Resume tower · floor

How to write a letter of resignation, and what it is for

The good news about how to write a letter of resignation is that it is the least demanding document in this whole tower. It has one job, it is short, and three separate governments publish a template for it. The difficulty is not the writing — it is knowing what the letter does and does not do, and there is one situation in which the standard template is the wrong thing to send.

Once the conversation has happened, the letter is a formality in the useful sense: it fixes dates in writing so that nobody has to remember them later.

What the letter is not for. It is not the place to explain why you are leaving, and it is not the place to raise anything you were unhappy about. Both belong in the conversation, or in an exit interview, or in a separate process if the matter is serious. A grievance inside a resignation letter becomes a permanent document in a personnel file, written at the moment you had least to gain from writing carefully.

It is also not the place to name where you are going. You may want to say it in person, and often you should, but a written record of your next employer serves no purpose for you and occasionally serves one for somebody else.

The part that actually matters is not in the letter at all. Your notice period is set by your contract or by law, not by what you write. New Zealand’s guidance says to “check your employment agreement to see how long you have to work there before you leave – usually 2 or 4 weeks”, and Acas treats the length of notice as a separate subject with its own advice. The letter states the period; it does not choose it. Getting that number wrong is the expensive mistake on this page, and it is the one thing worth checking before you send anything.

You can offer to work longer than the minimum, and the New Zealand service notes that you can if your employer agrees — which is worth knowing in reverse too. A handover that leaves your colleagues covered is the thing the reference remembers.

Email or paper? Acas says its template text can be copied “into an email or document”, so either is acceptable. Email is normal, and it has the practical advantage of timestamping itself. Send it to your manager, copy whoever handles personnel, and keep a copy somewhere that is not your work account — because access to that account frequently ends on your last day, sometimes earlier.

Holiday and final pay. The optional line in the official template asks how much accrued holiday and pay you are owed, and it is worth including even when you think you know. It puts the question in writing at the start of the notice period rather than at the end, when the answer is harder to change and you have less standing to ask.

Every sentence quoted on this floor comes from a statutory service or a government careers service, with the date it was read. The judgements — what to leave out, sending it from an address you will still have, asking about holiday early — are ours, and are marked as such rather than presented as rules.

What this tower will not do

It will not tell you to explain yourself in the letter. Everything you might want to say belongs in a conversation, and a grievance written here becomes a permanent record made at the worst moment for writing one.

It will not give advice on constructive dismissal. The statutory service quoted above calls it a complex area of law and points to a helpline, and repeating that is more useful than paraphrasing it.

And it will not sell you a letter template, which is what several of the pages ranking for this question are for — while three governments publish one for nothing. What holds instead is simple: the template and the warning above it are quoted from a statutory workplace advice service, and the guidance on talking first from a government careers service, each with the date it was read.