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Two to four pages as a JMO, and check the campaign first — Queensland caps the CV at four pages on its own template with the cover letter inside it 1, Tasmania mandates an RMO CV template 2, NSW takes one global resume upload 3. Too short is a real risk against a scoring rubric.
The campaign usually decides for you. Queensland's RMO and Registrar campaign wants a CV of four pages or fewer on the Queensland Health template, with the cover letter text inside it 1. Tasmania mandates its RMO Recruitment CV template and takes no selection-criteria statement 2. NSW takes a single global resume upload plus written responses to selection criteria at a thousand characters each, and no cover letter at all 3. Victoria leaves format to each health service, so the Austin asks for a one-page cover letter stating your stream preference alongside the CV 4, and the Royal Children's caps the JRMO CV at four pages 5. Read the ad before you format anything.
Where no limit is set, two to four pages is the JMO range — that is the advice from a self-identified recruitment lead in a large tertiary hospital who has read thousands of them 8.
The under-published risk is a CV that is too short. Many hospitals score your CV against a written criteria sheet, often adapted from SET, BPT or advanced training selection; a CV cut to two or three pages can fail to hit those criteria and be culled early 8. WA's adult BPT allocates 12.5 of 100 marks to the CV as a scored item 6; SA's adult BPT scores CV and cover letter together at 10% 7. You are not writing to impress a reader, you are filling in a scoring sheet that has categories.
So keep a master CV — every rotation, course, audit, presentation and committee — and cut it down per application 8. Ten pages of master, four pages of application.
The counter-argument. A CV padded with school-age achievements and irrelevant non-medical work irritates the people interviewing you, and eight pages of it gets read at speed 8. Length is not the variable; hitting the criteria is.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
Everything of importance should be on the front page
Many hospitals also score your CV against a criteria to make their lives easier. Lo-and-behold, this is often based on similar criteria for SET/BPT/AT selection. If you limit your CV to 2-3 pages, you may not hit this and get culled early.
2-4 is ok range. More than that is too much. Less is not more though
A few SHOs i recently interviewed for PHO/REG positions had around 8 pages. Problem was that a good chunk is what I personally deem to be irrelevant.
I cut my CV relentlessly as a junior to try and make sure it's short but realised it was more beneficial to add another page and demonstrate more areas in which i excelled in.
Asked 8 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /\bCV\b.{0,40}(page|length|long|format|template)|(page|length|format|template).{0,25}\bCV\b|resume.{0,30}(page|length|format)/i. Quotes are all the substantive answers in the page-count thread, chosen to put the recruitment lead's range beside the warning that a short CV misses scoring criteria.