Do cover letters still matter
No, not on paper, and here is the count
No. Across twenty live job openings measured at seven well known companies, Affirm, Stripe, Brex, Mercury, Block, Everlaw, and Capital One, a cover letter was optional on nineteen applications, entirely absent as a field on one, and required on exactly zero. If the question is whether a cover letter is a gate you have to clear to submit an application, the honest answer from real application forms is no, it almost never is.
That number settles the required question but it does not settle the useful question, and those are different questions that get treated as one. Nobody is stopping you at the door for skipping a cover letter. Whether writing one anyway is worth your time in a given situation is a separate call, covered fully in when a cover letter is worth the time. This post is only about the gate.
Why the myth survives anyway
The idea that a cover letter is required, or close to it, persists because it used to be closer to true, and because the advice around it has not caught up to how applications actually work now. Older hiring processes routed paper applications through a single reviewer who read everything in the packet, cover letter included, because there was no other way to triage volume. Modern applications route through a structured form first, and that form, not the folklore around what a complete application looks like, determines what is actually required. The three systems behind the large majority of company job boards, Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby, all expose their form definitions before you start filling one out, which means whether a given posting requires a cover letter is knowable in advance rather than a guess.
What optional actually means on the form
Optional does not mean discouraged and it does not mean decorative. It means the form will accept a submission with that field empty. Nineteen of twenty measured openings had a cover letter field marked exactly that way: present, uploadable, and skippable. The one remaining posting did not have a cover letter field on the form at all, which is a stronger signal than optional, since there was nowhere to put one even if you wanted to. A free text box near the end of that form is not a substitute for one either; the additional information box is not a cover letter covers what that field is actually for. Zero of the twenty forced it. For a full breakdown of which fields across an application are required versus which are marked optional and safe to skip, see which application fields you can safely skip.
What "checked" actually meant
Checking a posting meant opening its live application form, the same one a real applicant would use, and reading the actual field list rather than guessing from a company's general reputation or an old post about that employer. For boards running on Greenhouse and Ashby, that field list is exposed through a public endpoint the board itself uses to render the form, so the cover letter field's status, present or absent, required or optional, is a fact about the form rather than an impression from having applied there once in the past. That is a meaningfully different kind of evidence than "I heard company X doesn't care about cover letters," which is the level most advice on this topic operates at.
This is not a claim about every job everywhere
Twenty jobs at seven companies is a real, checked sample, not a massive one, and it would be a mistake to read it as "cover letters are never required anywhere, full stop." A government job posting, an academic position, or a small company running its hiring through a generic contact-us form built outside Greenhouse, Lever, or Ashby could easily require one, since those forms were not part of what got measured here. What the twenty-job count supports is a narrower and still useful claim: among application forms built on the systems that host the large majority of tech and startup job boards, a required cover letter field is uncommon enough that assuming one is required, and losing an evening to writing one before even checking, is usually a wasted evening.
What this changes about how you should think about it
Once required is off the table, the decision about whether to write a cover letter stops being about compliance and starts being about return on the fifteen or twenty minutes it takes to write one well. That is a real question with real answers, and it depends heavily on your specific situation: whether you are changing careers, whether there is a gap in your history that needs a sentence of context, whether you have a referral who already vouched for you, whether the role is a stretch you want badly enough to make the extra case. None of those situations show up in the twenty-job count above, because they are about you, not about the form. The number above tells you nobody will block your application over a blank field. It does not tell you whether skipping it is the right call for your specific application.
The form is the source, not a general impression
It is worth being precise about what this number does and does not claim. It is not a survey of hiring managers' opinions, and it does not describe every job board that has ever existed. It describes what twenty real, live application forms at seven identifiable companies actually required at the time they were checked, read directly off the form definitions those companies publish or expose. That is a narrower and more reliable claim than "cover letters do not matter anymore," which gets repeated constantly without anyone having checked a single real form. The full picture of what those twenty forms ask for, cover letter and everything else, is in what ATS application forms actually ask for.
How to check it yourself in under a minute
You do not have to take the twenty-job count on faith for your own applications. Open the posting, click through to the actual application page rather than a listing summary on an aggregator, and scroll through the whole form before you start filling anything in. A cover letter field, if one exists, sits near the resume upload, usually labeled clearly, and most systems mark optional fields as exactly that, in text, next to the field itself. Reading the whole form before starting it takes under a minute and removes the guesswork entirely, for this application and every one after it.
So do you write one or not
If the posting marks the field optional, which is by far the most likely case, the decision comes down to whether this specific application benefits from context a resume cannot carry on its own. A strong opening line matters more than length when you do decide to write one; see cover letter openings that are not filler for what a first sentence should be doing instead of restating the job title back to the poster.
iapplyai.app scores each live posting on a verified employer board against your real resume and prepares the whole application, tailored resume and a cover letter when one earns its place, so you are not guessing which of the two a given posting actually needs. The free tier covers two complete applications, then it is a fixed term pass that expires on its own, with no automatic renewal. What a pass costs.
