|October 30, 2026
What Does a Professional CV Writing Service Include?
Summary: Your writer should take your career level, industry and future plans into account A strong CV focuses on achievements,... Read more...
There’s no standard price for having your CV professionally written in the UK.
A quick browse online and you’ll find services for around £50 alongside others costing £200, £300 or considerably more.
That makes comparisons difficult. Any two websites might offer “professional CV writing” while selling quite different services.
The CV itself is only part of it. One writer may take an in-depth approach, exploring your career history before making a start on a bespoke CV. Others might simply polish what you already have.
Career level makes a difference too, which we’ll come to shortly.
So rather than picking an amount you think a CV should cost, look at what sits behind the price.
In certain cases, £60 for something that meets your needs could be money well spent. A £200 price-point isn’t suddenly better value because it costs more, what matters is your particular situation and requirements.
Early-career CVs pose their own challenges. A candidate will likely need to expand on their education and exam results as well as detail shorter placements and part-time work to balance a more limited employment history.
Note: If you’re wondering how to write a CV with no experience, check out our blog.
A decade on, you can have the opposite problem:
It becomes a kind of career history Tetris!
This is partly why prices tend to rise with career level. More experience means more information to unpick and sort through, but not necessarily more information to put on the page.
As a senior candidate, rather than turning a CV into a chronological list of responsibilities, you need to show leadership, progression and results. Someone in a niche profession may need a writer who can make sense of specialist experience and terminology too.
The longest CV isn’t the goal. Deciding what deserves the reader’s attention is often the difficult bit.
Say you find a CV-writing service for £75. Before comparing that £75 with another provider, check what it buys you.
Cover letters and LinkedIn profiles are often added extras, although some providers bundle them into packages. Similarly, a premium or expedited process often carries a higher charge.
Revisions are easy to forget about until you need one.
You could receive the first draft and realise you’ve forgotten to mention something important. Perhaps a sentence is accurate but doesn’t sound like something you’d ever say, or the writer hasn’t quite grasped what your previous role involved.
Check whether amendments come with the price and whether there are any limits or deadlines attached.
Career-service packages can be an economical approach if you’re after several services. If you only need your CV rewriting, paying for three things because they’re bundled together doesn’t automatically make it a bargain.
Take time to consider your needs.
Be careful with guarantees about what happens after you receive your CV.
A writer can promise to do certain things themselves. They can agree to deliver your CV within a particular timeframe or make a set number of revisions.
But they can’t promise that an employer will definitely interview you, never mind offer you the job.
After ordering the service, I’d also want to know who is actually writing the CV and what they need from me first. It’s difficult to write convincingly about somebody’s career without finding out much about it.
Price needs some perspective as well. An inexpensive service might be exactly what an early-career applicant needs but equally, a £300 price tag doesn’t prove that somebody understands your industry or will write a brilliant CV.
Read what the service includes, check its amendment policy and look for clarity about the process. If you’re still not quite sure what you’re buying after reading the website, that’s useful information in itself.
Make sure the CV writing service provider has lots of 5-star reviews, achieved over many years, as a strong sign of customer satisfaction. It is a red flag if it’s hard to find plenty of positive reviews.
There are plenty of people who don’t need to pay someone to write their CV. If yours is current, you’re comfortable tailoring it and applications regularly turn into interviews, you may be one of them.
It’s often when something isn’t working that outside help starts to look more useful:
Job hunting can also make it surprisingly hard to judge your own experience. Things you do every week can feel too ordinary to mention even when they’re exactly what a new employer wants.
A professional writer can bring some distance to that. For more food for thought, check out these guides – reasons to use a CV writing service and should you pay someone to write your CV?
This is where we can give you some exact figures.
PurpleCV currently starts at £50 for an Early Career CV, aimed at people with up to three years of experience. The Early Career package costs £100 and includes the CV, a cover letter and a LinkedIn profile.
If you’ve been working for between three and 10 years, the Next Step CV costs £95. The package version costs £135.
More than 10 years into your career? An Advanced Career CV costs £110, or £140 for the package with a cover letter and LinkedIn profile.
PurpleCV also offers a Specialist CV for £190 for people in niche professions. Add the cover letter and LinkedIn profile and the price comes to £215.
Those different levels matter. Someone with their first two years of work to talk about isn’t bringing the same CV problem as someone with 18 years, five employers and a couple of promotions behind them.
PurpleCV assigns you a dedicated professional CV writer who writes your CV from scratch. You receive the finished document in Word and PDF formats, rather than having your details dropped into a standard template.
There are a couple of practical details worth knowing as well. PurpleCV currently includes free lifetime amendments and a 100% satisfaction guarantee, with a two-day turnaround. Find out more about what a professional CV writing service includes.
If you want the cover letter and LinkedIn profile too, the package prices above let you sort all three together. If you don’t, you can stick with the CV.
Keep in mind, your writer creates your new CV without templates or AI, with the finished document written to work with applicant tracking systems (ATS), the systems many employers use to process applications before a recruiter starts reading them.
If you found this guide useful, you may also like some of our most popular articles, including:
It would be handy if there were a simple answer to how much a professionally written CV should cost. There isn’t.
Prices across the UK market vary widely and the cheapest and most expensive options aren’t automatically the worst and best.
Think about where you are in your career and why you’re considering professional help in the first place. Then look at who’s doing the writing, what’s included and what happens if you want something changed.
You may decide your existing CV only needs an afternoon and a strong cup of coffee. Fair enough.
But if you’ve been staring at the same document for weeks, aren’t getting the response you hoped for or simply want somebody else to make sense of years of experience, professional help may feel like money better spent.
Whatever you spend, the end result should still sound like you and give an employer a clear picture of why you’re worth meeting.
PurpleCV currently offers CV writing from £50, with separate options for different stages and specialist careers.
We currently have a 4.8/5.0 rating on both Trustpilot and Google, having received thousands of 5-star reviews over many years.
We are members of the Professional Association of Resume Writers & Career Coaches (PARWCC), plus our founder Andrew Arkley is Chairman and Programme Director of its Certified Professional CV Writer (CCVW) qualification.
For any queries about our CV writing services or anything else, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
