# Business Letter Heading: What Goes at the Top and Where Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/business-letter-heading/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/business-letter-heading.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer What goes in a business letter heading, in what order, and where it sits on the page - the five heading types, the date format, and what to leave out. ## Key facts - Title: Business Letter Heading: What Goes at the Top and Where - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Influence - Primary keyword: business letter heading - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/business-letter-heading/ ## What this page covers - What goes in a business letter heading, in what order, and where it sits on the page - the five heading types, the date format, and what to leave out. - Practical guidance for business letter heading - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation A business letter heading is the block at the top of the page that carries your return address and the date: your street address, city, state, and ZIP on the first lines, then the date written out in full one line below. Your own name does not go there — it belongs in the [signature block](/knowledge/communication/formal-business-letter/) at the bottom of the letter. That last rule catches most people out, and it is not the only one. Where the block sits on the page, what changes when the paper already carries a letterhead, and how far down the recipient's address begins are all settled by convention rather than preference. That is good news: [fixed conventions](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/workplace-etiquette/) can simply be learned, which is faster than developing taste. ## What a business letter heading contains Read three guides and you may come away with three slightly different answers about where the heading ends. In the narrow sense it is two things — your return address and the date. Some writing resources, including Elite Editing, fold the recipient's address into "the heading" as well. The seven-part breakdown used by Indeed and by university writing centers such as Northern Michigan University treats that recipient block as its own component, the inside address. The disagreement stops mattering once you produce all three in the right order: - Your street address, then city, state, and ZIP - An optional contact line — phone or email — directly above the date - The date, one line below the address - A gap, then the recipient's inside address, about two lines further down The one genuine trap is the name. Guidance from The Hartford's business letter format resource is explicit that the return address holds only the street address, city, and ZIP — not your name and not your job title. The reason is structural rather than stylistic: you sign the letter, so your name arrives at the bottom, and repeating it at the top is redundant. A heading that opens with your name is the clearest single signal that someone reached for a personal-letter template. ## The five types of business letter heading The heading varies along two axes. The first is what you have to supply, which depends on whether you are writing on company stationery. The second is where the block sits, which is decided by the letter's format style. Add the case where the letter is not on paper at all, and there are five headings you are realistically going to meet. ### The letterhead heading Pre-printed company stationery already carries the organization's name, logo, address, and contact details, so you do not retype any of it. You begin with the date, placed roughly two to six lines below the letterhead, and go straight on to the inside address. The distinguishing feature is that the date is the first thing you type. Letterhead also comes with house rules — margins, fonts, where the date sits — and those override any template you find online, including this one. ### The typed return-address heading On plain paper you supply the sender information yourself: street address, then city, state, and ZIP, with the date one line beneath. This is the version most people actually need, because most people writing a business letter are writing as themselves rather than on behalf of an employer. Use your home address when the letter serves your own interests — a cover letter, an application, a complaint — and your work address when you are writing on the organization's behalf. The distinguishing feature is that it is address-only: no name, no title. ### The full block heading Every line runs flush to the left margin — return address, date, inside address, and everything after it. The letter is single-spaced, with a blank line between paragraphs and no first-line indentation anywhere. This is the most common and the most formal arrangement, and it is the default for cover letters, thank-you letters, and letters of recommendation. Its distinguishing feature is the absence of a single tab: if you are unsure which style to use, this is the safe answer. ### The modified block heading Here the sender's address and the date move across the page while the body stays left-aligned, producing a slightly less formal letter. Sources disagree on the specifics, and it is worth knowing that before you go hunting for a definitive answer: The Hartford describes the date as tabbed to the center point, while Indeed Canada and Ginger describe the sender's address as right-aligned. Both are in circulation and neither is wrong. The distinguishing feature is simply that the heading and the body no longer share a margin. Semi-block, the third named style, uses the same heading and differs only in that the body paragraphs are indented — so it presents no new heading decision at all. ### The email and attachment heading This is the case the standard guides barely cover, and it is now the most common one. When the letter is the [body of an email](/knowledge/communication/email-letter-writing/), the heading largely collapses: the From field carries your identity, the timestamp carries the date, and your signature block carries the address and contact details. Retyping a return address above the [salutation](/knowledge/communication/business-letter-introduction/) reads as odd rather than as formal. When the letter travels as a PDF attachment, it is a letter again and keeps the full heading, inside address included. The distinguishing feature is that the medium supplies part of the heading for you, so the question to ask is which parts are already handled. ## Details that decide whether the heading looks right Write the date out in full — January 1, 2026, or 1 January 2026 — rather than in numerals. This is not fussiness. Written 01/02/2026, the date means January 2 to an American reader and 1 February to a British or European one, so a numeric date in cross-border correspondence is genuinely ambiguous. Spell out street-type words rather than abbreviating them: Avenue, Circle, Court, Drive, Street. This applies to your address and the recipient's alike. Give the inside address more than you gave your own. It carries the recipient's full name, their job title, the company name, and then the street address, city, state, and ZIP — in that order, with the person above the organization. Do not indent it, and leave about two lines between it and the date. Treat the blank lines as content. Spacing is doing the work that punctuation does elsewhere in writing, which is why every guide specifies line counts rather than leaving them to the eye. None of this is hard, and almost none of it is taught. Most people assemble their sense of what a professional document should look like from whatever examples happened to cross their desk, which is how a capable writer reaches a first job without knowing that a return address leaves off the name. Letter format is one small corner of that territory, and if you would rather see the rest of it mapped than find the gaps one at a time, you can [check your work skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) for free. ## The skills that make formal writing easier than it looks A heading is a five-minute problem. People search for it anyway because the letter around it usually matters — a job they want, a refund they are owed, a resignation they need to handle without burning anything down. Watch someone who writes those letters easily and the format turns out to be the least of what they are doing. **Communication** is the closest of the three. Choosing to write at all is part of it: writing is the right medium when the other person needs a record, or time to consider, or when the message runs one way. Once that choice is made, the principles that govern any professional message govern this one — lead with the main point, be clear and direct, be brief, proofread before it goes. The heading is where that starts, because it answers the reader's first four questions before the salutation even arrives: who is writing, from where, when, and how to reply. **Professional Behaviors** covers the part that can feel arbitrary. Workplace etiquette is largely a set of small conventions — being on time, dressing for the role, following the organization's own policies — that colleagues read as evidence of whether you know how things are done. A letter heading is that same signal in written form, which is why house letterhead rules outrank any template you find. The conventions themselves are arbitrary; knowing that they exist is not. **Influence** matters because almost every business letter is a request. You are asking someone to hire you, refund you, approve something, or release you from something. Establishing credibility early and keeping the ask simple is much of the difference between a letter that gets acted on and one that gets filed, and the heading does a quiet share of that work: it tells the reader you know the form, and it gives them a route to say yes without hunting for your contact details. Notice that none of the three is really about stationery. They are the habits that decide whether any piece of writing does its job, and the heading is just the most visible place they surface. They also belong to a wider set of **twelve work skills**, which is what the **free** Work Skills Test measures — so you can see [where each of these stands](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) for you rather than assuming. A weak one is not a verdict on you; it marks something nobody has shown you yet. You may already do parts of this without filing it under "skill" — rereading something before you send it, thinking about who is going to open it, noticing when a message you wrote landed differently than you meant. The heading rules are that instinct written down by people who had it first. Looking a convention up rather than guessing at it is the concrete version of the same instinct, and it is not a small thing; most people send the letter and hope. You can keep building on that without becoming a different sort of person, because these are habits rather than traits, and habits move. They also tend to count for more as you go. A letter is a low-stakes place to be judged on your written work. A proposal, a client email, or a case you are making to someone two levels above you is not — and the same handful of skills is running underneath all of them. ## Start with an honest read on where you stand You have the format; the only thing left is to find out which of the skills underneath it are already working for you. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. It takes you through all twelve — communication and professional conduct among them — shows you where each of yours sits today, and points to the ones worth your attention first. No preparation and no cost: just a starting point, so that the next time you are getting a document right, you already know which parts you handle well and which deserve a second pass. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and about 7 minutes from start to finish.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? What goes in a business letter heading, in what order, and where it sits on the page - the five heading types, the date format, and what to leave out. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Professional Behaviors, Influence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/business-letter-heading/ Preferred summary: "What goes in a business letter heading, in what order, and where it sits on the page - the five heading types, the date format, and what to leave out." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.