What CV help costs in 2026, and when it is worth paying for

The market for CV help is unusually confusing, because the same deliverable — a two-page document — is sold at £0 and at £500. The difference is not quality so much as who does the work and how much of it is human.

The four price bands

Free. Templates from word processors, university careers services, library guides, and free tiers of AI tools. Value: real, if you are willing to do the work. Limit: nobody reads your specific CV, and free AI tiers usually cap output or hide the download behind a trial.

Under £5 — AI CV improvers. You upload your CV and get a rewritten version. The work is automated, so the price is low and the turnaround is minutes rather than days. This is the band where most people should start: it fixes the things that are objectively wrong (duty-led bullets, weak summary, inconsistent formatting) for the price of a coffee.

£30–£150 — editing and rewriting services. A human — often a freelance writer or a marketplace seller — rewrites or reviews your CV. What you get depends entirely on the individual, and quality varies more inside this band than between bands. Ask to see a sample rewrite of a real CV, not a testimonial.

£150–£500+ — professional CV writers and career coaches. Justified when the stakes are high: senior appointments, executive search, sector switches where the conventions are rigid, or where you need a conversation rather than a document. Expect an intake call, a draft, and revisions.

What actually changes between cheap and expensive

Not the number of words. The expensive end buys you judgement: someone who knows what a hiring manager in your field looks for in the first eight seconds, and who can tell you that your third job is irrelevant and your volunteer work is the most impressive thing on the page.

If your CV needs judgement, pay for judgement. If your CV needs its sentences rebuilt and its structure fixed, a £0.99 AI rewrite does that job.

Five questions before you pay anyone

1. Can I see the finished CV before paying? Not a sample. Yours.
2. Is there a subscription? A surprising number of cheap CV sites charge monthly to keep your own document downloadable.
3. Do I get an editable file? Word as well as PDF, or you cannot tailor it later.
4. Who actually writes it? "Professional CV writer" on a marketplace listing sometimes means the same AI tool you could run yourself, at ten times the price.
5. What happens to my data? Your CV includes your address and phone number. Ask.

Red flags

• A countdown timer on the price.
• A promise of interviews, or a "guarantee" of a job.
• Testimonials with no specifics, all dated the same week.
• Output that arrives with invented achievements you did not supply. You will be asked about them.
• Being unable to preview a single line before checkout.

What we charge, and why

CVPerfect is deliberately in the cheap, automated band. One payment from £0.99 for a full rewrite, a preview before you pay, a PDF and an editable Word file, no account, no subscription, no upsell call.

We are also deliberate about the limit: we improve the CV you have. We do not invent experience, and we do not interview you about your career. If your problem is "I have twenty years of experience and no idea how to position it", a human coach is the right spend. If your problem is "this document undersells what I have done", that is what we are for.

See the packages