Writing · 2026-08-22 · 13 min read

What not to put on a CV in 2026 (and what HR still needs)

National ID, date of birth, marital status, and salary: when they hurt. What to keep and how to clean the PDF you already have. ClarCV.

What not to put on a CV in 2026 is not a moral list. It is a friction list: data that does not help ATS, that burns the first screen, or that is a legal red flag in some countries. National ID, date of birth, marital status, number of children, current salary, and “references available on request” still show up on PDFs copied from 2012. In Spain many people still add them. In a UK or US process, several of those fields reject you.

This guide goes field by field: what to remove, what to keep by country, and how not to break parsing when you clean. If the file already exists, do not throw it away: trim the header and the margins. Photo detail lives in photo on the CV; this page is the rest of the personal data. ClarCV is how you regenerate the same content without the noise, in a template the filter can read.

You will not anonymise yourself into invisibility. You will leave what a recruiter needs to contact you and judge the work. Everything else is school folklore or a Word template from sixth form.

National ID, NIE, and social-security numbers

Do not put Spanish DNI or NIE on the CV you send to a board or a mass email. It is sensitive, not a hiring keyword, and if the PDF circulates you have exposed identity. The company will ask at contract or verification, in a tighter channel. Narrow exception: some public-sector or security processes want ID in a separate form, not as decoration in the PDF header.

Social-security numbers, bank accounts, or a full passport do not belong on a CV. Ever. If a Latin American “hoja de vida” template includes a cédula by habit, remove it for multinationals and European ATS. You can leave it on an official local public-employment form if that form requires it — that is not the InfoJobs PDF.

Date of birth, age, and marital status

In Spain you still see date of birth. It is not illegal to add it, but it does not help and it feeds bias. ATS does not need your age to extract Python. If you are over 45, the date on line one works against you before anyone reads achievements. Remove it. If they want age, they will infer it from education dates; do not serve it. Sister guide when the issue is cutting a long career: CV if you are over 45 or 50.

Marital status, children, “available to travel because I have no dependents”: out. It is protected information and it sounds like another decade. Travel or shift availability is a work fact (“rotating shifts 2022–2024”), not private life. Nationality: only if the role requires it (work permit, public employment). “Spanish” on a Madrid CV is rarely needed; “EU work authorisation” can be a useful line if it is not obvious.

• Remove: national ID, date of birth, marital status, children, religion, party, a blurry ID photo.
• Remove: current salary and salary expectations on the PDF (that belongs in a form or interview).
• Remove: “references available on request” — it adds nothing; the space is worth more.
• Keep: email, phone, city (not street number), LinkedIn, work authorisation if it applies.
• By country: a photo is often expected in Spain; in the UK/US, no. See the photo guide.

Address, salary, and the 1990s objective

Street, building, and postcode: no. City and, if it helps, “willing to relocate to Bilbao”. A full address is a privacy risk and is not what ATS searches. Salary: do not put it on the CV. If the ad asks for expectations, answer in the portal field or the email, not as a permanent bullet that anchors you low.

The generic “career objective” (“eager to join a leading company…”) is surplus. Replace it with a professional summary of 2–4 lines: role, sector, one proof. The school objective eats space and holds no keywords from the ad.

What HR still expects in 2026

A human in Spain, in ten seconds: name, implied target role, city, whether there is a weird gap, and two achievements with numbers. An ATS: email as text, dates, Experience / Education / Skills headings, keywords from the ad. That is why cutting noise is not “fashionable minimalism”: it lets those signals exist. Document language = ad language. EN/ES detail: CV in English or Spanish.

Irrelevant hobbies, Excel skill bars at 80%, and phone icons are also “what not to put”, as format. They live in icons on the CV and interests on the CV. The test is the same: if it cannot be copied or cannot be defended, cut it.

How to clean the file you already have

Do not redesign in Canva cell by cell. Extract the content, delete ID and date of birth, leave city and phone as text, and put it in one column. In ClarCV you upload the PDF or Word, analysis flags structure and clarity, and you regenerate an ATS template. Free: 3 analyses and 2 downloads / 30 days, no card. Pro €7/month. The checklist tells you when you can hit send.