Cover Letters Still Matter in 2026, Just Not the Way You Think

In November 2025, Forbes asked five hiring experts the same question job seekers keep emailing us about: do cover letters still matter in 2026? Three said yes. Two said, more or less, no. All five were describing the same job market: the same flood of AI-written applications, the same recruiting teams stretched thinner than they were in 2022.

The split is more useful than either answer alone. Paddy Lambros, CEO of the recruiting platform Dex, told Forbes that fewer than 1% of the applications he sees include a cover letter, which is exactly why he still recommends writing one: almost nobody does, so almost anyone who does stands out. Victoria McLean, founder of City CV, disagreed. “Cover letters only matter if they’re explicitly asked for,” she told Forbes. “Otherwise, frankly, they’re a waste of time.” Matt Collingwood, managing director at VIQU IT Recruitment, backed her up with a number of his own: “Less than 5% of CVs sent to us include one.”

The Split Nobody in Hiring Has Actually Resolved

Neither side is inventing this. A 2024 American Staffing Association and Harris Poll survey, cited in the same Forbes piece, found 31% of Americans wouldn’t even apply for a job that required a cover letter, nearly a third of the labor market opting out before the debate even starts. Meanwhile ZipRecruiter career expert Sam DeMase told Forbes the cover letter is “the most human part of the initial hiring process before the interview,” and HR consultant Aime Ayrehart made a narrower point that’s harder to argue with: even if AI handles the early screening, someone eventually reads what you wrote, assuming things go well.

So you’ve got declining submission rates, a chunk of applicants who won’t write one under any circumstance, and hiring experts who can’t agree on whether that’s a problem or the whole point. I don’t think there’s a clean resolution here, and I’d be skeptical of anyone who claims one.

So, Do Cover Letters Still Matter in 2026?

Yes, for most roles, and the data is less ambiguous than the anecdotes above suggest. ResumeGenius surveyed 625 U.S. hiring managers and found 83% always or frequently read cover letters, including 73% who read them even when the application marked the field optional. Only 4% said they never or rarely bother.

Timing matters too. 45% of the hiring managers in that same survey said they read the cover letter before the resume, not after, which quietly undercuts the common advice to treat it as an afterthought you attach once the resume is finished. If nearly half your audience reads it first, it’s doing more work than a formality.

None of that means a bad cover letter helps you. A generic one, the kind that could’ve gone to any company in your industry, mostly just wastes the 45% who see it first. Specific beats present.

The Numbers, Side by Side

Three surveys, three different questions, one overlapping answer. Worth reading the raw numbers before anyone’s interpretation of them, including mine.

A Cover Letter in the AI Era Is a Different Bet

The 2026 version of this question diverges from the 2019 version in one place. It used to be about whether anyone would read it. A cover letter in the AI era is now also about whether anyone believes you wrote it.

TopResume surveyed 600 U.S. hiring managers in May 2025 and found 33.5% believe they can spot an AI-generated resume in under 20 seconds. (Millennial and Gen X managers were the most confident, at roughly 35%; Gen Z managers were the least, at 19.8%, which says as much about who’s doing the hiring now as it does about the AI.) Nearly one in five, 19.6%, said they’d reject a candidate outright for submitting an AI-generated resume or cover letter. A quarter of respondents said AI shouldn’t touch the cover letter specifically, even though a slight majority, 52%, were fine with AI helping proofread or draft one, as long as the final version reflected the applicant’s own words.

I don’t know how much of that 33.5% detection claim would survive an actual blind test. Self-reporting “I can tell” isn’t the same as a controlled study where hiring managers get shown letters and graded on accuracy, and TopResume’s own writeup doesn’t separate confidence from correctness. What I do trust is the 25% who said no AI on the cover letter, full stop, because that’s a stated policy, not a claimed skill.

My honest read: the scarcity argument from Lambros is the stronger one right now. When 99 out of 100 applicants skip the letter entirely, the cost of writing a genuinely specific one is close to zero, and the upside, standing out in a pile where almost nothing else does, is real. Disagree if you want. I’ve been wrong about hiring trends before.

The Irony Nobody’s Naming

Put the numbers next to each other and something uncomfortable falls out: the rarer cover letters get, the more a genuinely tailored one is worth writing, and the more an obviously AI-generated one costs you. Scarcity raises the ceiling and the floor at the same time.

If You Write One, Make It Provably Yours

“Provably yours” means naming the team, pointing at something specific from the job description, and dropping in one detail a template couldn’t have guessed. We wrote a full walkthrough of that structure, including where engineers specifically get it wrong, in our guide to writing a tech cover letter that actually gets read. This post isn’t trying to repeat that one. That’s the how. This is the why.

If you want a faster starting point than a blank page, LastRound’s free Cover Letter Generator works from the job description and your resume text, not a generic template. Paste both in, pick a tone (professional, warm, or direct) and a length (short, medium, or long), and it grounds the draft in what you actually pasted instead of inventing experience you don’t have. It won’t write the one detail that makes a letter provably yours. It just gets you to a real first draft faster, so you have time to add that detail yourself.

And if the real bottleneck isn’t any single cover letter but getting enough tailored applications out the door in the first place, that’s a different tool for a different problem: LastRound’s Auto-Apply writes a tailored resume and cover letter for every job it applies to on your behalf, queued for your review before anything actually sends.

How often a cover letter actually gets attached

A number from our own product, since this post is otherwise built on survey data.

Between 5 and 25 July 2026, LastRound Auto-Apply handled 109 applications from 6 active users. 99 of them went out with a cover letter generated against that specific posting.

That’s about 91%. Which is a strange rate when you set it beside the surveys above showing most recruiters say they rarely read one.

Our read is that the cost calculation changed rather than the value of the letter. When writing one takes twenty minutes, you skip it for the roles you care less about. When it’s drafted for you and waiting in a review queue, you attach it, because the only remaining cost is reading it.

Whether those 99 letters were read by anyone, we have no way of knowing.

FAQ

Are cover letters necessary in 2026?

For most roles, yes, though “necessary” depends on what the listing actually asks for. ResumeGenius’s survey of 625 hiring managers found 73% read the cover letter even when it’s marked optional, so treating it as skippable is a bet against most of your actual audience.

Can recruiters tell if a cover letter was written by AI?

A meaningful share believe they can. TopResume’s 2025 survey of 600 hiring managers found 33.5% say they can spot an AI-generated resume in under 20 seconds, and 19.6% would reject a candidate outright for an AI-generated cover letter. Whether that confidence matches their real-world accuracy is a separate, harder question nobody’s published a controlled test of yet.

Should I skip the cover letter if the application marks it optional?

Only if you genuinely have nothing specific to add. The data leans toward writing one anyway: 73% of hiring managers in the ResumeGenius survey read it even when it’s optional, and a specific two-paragraph letter costs you fifteen minutes. What you shouldn’t do is submit a generic one just to check a box. That’s closer to skipping it than actually helping yourself.

Five hiring experts couldn’t agree on this in the same Forbes article cited above. A blog post isn’t going to settle it either. What I’ll say is narrower: in a market where 99 out of 100 applicants aren’t writing one, and where a fifth of hiring managers say they’d reject an obviously AI-written one on sight, the letter you actually sit down and write yourself is doing more work than it did five years ago, not less.