Photo, Age, NI Number: What UK CVs Must Leave Off

By Mustafa Tarabya, founder of CVBooster · Published 2026-08-01 · Updated 2026-09-02

8 min read

You built the CV in a template gallery, so it has a circular photo top left and a block underneath labelled Personal Details: date of birth, nationality, marital status, driving licence, National Insurance number. It looks finished. Then you open a Civil Service application and the form asks for none of it, and the NHS Band 5 post you wanted takes no CV at all.

Almost every article on this says to delete those fields because they are not the British convention. True, and it explains nothing, so nobody remembers it. The real reason is that in the UK those fields are not only your data, they are the employer's problem. Under the Equality Act 2010, hiring is an employer's most legally exposed moment, and a CV carrying your face, your age and your nationality removes the defence they would otherwise rely on.

The list, first

All of this comes off a UK CV. The National Careers Service says the same in fewer words: leave out your age, date of birth, marital status and nationality, and do not attach a photo.

A photograph of any kind, including a small headshot in a sidebar.
Date of birth, age, or a birth year inferable from a school date.
Your National Insurance number, which has no function at application stage.
Nationality, country of birth, ethnicity, or a flag icon beside a language.
Marital status, number of children, and the titles Mrs or Miss.
Religion, and a faith school named where a neutral descriptor would do.
Health conditions, disability, or an absence explained in medical terms.
Passport number, licence number, full street address, signature block.
Referees' names and contact details. That is their personal data, not yours.

Why a UK employer would rather your face was not in the file

Section 39 of the Equality Act 2010 covers the arrangements an employer makes for deciding who to offer employment to. So a rejected applicant can bring a discrimination claim without ever having worked a day there, and with no qualifying period of service, unlike unfair dismissal. Someone sifted out the day after applying has standing.

The part that changes employer behaviour is section 136, the burden of proof. If a claimant sets out facts from which a tribunal could conclude that discrimination occurred, the tribunal must find that it did unless the employer proves otherwise. The employer has to disprove it, and the cheapest way to prove nobody was influenced by someone's age, race or religion is to show you never had the information. A photograph destroys that in one click, and so does a date of birth. The argument then moves from knowledge to motive, which is harder and far more expensive. Discrimination compensation is not capped the way unfair dismissal compensation is, and can include an award for injury to feelings under what practitioners call the Vento bands.

Tip: The Equality Act 2010 applies in England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland has its own framework, including the Fair Employment and Treatment (Northern Ireland) Order 1998. The CV convention is identical UK-wide, only the statute differs.

Anonymised shortlisting, and the ways candidates break it

So rather than trust panels to ignore information, UK employers arranged not to give it to them. The Civil Service anonymises applications at the sift stage on Civil Service Jobs, so whoever scores your Success Profiles evidence does not see your name. NHS recruitment systems keep the personal details section apart from the supporting information the panel reads. A government-backed name-blind recruitment commitment in 2015 pulled the Civil Service, the NHS, local government and large private employers into the same practice. Agencies run a rougher version, stripping photos before forwarding a CV so the client cannot be shown to have had one.

A CV built around personal data is therefore not just old fashioned, it is incompatible with the process. A recruiter who receives a photo on a blind role has an administrative problem, and the fastest fix is to not put you forward. The other failure is self-inflicted, inside the free text boxes meant to protect you:

Your name in a header, a footer, or the PDF filename when the sift is anonymous.
Opening a supporting statement with "My name is", or signing a 250-word Behaviour box.
Writing "as a mother of three" or "after paternity leave" into a scored example.
Naming a faith school or community organisation instead of a neutral descriptor.
Uploading a photo-rich CV into a system that shows attachments beside the form.

Age is the one people get half right

Age is a protected characteristic in its own right, which surprises people who assume the Act is mainly about race and sex. Deleting the date of birth is the obvious half. The other half is that a CV broadcasts your age through the education and early career sections. Past ten years of experience, drop GCSE grades and A level subjects and stop the detailed work history at around fifteen years, with older roles in a two-line "Earlier career" block carrying employers and titles, no dates. Early career, do the opposite and keep your graduation year, because a graduate CV with no dates reads as evasive.

Your National Insurance number is not a CV field

The NI number appears on templates because payroll eventually needs it, and there is a route for that: you hand it over after you accept the offer, through your P45 or an HMRC starter checklist. Not before. It is also not evidence of your right to work. A British or Irish citizen proving status without a passport uses an official document showing the NI number alongside a birth certificate, so it is half of a combination, never a credential on its own.

The risk is not abstract. A CV is a document you deliberately spread around: job boards, agency databases, an email forwarded three times inside a company. Full name, date of birth, home address and NI number on one page is the bundle used to open credit in someone else's name. Fake job adverts exist to harvest it, which is why JobsAware takes reports of recruitment scams and Action Fraud handles the criminal side.

Tip: Same logic for a driving licence. If the job genuinely requires driving, write "Full UK driving licence, clean". Never the number, and never a scan of the licence or passport.

Nationality is not the same question as right to work

Race under section 9 of the Equality Act 2010 includes colour, nationality, and ethnic or national origins. So "Nationality: Nigerian" is not a neutral administrative fact, it is a statement of a protected characteristic handed to a shortlister who then cannot show they did not see it. Right to work is a different question: an operational requirement an employer may put to every applicant, because they put it to everyone. Write the consequence, not the identity. "Full right to work in the UK, no sponsorship required" answers what the employer needs and reveals nothing about where you were born. If you do need sponsorship, say so plainly. Either way it is one line in the contact block, and neither needs a passport.

Marital status, title and children

Marriage and civil partnership is a protected characteristic, and so are pregnancy and maternity. "Married, two children" survives in templates written for markets where it signals stability, and has not been current on a UK CV for decades. Watch the title field too: Mrs and Miss both state marital status before the reader reaches your first job. Use Ms, or no title at all.

Health, disability, and the one declaration worth making

Section 60 of the Equality Act 2010 restricts what an employer may ask about your health or disability before an offer, with narrow exceptions. That works in your favour: you need not volunteer a condition or an absence record, and writing one in gives away information the employer was not entitled to request.

One exception has a real payoff, and it is not on the CV. Employers in the government's Disability Confident scheme commit to interviewing disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria for a role. You claim that by ticking the box on the form, where the declaration sits apart from the scored sift, not by describing your condition in a personal statement. Interview adjustments work the same way.

Then why does the application form ask for all of it?

Because equal opportunities monitoring is different machinery from shortlisting. It asks ethnicity, age band, sex, disability status, religion and sexual orientation so the organisation can audit itself, and it is split off before any panel sees your application. It is normally optional, and skipping it costs you nothing.

Several of those fields are special category data under UK GDPR, including racial or ethnic origin, religious belief and health, and a photograph can carry all three at once. Data minimisation means an employer should collect only what the decision requires, and ICO guidance on recruitment and selection points the same way. A CV carrying that data pushes it into the one channel built to exclude it.

The exceptions people cite, and whether they hold

Acting, modelling and presenting are the genuine ones, and even there the photo does not live on a CV: UK performers work through a casting profile, with Spotlight the established industry directory, and the acting CV beside it is a credits list. A designer's portfolio site can carry an About page with your face on it. That is your platform. A CV inside an employer's system is a different object.

The LinkedIn objection is fair and does not change the answer. Your CV lists a LinkedIn URL, and one click shows the recruiter your face. The point was never that you are anonymous, it is what sits inside the employer's file if the process is audited. A recruiter viewing your public profile is their action. A photograph in the file they were sent is a record.

What goes in the space you just cleared

Deleting that block frees the most valuable third of page one. The UK header that earns its space is short and functional:

Your name, sized as a heading, not a logo.
The job title you are applying for, or a short professional label.
Town or city. Never the full street address.
One phone number and one email address built from your name.
A LinkedIn URL, plus a portfolio or GitHub URL if the role calls for it.
One right to work line, if a reader might wonder.
Then four to six lines of summary: what you do, at what level, with what evidence.

A five minute audit before you send anything

Read page one from the top. If anything above your first job title is not in that header list, delete it.
Check the header, footer and PDF filename for your name if the sift is anonymised.
Find every four digit year before 2005 and ask whether it tells the reader anything.
Search for married, single, children, nationality, born, and any digit string resembling an NI number.
Read each free text answer for a sentence identifying you, your family or your faith.
Confirm any named referee agreed. "References available on request" is still normal in the UK.

Be honest about what this fixes. Removing a photo will not turn a weak CV into a shortlisted one, and no employer will ever tell you the headshot was the reason. The gain is that you stop handing over decisions you cannot control, you stop creating friction for processes built to help you, and you reclaim the part of the page that persuades. If you believe you were discriminated against in recruitment, the deadline is short, ordinarily three months less one day from the act complained of, subject to the ACAS early conciliation extension. This is general information, not legal advice.

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