Business Documents
Business Letter Generator
Produce a correctly formatted business letter (sender and recipient blocks, date, reference, salutation and sign-off in the right places), and download it as a PDF.
Overview
Why use a free business letter generator?
This free business letter generator produces a correctly laid-out formal letter and saves it as a PDF. Your address, the date, the recipient, references, the salutation, the body, the close and the enclosure lines all go where convention puts them, in either the full block or the indented layout.
The part it does that a template cannot is the close. British convention pairs “Yours sincerely” with a letter addressed to a named person and “Yours faithfully” with one that is not, and it is the single most asked question about business letters. Here the close follows from the salutation you typed, and the tool says which it has chosen and why.
American practice does not have that distinction at all (“Sincerely” serves either way, and the salutation takes a colon rather than a comma), so the convention is something you choose rather than something assumed on your behalf. Getting this wrong is not a spelling difference; it is following neither convention properly.
Everything is composed in your browser. Your letterhead is remembered on your own device so you do not retype it, and the recipient, subject and body are never stored anywhere. There is no signup and nothing is uploaded.
Step by step
How to lay out a business letter correctly
Choose the convention
British or American. It decides the punctuation after the salutation, how the date is written, and whether the close depends on naming the reader.
Add your letterhead and the recipient
Your details are remembered in this browser for next time. The recipient's are not, because the next letter goes to somebody else.
Write the salutation
The close follows from it, and the tool says which one it has chosen and why. You can override it, and it will tell you if the override contradicts the opening.
Write the letter and download it
Leave a blank line between paragraphs. Add enclosures and copies at the foot, then save a print-ready PDF.
What you get
- The close worked out from your salutation, with the reason
- British and American conventions, which differ in more than spelling
- Full block and indented layouts, both correctly set out
- Reference, enclosure and copy-to lines
- Your letterhead is remembered; the letter never is
Background
Sincerely or faithfully, and why it depends
The British rule is simple and absolute: if you opened by naming the person, you close “Yours sincerely”. If you did not, you close “Yours faithfully”. The logic is that “sincerely” is a personal assurance, which only makes sense addressed to a person you have identified, while “faithfully” is a formal one offered to whoever happens to read it. Pairing “Dear Sir or Madam” with “Yours sincerely” is the commonest error in British business correspondence and reads, to anyone who knows the rule, as either carelessness or a mail merge.
The half that gets left out of most explanations is that a role is not a name. “Dear Hiring Manager”, “Dear Customer Services” and “Dear Accounts Department” all address a function rather than a person, so all three take “Yours faithfully”. Almost every version of this rule you will find cites only “Dear Sir or Madam”, which leaves people confidently applying it to exactly the openings where they are most likely to be writing to a job title.
None of this holds in American English, and applying it there is its own mistake. American convention closes “Sincerely” whether or not the reader is named; “Yours faithfully” is not in ordinary use and reads as an affectation. American formal letters also take a colon after the salutation rather than a comma. Two internally consistent systems, no overlap in the rules. That is why picking one matters more than picking the “right” one.
The date is worth the same care for a different reason. Written as 04/08/2026 it is the fourth of August to a British reader and the eighth of April to an American one, and a letter is precisely the kind of document that ends up in front of both. Writing the month out removes the ambiguity entirely, and both conventions have a form that does it: “4 August 2026” and “August 4, 2026”.
The rest is layout, and there are two that are actually used. Full block aligns everything to the left margin and separates paragraphs with a blank line; it is the modern default and the safe choice. Indented (modified block) puts the sender's address, the date and the signature block on the right and indents the first line of each paragraph instead of spacing them. It is older, still standard in parts of law and academia, and it is what people usually mean when they say a letter looks formal.
Not to be confused with
- “Yours sincerely” and “Yours faithfully”
- Decided entirely by the opening, not by how formal the letter is or how well you know the reader. Named person, sincerely. Anyone else, including a job title, faithfully. The tool derives it rather than leaving it as one more thing to remember.
- A named recipient and a known one
- The rule turns on whether the letter names somebody, not on whether you have met them. Writing “Dear Ms Okonjo” to a stranger still takes “Yours sincerely”; writing “Dear Sir or Madam” to a company you deal with weekly still takes “Yours faithfully”.
- British and American convention
- They differ in the close, the punctuation after the salutation and the date order. Each is internally consistent and neither is correct inside the other, so the choice to make is which one you are writing in, not which is better.
- Full block and indented layout
- Block puts everything left and separates paragraphs with space. Indented puts the address, date and signature right, and marks paragraphs by indenting the first line. Doing both (indenting and spacing) is the version that follows neither.
- A business letter and an email
- A letter carries a return address, a date, a formal salutation and a signature, because it may be filed, forwarded or produced in evidence years later. An email printed onto letterhead is not a business letter, and it is obvious to the reader which one arrived.
Reference
What goes in a business letter, and where
In the order a reader meets them on the page. Most of these are conventional rather than compulsory, and a letter missing one is not wrong so much as noticeably informal. That matters on anything that will be filed, forwarded or relied on later.
Your address
Top of the page: left in a block letter, right in an indented one. It goes on whether or not a reply is expected, because a letter without a return address is conspicuous on anything that ends up on a file.
Required
The date
Below your address, with the month written out. All-numeric dates mean two different days on two sides of the Atlantic, and a formal letter is exactly the document that crosses that line.
Required
The recipient's name, title and address
Below the date, against the left margin in both layouts. A name gets a letter to a desk; a job title gets it to a department; neither gets it opened as fast as both together.
Required
References
“Our ref” and “Your ref” lines, used where correspondence is filed against a case or an account number. Quoting the recipient's own reference is the single most effective thing you can do to get a reply from a large organisation.
Optional
The salutation
“Dear” plus a name where you have one. It decides the close, so it is worth a moment's thought, and a phone call to find out who to address is almost always better than “Dear Sir or Madam”.
Required
The subject line
One line saying what this is about, in bold, below the salutation. It is what gets the letter to the right desk in an organisation that handles a lot of post, and the first thing a reader uses to decide whether it is theirs.
Optional
The body
Why you are writing, the detail, and what you want to happen next, in that order. A reader who has to reach the third paragraph to find out what is being asked of them will often not reach it.
Required
The close and signature
The close follows the salutation, then space to sign, then your name and title typed underneath. A letter with no room to sign reads as an email that has been printed, which is usually what it is.
Required
Enclosures
An “Enc.” line at the foot listing what else is in the envelope. Mentioning something enclosed without listing it is the commonest way a letter arrives incomplete, and the recipient has no way of knowing what is missing.
Optional
Copies
A “cc” line naming who else received one. Worth including whenever it changes how the letter reads: a copy to a regulator, an accountant or a solicitor is information the recipient is entitled to have.
Optional
Who it helps
Who still writes business letters?
Small businesses and freelancers
Formal notice: a price change, a termination, a final demand before escalation. These are the letters that get quoted back at you, and the ones where sending an email instead weakens the position you are trying to establish.
Anyone chasing an unpaid invoice
A letter carries weight an email does not, particularly the second and third time. It also creates a dated record of what was asked and when, which is what any later step depends on.
Anyone dealing with a bank, insurer or public body
Large organisations still run on post for anything with legal weight, and they file by reference number. A properly headed letter quoting their reference gets handled; an email to a general address frequently does not.
Landlords and tenants
Notices, deposit correspondence and repair requests are often required in writing and sometimes required by post. The date on the letter matters as much as the content, because it starts a period running.
Job applicants
A covering letter is a business letter, and it is where “Dear Hiring Manager” meets “Yours sincerely” more often than anywhere else. Getting the pairing right costs nothing and is noticed by exactly the people you want to notice things.
Anyone writing across conventions
British writers corresponding with American organisations and the reverse. The differences are small, consistent and invisible until you know them, and mixing the two is more conspicuous than picking either.
Do it properly
Best practices
Find a name before settling for “Dear Sir or Madam”
One phone call to a switchboard usually produces one. A named letter is opened by somebody with a reason to act on it, and it removes the whole sincerely-or-faithfully question at the same time.
Say what you want in the first paragraph
State the reason for writing before the background. A reader deciding in ten seconds whether this is theirs to deal with will not find the request if it is at the bottom, and a letter that is not acted on has failed regardless of how it is laid out.
Quote their reference, not just yours
Organisations file by their own numbers. A letter carrying the recipient's reference reaches the right file; one carrying only yours reaches a desk where somebody has to work out where it belongs.
Write the month out
“4 August 2026” or “August 4, 2026”, never 04/08/2026. It costs three characters and removes an ambiguity that can move a deadline by four months.
List what is in the envelope
An enclosure line tells the recipient whether anything is missing. Without it, a document that never made it into the envelope simply does not exist as far as they are concerned, and neither of you finds out for weeks.
Keep a copy of what you sent
Save the PDF, not just the fact that you wrote. Letters matter most when they are being relied on later, and “I wrote to you in March” is a much weaker position than a dated document.
Avoid these
Common mistakes
Closing “Yours sincerely” after “Dear Sir or Madam”
Use “Yours faithfully” when the reader is not named. It is the commonest error in British correspondence and one of the few that a knowledgeable reader will spot immediately: the tool works the pairing out from your salutation so it cannot happen by accident.
Treating a job title as a name
“Dear Hiring Manager” addresses a role, so it takes “Yours faithfully”. This is the case almost every explanation of the rule omits, which is why so many otherwise careful covering letters get it wrong.
Mixing British and American convention in one letter
Pick one and follow it throughout: comma and the sincerely/faithfully distinction, or colon and “Sincerely”. A letter that takes half of each is more noticeable than one that consistently follows the convention its reader does not use.
Writing the date in numbers
04/08/2026 is two different days depending on who reads it. Write the month out: the ambiguity is invisible to the writer and expensive to whoever acts on the wrong one.
Mentioning an enclosure and not listing it
Add an “Enc.” line naming what is included. Without it, neither of you can tell whether something fell out of the envelope, and the gap is usually discovered by whoever needed the missing document.
Sending an email when a letter was needed
Where a notice period, a contractual term or a regulator's process requires writing, check whether it requires post. An email that does not satisfy the requirement leaves you believing you have given notice when you have not.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
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