# How to Write the Heading of a Formal Letter Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/heading-of-a-formal-letter/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/heading-of-a-formal-letter.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 The heading of a formal letter holds your address and the date - not your name. Here are its four parts, the order they go in, and where the block sits. ## Key facts - Title: How to Write the Heading of a Formal Letter - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Influence - Primary keyword: heading of a formal letter - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/heading-of-a-formal-letter/ ## What this page covers - The heading of a formal letter holds your address and the date - not your name. Here are its four parts, the order they go in, and where the block sits. - Practical guidance for heading of a formal letter - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The heading of a formal letter is the block at the top of the page carrying your return address and the date: street address, then city, state, and postal code, with the date written in full one line below. Your name is not part of it — that goes at the bottom, with your signature. That last rule is the one that catches people, and it is not the only convention here with more than one version in circulation. ## The four parts of the heading of a formal letter Guides disagree about where the heading ends. Northern Michigan University's writing center takes the narrow view — the return address with the date on the last line, plus an optional line above the date for a phone number, fax number, or email address — while other sources treat the heading as everything above the [salutation](/knowledge/communication/business-letter-introduction/), recipient's address included. The disagreement does not need settling, because Elite Editing states the purpose in a way that resolves it: the heading exists to tell the recipient where the letter came from and to give them somewhere to reply. Every line either identifies a sender, fixes a date, or names a recipient. That leaves four parts, in this order: - Your street address, then city, state, and postal code - An optional contact line — phone or email — directly above the date - The date, one line below the address - The recipient's address, roughly two lines further down and left-aligned Your name does none of those three jobs at the top of the page, which is why it is not up there. You are about to [sign the letter](/knowledge/communication/formal-business-letter/). ### The sender's address This is your street address, then your city, state, and postal code — and nothing else. No name, no job title, no company. On a plain sheet of paper it is the first thing you type, and it runs two to four lines depending on your address. Spell street-type words out in full while you are at it: Avenue, Court, Drive, Street. Which address you use depends on who the letter is really from. Writing on your own behalf — an application, a complaint, a notice to a landlord — use your home address, because the reply needs to reach you. Writing on your employer's behalf, use the work address. The distinguishing feature of this part is what it leaves out: it is address-only, and that single omission is most of the difference between a formal letter and a personal one dressed up as one. ### The date line The date goes on its own line, one line below the address, with a blank line between the two. That gap is not decoration. It separates two different kinds of information and makes the date easy to find, which matters because the date is what the letter gets filed and referred to by. Guidance on letter formatting errors repeatedly names alignment and spacing as the thing people neglect, with sections crammed together rather than separated — spacing carries information in a letter the way punctuation carries it in a sentence, which is why guides specify line counts instead of leaving it to your eye. Write the date out. Purdue OWL's guide to the basic business letter has you write the month, day, and year in full, roughly two inches from the top of the page, in the American order with the month first — June 11, 2001, in its own example. Numerals are the trap: 01/02/2026 reads as January 2 to an American and as 1 February across most of Europe, so a numeric date on a letter that crosses a border is genuinely ambiguous. The date is also the only part of the heading that is never optional, because everything else can be supplied by something other than you. ### The recipient's inside address The recipient's block sits about two lines below the date, left-aligned and not indented. It is more detailed than your own: Northern Michigan University's writing center specifies the recipient's full name and address, written out rather than abbreviated, with title names such as Dr. included whenever you know them. Their job title and organization go between the name and the street address. The asymmetry is deliberate. Your block gives a place, because a reply only has to find you; theirs gives a person and a place, because the letter has to reach one named human inside an organization that may handle a great deal of mail. Guidance on common formatting errors keeps returning to this same block — name, title, company, address, in that order — because it is where the wrong information most often ends up. Proofread it, too: a misspelling in someone's name is the one error in a formal letter that cannot be read as a typo. ### The letterhead If the letter goes out on company stationery, the organization has already supplied your half of the heading. Its name, logo, address, and contact details are printed there, and retyping them looks like a mistake — you begin with the date instead and go straight on to the inside address. Letterhead also arrives with house rules about margins, fonts, and where the date sits, and business writing guides treat that consistency as part of what gives the document its authority. Those rules override any template you find online, this one included. ## Where the heading of a formal letter sits on the page Everything so far is content. The remaining decision is alignment, and it is the one place where what you were taught and what you find online are most likely to disagree — school usually teaches the address in the top right corner, while much of the guidance online shows it flush left. Both are real. They belong to different format styles, and the styles have names. **Full block** puts every line against the left margin — your address, the date, the inside address, and every paragraph after them — with no indentation anywhere and a blank line between paragraphs. It is the most common arrangement and the most formal of the three, and with no particular reason to choose otherwise, it is the correct default. **Modified block** moves the sender's address and the date across the page while the body stays left-aligned. Sources describe the destination differently — some as right-aligned, some as tabbed to the center point — so both are in use, and neither is the single definitive answer you may be hunting for. This is where the top-right version you may once have been marked on comes from, and it is not wrong — only marginally less formal, which makes it a sensible choice when you already have a working relationship with the person and a weaker one when the letter goes to someone who has never met you. **Semi-block** uses that same heading and indents only the body paragraphs, so it presents no new heading decision at all. Almost none of this is taught anywhere. Most people assemble their sense of what a professional document should look like from whatever examples happened to pass in front of them, which is how a perfectly capable person reaches a first job without knowing that a return address leaves the name off. The format you can look up in five minutes. What you cannot look up is whether the [writing underneath it](/knowledge/communication/business-writing/) is doing its job — and when the letter actually matters, it is worth knowing [where your work skills stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you send it. It is free, and gaps like these turn out to be learnable rather than fixed. ## The skills that make formal writing feel less like guesswork A heading is a five-minute problem. People look it up anyway, and almost always because the letter around it matters — a job, a refund, a resignation that has to be handled right the first time. Watch someone who writes those letters without effort and the formatting turns out to be the smallest part of what they are doing. **Communication** covers a decision you already made without noticing. Choosing to write rather than call is a real choice, and it is the right one when the other person needs a record, or time to consider, or when the message only travels one way — which describes nearly every formal letter anyone sends. What follows runs on the same principles that govern any professional message: state the main point first, be clear, be brief, proofread before it leaves your hands. The heading is the first place those become visible on the page. **Professional Behaviors** is where the anxiety usually sits, so it is worth being precise about what falls under it. The behaviors this skill warns against are being passive, aggressive, arrogant, manipulative, or negative. A wrong margin is not on that list. What does belong here is quieter: following the conventions an organization genuinely uses, and getting administrative work right without making a fuss about it. A formal letter is often exactly that sort of task, and the etiquette that counts is the willingness to check the form, not the ability to have known it already. **Influence** turns up earlier than most people expect. Nearly every formal letter is a request — hire me, refund me, approve this, release me from that — and this skill treats preparation as most of the work: understanding what the reader needs, and how a decision gets made on their side, before the ask. A heading is that move in miniature. You answer the reader's questions before they ask them and leave a route for them to come back to you, which is what makes following up possible at all. Which of the three is weakest for you is not something you can see from the inside, and that is the practical case for measuring it rather than guessing. The Work Skills Test is **free**, and it works through the whole set — twelve of them, these three included — so what comes back is less a grade than an order of work: [which one to start with](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). A low result is not a verdict on you. It marks something nobody has walked you through yet. There is a fair chance you recognize a version of this in yourself already — checking how something is done before you rely on it, rather than after somebody points out that you got it wrong. That is not a small habit. You looked up the heading before writing the letter; most people write the letter and deal with the format only if it comes back to them. None of this asks you to write differently or to become a more formal sort of person. Conventions are procedures, and procedures transfer: learn where the date goes once and you have it for every letter you will ever write. What changes as you go is not the rules. Those stay small, and you can look them up. What changes is how many people read what you write, and how little chance you get to explain yourself afterward. So the useful question stops being what goes at the top of the page. It becomes which of the things underneath it you already have. ## Find out which parts you already have You have the format. What is left is the part no guide can hand you: an honest read on the skills that were carrying the letter underneath it. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your own work skills. You answer questions about how you actually work, and you get back a picture of where you stand across all twelve — communication and professional conduct among them — with the ones worth your attention first marked out. That is the whole of it: no preparation, no cost, and a short, specific list at the end instead of general advice. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and seven minutes is the whole commitment.* ## 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? The heading of a formal letter holds your address and the date - not your name. Here are its four parts, the order they go in, and where the block sits. ### 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/heading-of-a-formal-letter/ Preferred summary: "The heading of a formal letter holds your address and the date - not your name. Here are its four parts, the order they go in, and where the block sits." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.