Marriage biodata format: what goes on the page, section by section

A marriage biodata is a one-page summary of a person and their family, written to be forwarded. Here is every row it usually carries, why each one is asked for, and which ones you can safely leave off.

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What a marriage biodata is, and who it travels through

A marriage biodata is a one-page document that introduces a person and their family to another family considering a match. It is not a résumé, although it borrows the shape of one, and it is not the government-style bio-data form that PSU job applications used to ask for. Its purpose is narrower: to give the other side enough to decide whether a conversation is worth having, and to give a priest or an astrologer enough to begin a horoscope match if the families use one.

The thing that shapes the format more than anything else is that a biodata is forwarded. It rarely goes from one hand to one hand. It goes to an aunt, who sends it to a marriage bureau, which sends it into a community WhatsApp group, where it is read by fifty families nobody mentioned to you. Everything in the format follows from that: it has to be legible on a phone screen, complete enough that nobody has to ring you about a missing date of birth, and free of anything you would not want a stranger holding a copy of.

Who actually circulates it varies, and that changes the tone. Often it is a parent or an elder relative, who reads the document as a statement about the family as much as about the individual. Sometimes it is a marriage bureau or a mediator, who wants the filterable rows — age, height, education, income, caste, city — complete and near the top. Increasingly the person themselves sends it directly, in reply to a message on a matrimony app, in which case the About-me block does more work than any other line on the page. All three read the same document, so the practical answer is one biodata that satisfies the filters and still sounds like a person.

Every section, in the order families expect it

Seven blocks, in this order. The order is not arbitrary: the rows a family filters on come first, the rows they judge on come next, and the rows that need a conversation come last. You do not need every row — the notes say which are genuinely load-bearing.

Personal Details

The block a bureau or a WhatsApp group reads first, and the one that gets you filtered in or out before anyone reads a sentence.

Date of Birth: Write the full date, and write it the same way everywhere — 12 March 1998 rather than 12/03/98, which an American reader will take for December. Age is calculated from this row, so leaving it vague reads as hiding something rather than as privacy.
Time of Birth: This exists for one reason: a kundali cannot be cast without it. Take it from the birth certificate or the hospital record rather than from memory, because a twenty-minute error can move the nakshatra and therefore the whole match. If your family does not use horoscopes, leave the row out rather than guessing at it.
Place of Birth: The town or city — the astrologer needs the latitude and longitude that go with it. A hospital name adds nothing.
Height: Feet and inches with the centimetres in brackets, because bureaus and apps filter on it and half of them work in metric. 5 ft 4 in (163 cm).
Blood Group: Harmless, occasionally useful, and genuinely one of the first questions some families ask. One line.
Complexion: Traditional, contested, and entirely optional. Whether you grade your own skin on a document that will be forwarded is your decision; plenty of families now leave the row out and let the photograph speak. Omitting it occasionally draws a question, which can be answered in conversation.
Diet: Pure vegetarian, vegetarian, eggetarian, non-vegetarian, Jain. This is a real filter in a lot of households, and being vague about it wastes everybody's time.
Marital Status: Unmarried, divorced, widowed. If there has been an earlier marriage, it goes here. It is established at the talks stage without exception, and a family that finds out late treats the omission as the problem rather than the fact.

Religious Details

The horoscope and community block, and the section that varies most. A Brahmin family reads gotra and nakshatra closely, a Maratha family looks for devak, and Muslim, Christian and Sikh biodatas usually carry none of the astrological rows at all. Include the block or drop it whole — half-filled rows are what generate phone calls.

Religion: One word. It is the first row a community bureau files you under.
Caste / Sub-caste: Write both, because the sub-caste is what a lot of families actually match on — Agarwal (Vaishya), Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmin, 96 Kuli Maratha. If your family is not matching on caste, delete the row rather than writing “any” in it; that belongs in the expectations paragraph, where it reads as a position instead of a gap.
Gotra: Exogamy: many communities do not marry within the same gotra, so this row exists to be checked against the other side's. Some families also ask for the mother's gotra.
Rashi: The moon sign from the birth chart, not the sun sign from a newspaper column. Kanya (Virgo), Vrischika (Scorpio), Meena (Pisces).
Nakshatra: The birth star with the charan — “Hasta, 2nd charan”. The charan is part of the answer, so do not drop it if you have it.
Manglik: Yes or no, and the finer reading if one has been given: purna manglik or anshik manglik. A blank row is read as yes, so either answer it or remove the block.
Gan / Nadi: Dev, Manushya or Rakshasa gan; Aadi, Madhya or Antya nadi. Both are derived from the nakshatra and both feed the guna milan, so putting them on the page saves the other family a call to their astrologer.

Education & Career

One block, five rows, and the place where biodatas either say too little or drift into résumé writing. It is not a résumé: no bullet points, no achievements, no skills list.

Qualification: The highest degree, the subject, the institution and the year — “B.Tech, Computer Science, Delhi Technological University, 2020”. Add the previous degree only where it changes the picture.
Occupation: The job title as an outsider would understand it, not the internal designation. “Software Engineer, platform team” rather than “SDE-II, Grade 6”.
Organisation: Name the employer. Families look it up, and “a reputed MNC” reads as evasion.
Location: Where you actually work, which is often not where you are from. It is a live question for both sides, because it decides where the couple would live.
Annual Income: Write a figure — ₹14 lakh per annum — or write nothing. A range is fine, an adjective is not. Salary slips get asked for once talks are serious, so an inflated figure is a bad investment.

Family Details

On most biodatas this is the most-read block after the personal details, because the other family is not only assessing the individual.

Father's Name: With the honorific your family uses — Shri, Sardar, Mr.
Father's Occupation: In service, retired, or in business with the line of business, because “businessman” tells a reader nothing at all.
Mother's Name: With the honorific, the same way.
Mother's Occupation: Homemaker is an occupation and is written as one.
Siblings: One line each: elder or younger, married or not, and what they do. Whether siblings are still to be married is a real practical question for the other side, so it belongs on the page rather than in a phone call.
Family Type: Nuclear or joint, plus anything about the household a person marrying into it would want to know in advance — a vegetarian kitchen, elders living at home.
Native Place: The ancestral town or village. It carries more weight than urban readers expect: the native place locates a family for anyone who knows the region, and a recognised connection is what usually moves a match along.

About Me

Two or three sentences of prose in the first person. This is the only part of the document that is not a row in a table, and on a biodata being sent directly rather than through a relative it is the part that gets read twice.

Write it in your own register. Three sentences is plenty: what you do, where the family is from and how it lives, and one or two things you genuinely spend your free time on. Specifics are what make it readable — “I teach maths to two children at a neighbourhood centre on Sundays” does more than a paragraph of adjectives, because it could not have been copied off a template.

Avoid the two failure modes. One is the résumé slide: responsibilities, appraisal ratings and project names, which nobody reading a biodata cares about. The other is the personality inventory — simple, caring, homely, family-oriented — which appears on so many biodatas that a reader's eye now slides straight past it. If a sentence would be equally true of everybody in the WhatsApp group, it is doing nothing.

Partner Expectations

What you are looking for, in plain words and kept short. Two or three sentences, phrased as preferences rather than conditions — the same information reads very differently depending on which it sounds like.

Age band, education, diet, city, and any one thing that genuinely matters: a family where working after marriage is normal, a willingness to live in the same city as elderly parents. Leave out anything you have no real preference about, because a list of twelve items with “no bar” after half of them reads as a form somebody filled in rather than a thought somebody had.

Two things are worth stating even though they feel awkward, because they are the most common reasons a match falls apart after the families have already met twice: whether you intend to keep working after marriage, and where you expect the couple to live. Both are far cheaper to say on the page than to discover at the third meeting, and saying them only removes readers who were never going to agree.

Contact Details

Three rows, and the block most worth a family decision before the file is exported rather than after it is in three groups.

Contact Person: A name and the relationship — “Rajeev Agarwal (father)”. The other side needs to know who they are calling and how to address them. A parent or elder sibling is the convention for a first approach; your own name is equally normal if you are running the search yourself.
Phone: One number that is actually answered. Two at most, labelled — a reader who has to guess which one to try often tries neither, and three numbers is three more pieces of your household's data in circulation.
Address: Area and city is enough on any copy that will be forwarded. The full postal address belongs on a printed copy handed to one family, not on a file that ends up in a group of two hundred.

One page, or two

One page is the default and one page is what gets read. A biodata is skimmed on a phone; a second page is a second image to open, and second pages routinely go unread and unforwarded.

Two pages are justified in three situations: the family wants the full janm-patrika reproduced, in which case the chart goes on page two; the family is large and the sibling and relation rows genuinely run long, which is common on Maharashtrian biodatas that list the maternal side; or there is a property and business statement the family wants in full. Everything else — hobbies, a longer About-me, more photographs — is padding, and it costs you the page that mattered.

If you are close to spilling over, cut rows rather than shrinking type. Anything under about 10pt is unreadable on a phone and looks cramped printed at A4, and the phone is where it will be read.

The photograph

One photograph, recent, face clearly visible, plain background, taken in daylight. That is the whole convention. A passport photograph is acceptable and slightly formal; a plain half-length photograph is the most common choice and reads best.

What reads badly: heavy filters and skin smoothing, because the difference is obvious the moment you meet and it makes everything else on the page look less reliable; group photographs where the reader has to guess which person you are; a four-pose collage; and anything that looks like a professional shoot, which raises the question of why.

Sending the biodata first and the photograph after a reply is now completely normal, particularly where the document is going into groups rather than to one family. Nobody reads it as evasive, and it is worth knowing that a photograph on a forwarded document travels a great deal further than the conversation you sent it into.

WhatsApp copy versus printed copy

These should not be the same file. The WhatsApp copy is the one that gets forwarded, so it carries the area and city rather than the full address, one contact number rather than three, and no document numbers of any kind. Export it as a PDF: an image gets recompressed until the text is unreadable, and a Word file will not open properly on half the phones it reaches.

The printed copy, handed to one family at a meeting or pinned up at a marriage-bureau gathering, can carry the full address and the horoscope, because it goes to a known recipient. Print it at A4 on plain paper; a thin border is fine, glossy photo paper curls and marks.

Name the file properly. “Ishita_Agarwal_Biodata.pdf” survives a hundred forwards and can be found again by searching for a name. “IMG-20260906-WA0031.pdf” cannot, and a file nobody can find is a file nobody sends on.

The mistakes that actually cost replies

Leaving the time of birth blank
If your family exchanges horoscopes this is the first row the other side looks for, and a blank one means somebody has to call and ask. If nobody knows it, write what the family believes it to be and say so — a guess presented as a fact is worse, because the entire guna milan is then built on it.
Writing income as an adjective
“Good package”, “handsome salary” and “well settled” are read as either evasion or exaggeration. A figure, a range, or no row at all.
Turning it into a résumé
Bullet-pointed achievements, project lists, appraisal ratings and skills sections belong on a résumé. On a biodata they push the family block onto page two, which is where nobody reads it.
Sending an image instead of a PDF
A screenshot of a biodata is illegible after three forwards, cannot be printed for a family meeting, and cannot be found again by searching. A PDF with real text survives both.
The full address, the Aadhaar number, the office ID
Anything that identifies you to a stranger for a purpose other than marriage should not be on a document designed to be forwarded. Nobody needs an Aadhaar number to decide whether to call.
Never updating it
A biodata with a two-year-old job title and last year's salary is circulating right now in groups you have forgotten about. Re-export it whenever anything on it changes.

Questions people actually ask

What is the correct format for a marriage biodata?

There is no single official format, but the widely used one is a single page with seven blocks in this order: personal details, religious and horoscope details, education and career, family details, a short paragraph about yourself, a short paragraph on what you are looking for, and contact details, with the name and photograph at the top. Communities that do not exchange horoscopes simply omit the second block. Anything beyond those seven is optional, and the shorter the document, the more of it gets read.

How long should a marriage biodata be?

One page. A biodata is read on a phone and forwarded, and a second page is a second file that often does not travel with the first. Go to two pages only when you are reproducing the full janm-patrika, when the family and relation rows genuinely run long, or when there is a property and business statement the family wants stated in full. If you are close to overflowing, cut rows rather than reducing the type size below about 10pt.

Should a marriage biodata include salary?

Include a figure if you are comfortable doing so, because it is one of the rows families filter on and its absence is noticed. Write it as a number or a range in rupees per annum. Do not write an adjective, and do not inflate it: pay slips or an income tax return are commonly asked for once talks become serious, and a figure that does not reconcile is very hard to explain. Leaving the row out entirely is a legitimate choice, and it means the question comes up in the first conversation instead.

Is a marriage biodata the same as a résumé?

No. A résumé is written to win an interview and contains only professional information. A biodata is written to introduce a person and a family, so it carries date, time and place of birth, height, diet, caste and horoscope details and a family block — and it deliberately leaves out what a résumé is made of, such as achievements, project detail and skills lists. Sending a résumé where a biodata was asked for reads as a misunderstanding of the request.

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