Your city and state, not your street. That is not a matter of taste. It follows from what the line is read for: someone is checking whether you can be where the job needs you to be. A street address does not answer that question any better than a city does, and it hands a reader several things they were not asking for.
What the line is actually parsed for
The contact record behind this product holds a name, an email address, a phone number, a set of links and a single free-text location. There is no street field and no postal code field, so a street address arriving in an uploaded file has nowhere structured to land. Our ATS resume checker is blunter still: its contact check passes once it finds an email address near the top of the document, notes a phone number if one is there, and never looks for a street address at all. Adding one cannot move that result, because nothing is reading it.
Other systems are not obliged to work the same way, and you cannot inspect the one a given employer runs. That is the point. A street address is a cost you can see set against a benefit nobody has been able to name.
Let the posting tell you how precise to be
The useful question is not how much address to include, it is what the posting is filtering on. Write the answer to that, and stop.
- Onsite or hybrid in one metro. Give the city and state the way the posting writes them. The reader is estimating a commute, and a metro is enough to do that.
- Remote with a region or time-zone constraint. State the constraint you satisfy, for example your country, or your working time zone. A city alone leaves the reader to look it up.
- Remote with a work-authorisation constraint. Location is standing in for eligibility, so answer eligibility directly rather than hoping a city implies it.
- Relocating. Name the destination and say you are relocating there. A current city that contradicts the posting reads as a mismatch, and a destination city with no explanation reads as a mistake.
The failure mode here is precision in the wrong direction: a full street address on an application for a fully remote role tells the reader nothing they can use, while a resume that says nothing about location on an onsite role leaves them guessing.
What a full address costs
A resume file travels further than the application you sent it with. It gets forwarded, stored in a candidate database, sometimes attached to a profile on a job board. Your home address is the one line on the page that is worth something to a person who is not trying to hire you.
It also invites a judgement you never get to answer. A reader who decides your commute looks unsustainable, or who draws a conclusion from the neighbourhood, does that silently and before you have spoken to anyone. City and state give them the fact they need and very little to speculate with.
Forms are not resumes
Some applications ask for a full mailing address in a required field, and background-check or onboarding paperwork usually asks for an address history. Fill those in. They are the form's requirement, and the form is a separate document from your resume. Answering a required field honestly is not a reason to print the same information across the top of a page that will be read by people who did not ask for it.
Check the line survives the file
Once the contact line says what you want it to say, confirm a parser can still read it. Contact details sitting in a header, a text box or a table are a common way for a name and an email address to vanish between your screen and a recruiter's, which is the failure worth ruling out first. Run the file through the ATS resume checker, and if the result surprises you, what an ATS resume is covers why formatting decides this more often than wording does.
Location is one of the few lines that genuinely changes from one application to the next. The rest of what should change, and what can safely stay as it is, is in our guide on tailoring a resume to a job description.