone reads it. Fix the layout, not the words. |
| Match score | How many of one posting's required keywords your resume demonstrates. A property of the pair (resume, job) — the same resume gets a different number for every posting. | Median 80% across 2,955 resume-vs-posting analyses; 37.6% below 70, 43.9% at 85+. | Either the fit is weak or the evidence is in the wrong place (skills list, not bullets). |
| Blended / “resume score” | A model's overall judgement of ATS-friendliness — structure, section coverage, formatting red flags, bullet quality — in one 0–100 number. Some builders call a pure writing grade this too. | Median 80 across 1,085 analyses (the table above). | Several small problems at once. Useful as a first look; act on the two numbers above. |
Parse score: ResumeAtlas's own analyzer over 218 resumes people submitted (June 2026 – September 2026). Match and blended scores: resume-vs-job-description analyses in the same dataset as Resume Insights. Each series has its own sample; they are never pooled.
How an ATS score is worked out, and what to do with it
Checkers do not all measure the same thing, so look at what a score is based on before you react to it. There are two kinds that matter, and each points to a different next step.
Parse score: can a system read your file?
The ATS resume checker reads your file the way a hiring system does and looks at the parts it needs: your contact details, your jobs with their dates, your skills, your education and clear section headings. The score drops when something is lost, mixed up or missing from what it read. A part that is simply not in your resume is not held against you.
What to do: if the score is low, the cause is almost always the format, such as columns, tables, text boxes or unusual headings. Switch to a single-column layout with plain headings, then check again. Starting over is often quicker: begin from a free single-column ATS resume template and paste your content in.
Match score: does your resume fit this job?
The resume-vs-job-description check lists what the posting asks for and checks whether your experience shows each requirement. A word sitting only in a skills list counts for less than one backed by a real example.
What to do: for each requirement you are missing, add a real example from your work, then check again against the same posting.
What an employer's system does instead
It does not show a recruiter a score. It reads your file into fields, stores them, and lets the recruiter search and filter. There is no universal pass line. So a checker's number is a guide to two questions, “will my details be read?” and “will a search find me?”, never the employer's verdict on you.
Why the same resume gets 60 on one tool and 85 on another
Four reasons, in order of how often they explain the gap:
- Different measurement. One tool is a parse score, the other a match score (see above). A resume can parse at 95 and match at 40 — right file, wrong job — or match at 90 and parse at 55 — right skills, two-column PDF.
- Different ideas of what the job requires. A match score depends on which words the tool decides the posting asks for. The same resume can score differently on two tools.
- Different priorities. A tool that rewards a readable file and one that rewards good writing can rank the same two resumes in opposite order.
- A writing grade in disguise. Several resume builders label their prose score — action verbs, bullet length, buzzwords — an “ATS score”. It is not measuring anything a hiring system or a recruiter search does.
The things that stop a hiring system reading a resume are known and measurable. In our parsing benchmark of 218 submitted resumes, the most-flagged problems were tables & columns (40.8% of resumes), section detection (39.4% of resumes), icons & graphics (28.4% of resumes) and skills (27.1% of resumes). 62.8% had no readable LinkedIn URL and 7.8% lost the candidate's name to a header band or image. None of that shows up in a match score. If your high score is not turning into interviews, the reasons are usually in the fit, not the file — see why a high ATS score still gets no interviews.
A good score is not a verdict
Since June 2026 every ResumeAtlas analysis also records an application verdict for the specific posting — Apply, Optimize First, or Skip — and an estimate of shortlist odds. Across 1,883 analyses with a verdict, even with median scores around 80:
41.6%
rated Apply as-is · median shortlist odds 72%
40.1%
rated Optimize First · median odds 42%
18.3%
rated Skip · median odds 12%
40.1% of resumes — most of which would pass any published “good score” threshold — still came back Optimize First — a requirement the posting insists on was not proven in a bullet. The score tells you the file reads; the verdict tells you whether to send it. That is why this page does not end at “85 is good”. See why resumes with good scores still get no interviews.
Median ATS score 80. Across 1,085 real resume checks (March 2026 – June 2026), 37.8% of resumes scored 85 or higher and 12.5% scored below 70 — an 85 is a top-38% score, not a pass mark. See all 2,969 analyses →
What to do at each score
The bands are ResumeAtlas's own (below 70 / 70–84 / 85 and up) and are stated as such — no employer publishes theirs. They are useful because each band has a different next step.
Below 70 — a formatting problem before it is a keyword problem
Parts of your resume are not being read. Do not touch the wording yet: rebuild the layout as a single column with standard headings, then re-check. The ATS format converter does that in one pass (free to convert and preview, no signup), and the checker shows which parts of your resume could not be read.
70–84 — the file reads; the fit leaks
Contact and sections extract; points are going on a skills grid, a creative heading or a keyword that lives only in the skills list. Move the evidence into experience bullets — one bullet per requirement the posting names — and score the resume against the actual posting to see which requirements are still unproven. If the bullets have no numbers in them, start with quantifying your accomplishments.
85 and up — stop polishing the score
Another five points on a parse score changes nothing a recruiter sees. Spend the time on the specific job: run the verdict for that posting, fix the one or two requirements it flags, and send it with the job-description check. Chasing a 95 is how people end up with a keyword-stuffed resume that reads badly to the human who eventually opens it.
Can ChatGPT check my ATS score?
It can give you a number, and the number is not meaningless — but it is a writing grade with a guess at keywords, not a test of the file. A chat model reads the text you paste. It never sees the file itself. So it cannot tell you that your two-column layout mixes up your lines, that your name sits in a header image, or that your dates are inside a table, which are the things that make a hiring system lose details. Use it to rewrite bullets and to check whether your experience addresses a posting. Use a checker to test the file. Both of ours are free with no signup: the checker for the file, the job-description check for the fit. If you want to see how other free checkers score the same file, they are compared on best free ATS resume checkers.
Do ATS scores matter? Are checkers legit?
A checker can accurately tell you one thing: whether a hiring system can read your name, dates, job titles, skills and education cleanly from your file. That matters, because a resume whose fields come back empty is sorted too far down a recruiter's search to be opened — not rejected by a switch, just never seen. No checker, including ours, can tell you an employer's scoring or ranking logic, and any tool that claims a single universal pass/fail score is selling certainty it does not have.
When to ignore a score: when it is a prose grade from a builder that rewards buzzwords, when it moves ten points after you change a font, or when it is the only feedback the tool gives. When to take it seriously: when the tool tells you which part of your resume could not be read, so you can fix it instead of trusting a number.
Method and limits
These are resume-vs-job-description analyses run on ResumeAtlas, not a survey of all resumes. The sample skews toward software, data and engineering roles, so the specific tools below reflect those postings more than hiring overall.
- Blended ATS score — the 0–100 judgement the ResumeAtlas analyzer assigned to each resume in resume-vs-job-description runs, n = 1,085, 2026-03-26 to 2026-06-19. Later analyzer versions report the match score in that field instead, so this series is fixed at that window rather than mixed with a different measurement.
- Match score — required-keyword coverage against the pasted posting, n = 2,955, 2026-03-26 to 2026-10-28, updated as the dataset grows.
- Parse score and parse checks — ResumeAtlas's checker (the same checks you run on the ATS resume checker) over n = 218 distinct resumes real people submitted, 2026-06-23 to 2026-09-20; 16.5% did not produce a usable record.
- Verdict split — n = 1,883 analyses that recorded a verdict, 2026-06-19 to 2026-10-28.
What this data does not prove
- PDF vs DOCX parse rates on the submitted resumes — the source file type is not stored. The page answers the question from 35 template pairs rendered both ways instead (see the PDF or Word card).
- Page-count effects — not stored.
- Bullet structure — text extraction normalises or strips bullet glyphs, so a low bullet count here is an extraction artefact, not the resume.
- Any specific commercial ATS (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Taleo, SAP). This benchmark tested the ResumeAtlas analyzer, which models the shared text-extraction stage — not any one vendor's parser.
- Hiring outcomes — nothing here records whether a resume led to an interview.
- Whether any score predicts an interview — nothing here records a hiring outcome.
Data generated 2026-10-28 (analyses) and 2026-09-20 (parsing benchmark). Aggregate only — no resume text or personal data. Free to cite with attribution; the full dataset and a CSV are on Resume Insights.
FAQ
What ATS score do you need to pass?
There is no pass mark, because an employer's system does not grade you — it reads your file and lets a recruiter search and sort. A checker's number tells you how reliably your file is read (a parse score) or how many of the posting's requirements your resume demonstrates (a match score). Treat below 70 as "fix the file or the fit first" and 85+ as "stop polishing the number"; nothing in between is a rejection.
What ATS score gets an interview?
None on its own. In the 1,883 analyses that recorded an application verdict, only 41.6% were rated ready to send as-is even though the median score sat around 80. The interview comes from the specific posting's must-haves being proven in your bullets — that is what the verdict measures, not the score.
Is a 100 ATS score possible?
Rarely, and it is not the goal. Only 1% of blended scores reached 95 or higher. A 100 on a match score just means every required keyword the tool extracted appears in your experience — which you can reach for one posting and lose on the next.
Why did my score drop after I edited my resume?
Usually one of three things: you moved a keyword from an experience bullet into a skills list (match scores count evidence in bullets), you introduced a layout a hiring system cannot read well (a table, a text box, a two-column section), or you are comparing against a different posting. Undo the layout change, or switch to a single column, and re-run the same posting through the same tool before concluding anything.
Does the file type change the score?
It can change the parse score, not the match score. A single-column PDF or DOCX with real text reads the same; a PDF exported from a design tool with text in shapes, or a scanned image, may be read as empty. If your file looks like that, convert it to a plain single-column PDF or DOCX. Our benchmark does not store file type, so we cannot put a number on the PDF-vs-DOCX gap — that is listed under what the data does not prove.
How often should I check my ATS score?
The parse score once per version of your file. It only changes when the layout does. The match score once per posting you actually intend to apply to, because it is a property of the pair (your resume, that job), not of the resume alone.
See where your resume falls
Upload or paste your resume and get the parse score and the parts of your resume an ATS could not read — free, no signup. Then score it against the posting you are actually applying to.