How to end a cover letter (and the sign-off to skip)

End a cover letter by pointing at one specific thing — the work you want opened, the availability you want on record — and then stop. The closing paragraph is not a summary. It is the handoff, and most people spend it repeating a case they already made two paragraphs earlier.

This post covers the four lines that belong in a closing, which sign-off to use, the sentence to delete, and where a portfolio link goes when the application form has nowhere to put one. The examples run on a UX Designer application, because that role has a closing problem most do not: the work that proves you can do the job lives in a file the form will not accept.

The last paragraph has one job

By the time a reader reaches your final lines, the argument is over. They have your resume open in the next tab, they know roughly what you have done, and the letter's job now is to tell them what happens next. Confidence statements do nothing here. "I am confident my skills make me an excellent fit" is a claim with no evidence attached, arriving after all the evidence.

Here is what the recruiter sees. A UX Designer closing the way most people close:

I am confident that my skills and experience make me an excellent fit for this role, and I would welcome the opportunity to discuss my qualifications further. Thank you for your time and consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you.

And the same designer using the same amount of space to hand over something:

My portfolio is at example.com/work — the checkout redesign is the case study closest to what your posting describes, including the two usability tests that changed the flow. I am reachable any weekday afternoon Eastern for a call. Thank you for reading.

Nothing in the second version is a bigger claim. It is smaller, in fact. But it leaves the reader with a URL, a reason to click it, and a window of time, where the first leaves them with a sentiment and a task.

The reason the first version keeps getting written is that it feels safe. It is the paragraph nobody could object to, which is exactly the problem — a paragraph nobody could object to is also one nobody remembers, and it is identical in every letter in the folder. A closing that names a specific case study can be wrong. It can point at work the reader does not rate. That risk is the price of saying anything at all, and it is worth paying in the one place where the reader has stopped reading for content and started deciding what to do.

The four lines, in order

The closing paragraph, line by line

Four sentences. If your closing has a fifth, it is almost always a restatement of the second paragraph.

1. 1
   The pointer

   Name the one thing you want opened — a portfolio URL, a case study, a GitHub repo, a writing sample. Write the address out in full rather than hiding it behind a word.

2. 2
   The match

   One sentence saying which part of that work lines up with the posting. Not your whole background: the single closest piece.

3. 3
   Availability

   When you can talk, in the employer's terms — a time zone, a range of days. This is the politeness sentence, doing work.

4. 4
   The sign-off

   Thank them once, sign your name, stop. No postscript, no second thank-you, no promise to follow up you have not decided to keep.

Four lines is not a rule handed down from anywhere; it is what fits before a reader's eye moves on. The ordering matters more than the count. Put the pointer first because it is the only sentence with a link in it, and a link is the one thing in a cover letter that can survive being skimmed.

For a UX Designer, the pointer and the match are usually one decision made twice: which case study, and which sentence of the posting it answers. Pick the case study before you write the paragraph. Writing the paragraph first produces a general sentence about your process, and then you go looking for work that fits it, which is backwards and reads that way.

Close on the thing the job actually does

If you are going to name one piece of work in your last paragraph, name the one the job description is built around — and job descriptions have a public skeleton you can read. O*NET rates each task in an occupation by importance, on a 0–100 scale, from surveys of people doing the work. For Web and Digital Interface Designers — the occupation that covers most UX Designer postings — the ratings in O*NET's 2026 update do not rank the way portfolio culture suggests they should.

Task importance for Web and Digital Interface Designers

O*NET importance ratings, 0–100, from incumbent surveys, 2026 update. Higher means the task matters more to the job as it is actually performed.

Identify problems from testing or customer feedback		83
Design, build, or maintain sites and interfaces		78
Write supporting code		78
Perform tests after any revision		77
Collaborate with development professionals		76
Develop new visual design concepts		75
Conduct user research		70

The highest-rated task, at 83, is identifying problems uncovered by testing or customer feedback and either fixing them or routing them to whoever can. Developing new visual design concepts sits at 75. Conducting user research sits at 70. So a closing line that points at the case study where you found a problem in testing and fixed it is pointing at the part of the job the people already doing it rate highest — while a closing line that points at your prettiest screen is pointing at something real, but rated lower.

O*NET also asks people in the occupation what education a new hire needs, and the answers do not converge on one track: 52 percent name a bachelor's degree, 30 percent a post-baccalaureate certificate, 16 percent an associate's degree. Read that carefully — it is a question about what the job requires, not a count of the diplomas people in it actually hold, so it cannot tell you how any one hiring manager will read your background. What it does say is that nearly half of this occupation does not treat a four-year degree as the entry condition. If you were planning to spend your last paragraph explaining a nontraditional education, that is the paragraph to cut: the closing is the worst place in the letter to raise it, and on this occupation's own numbers it is a defense of something a large share of the field never asked for.

Which sign-off?

Use "Sincerely." If that reads stiff to you, use "Best regards." Both are invisible, and invisible is the entire specification for a sign-off — a reader should get past it without forming an opinion.

Sign-offs, and where each one belongs

Convention, not evidence. No public data source ranks sign-offs by outcome.

	Register	Where it fits
Sincerely	Neutral formal	Safe everywhere. Formal enough for a bank, not stiff enough to be odd at a startup.
Best regards	Neutral warm	Equally safe, slightly warmer. Fine for a design or product team.
Thank you	Plain	Works when your last line was not already a thank-you. Two thank-yous read as nervous.
Best	Casual	Fine in email, thin at the bottom of a formal letter.
Warmly	Familiar	Reads as closeness you have not earned with someone who has never met you.
Cheers	Casual, regional	A habit rather than a US letter convention. It lands as breezy with the wrong reader.
Yours faithfully	British formal	UK correspondence. In a US application it reads as a template pulled from another country.
Respectfully	Deferential	Military, federal and law enforcement applications, where it is standard. Heavy elsewhere.

The one place register genuinely shifts is the employer, not the role. A UX Designer applying to a bank's digital team and the same designer applying to a twelve-person product company are writing to different houses; "Sincerely" is correct in both, and "Cheers" is a small wrong note in one of them. That is the whole extent of the decision.

Here is the part nobody says out loud: none of that table is measured. O*NET publishes tasks and skills, BLS publishes wages and employment counts, ATS vendors publish file specifications — and not one of them publishes anything about sign-offs. There is no dataset showing that "Best regards" gets more interviews than "Sincerely," because nobody collects that. Anyone who tells you otherwise is repeating a preference with a confident voice.

The line to delete

Cut "I look forward to hearing from you." It is the default last sentence in the stack, it hands the next action back to the reader, and it burns the strongest position in the document — the final line, the one thing a skimmer's eye lands on — to say that you will now be waiting.

Replace it with when you are available. Same courtesy, same length, and it puts a fact where a formula was.

Should you promise to follow up?

Only if you will, and only with a date. "I will follow up next Tuesday" is a commitment; "I will follow up soon" is the same waiting sentence you just deleted, wearing a different coat. A promise you do not keep is worse than no promise, because the reader has no way to distinguish it from every other applicant who wrote the same thing.

It also helps to know who is on the receiving end of the promise.

Who reads the last paragraph

939,700HR specialists employed, 2025

$75,940Median annual wage, May 2025

73,700Projected openings per year, 2025–35

BLS counts 939,700 human resources specialists in 2025 and describes the work plainly: they "recruit, screen, and interview job applicants and place newly hired workers in jobs." That is a person, with a queue, and a median wage of $75,940 as of May 2025. A dated follow-up gives them something to file against. A vague one gives them one more line to skim past on the way to the next application.

There is one version of the follow-up promise that earns its place, and it is not a promise at all. A UX Designer who writes "the case study I mentioned goes up on the site next week, and I will send the link when it does" has given the reader a reason to expect a second message and a reason to open it. That is a follow-up with a payload.

Where the portfolio link goes

For a UX Designer this is the practical half of the whole question, because the application form usually cannot hold your work. Greenhouse accepts .doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf and .txt files from candidates, and candidate uploads can run up to 100 MB. Its support page then tells employers that if they want videos, portfolios, or other files larger than that, they should ask candidates to upload them to a third-party site like Google Drive and share the link with the hiring team. Note what that is and is not: guidance written for the employer about oversized files, not a rule about portfolios as such. It lands in the same place either way. A portfolio that is a live site is not one of those five file types, and a portfolio that is a folder of full-resolution screens is exactly what the size guidance is about. Your work is not going into the upload box. It is going into a sentence.

Which sentence matters, too, because of what happens to each document after submission. Workday's administrator documentation describes resume parsing as the feature that "enables recruiters to create a prospect or job application when attaching a resume," and notes it will not auto-fill fields configured as hidden, nor Languages and Skills. Every reference on that page is to the resume — the cover letter is not mentioned once. Nothing there suggests your letter is read for fields, which means whatever it does for you, a person has to do by reading it.

That has one consequence worth acting on: write the URL out in full — example.com/work, not "my portfolio" as link text — because plain text survives being copied out of an attachment into a note, and a hyperlink often does not.

The table describes where a link is visible, not how often anyone clicks it. No ATS vendor publishes attachment open rates, and I would not trust a number for it that did not come from one.

Should salary expectations go in the closing?

Only when the posting or the form asks. The last paragraph is a bad place to volunteer a figure, and the wage spread for this occupation shows why.

BLS reported those figures for May 2025, and the distance between the bottom decile and the top one is far wider than most people assume when they type a figure into a letter. Two designers with the same title, the same tools and similar portfolios can sit at opposite ends of it depending on industry alone. What the table cannot tell you is what this employer budgeted for this req — BLS reports what people in the occupation were paid, not what any particular posting pays, and the published cut is national rather than city by city.

If the form has a required expectations field, answer it there in the range the posting implies. If it does not, leave the number for the recruiter screen, where you can ask what the band is before you name one.

What to do this week

Open the last cover letter you sent and delete its final sentence. Then check whether what remains contains a URL, a reason to open it, and a time you can talk — if any of the three is missing, that is the rewrite, and it takes four minutes.

Second: settle on one closing paragraph and reuse it across applications and let the middle of the letter be the part you tailor. The pointer, the match, the availability and the sign-off do not change from posting to posting; only the sentence naming which piece of work is closest does.

Third: read the posting once more for what it asks you to send. On a UX Designer req that is usually a portfolio, and the request is often buried in the last line of the description rather than in a form field. Missing it is an easy way to send a strong letter that is still incomplete.

If the retyping is what is slowing you down, HeroApply fills the application form from your resume so the time you have goes into the paragraph a person will actually read.