Thesis Margins, Font Size and Line Spacing: Canadian University Requirements

Page setup is the part of a thesis that gets checked first and argued about last. Margins, font size, line spacing and pagination are objective, so a reviewer can reject a deposit on them in under a minute. This page collects the verified values published by 53 Canadian universities, taken from official graduate studies pages, style guides and templates. Where an institution publishes no value, the table says “not published” rather than guessing.

Short answer: the most common values

Across the 53 institutions below, the dominant page setup is:

• Margins: 1 inch (2.5 cm) on all four sides. Seventeen of the 44 institutions that publish a left margin use this value. The second most common is 1.5 inches (38 mm) on the binding edge, used by six Ontario universities and by several Quebec institutions that expect a bound copy. A third cluster of six sits at 1.25 inches (32 mm), and four of those six are in British Columbia: UBC, Simon Fraser, UNBC and Trinity Western, joined by Thompson Rivers and the University of Toronto.
• Body font: 12 pt. Where a minimum is set instead of a fixed size, that minimum is almost always 10 pt.
• Line spacing: 1.5 for the body. Twenty-three institutions require or accept 1.5, fourteen require double spacing, and a handful allow single spacing.
• Pagination: lowercase roman numerals in the front matter, arabic numerals from the introduction, title page counted but not printed.

If you are formatting before you have confirmed your own university’s rules, 1 inch margins, 12 pt and 1.5 spacing will be legal or close to legal almost everywhere. It is still not a substitute for the official page.

Master table: margins, font and spacing by university

Ontario

Quebec

British Columbia

The Adler values are those of the Vancouver doctoral handbook; its two Vancouver master’s handbooks publish no page setup and defer to APA. Verified 2026-09-03: every institution above was read at its official source, so no British Columbia row is left inaccessible, but the University of Victoria, Royal Roads and Vancouver Island University publish little or nothing on page setup.

Font rules: imposed, bounded or free

Three regimes coexist.

A named typeface. ETS requires Times New Roman 12 pt and refuses condensed characters. ENAP, TELUQ, Tyndale and Nipissing name their fonts. Guelph names Times New Roman or Arial. Bishop’s ships a LaTeX class built on Palatino, so the choice is made for you the moment you use the official class.

A size range with no typeface. This is the most common pattern. Queen’s asks for a standard font at 10 to 12 pt, OCAD for 10 to 12 pt, HEC for 10 to 12 pt, UQAC for 10 to 12 pt. The University of Toronto, York, Windsor and Brock set only a floor of 10 pt, which means a 10 pt thesis is legal at those four and would be rejected at Western, where the body must be at least 12 pt.

Characters per inch. Three Ontario universities still measure density the way a typewriter did. Carleton requires a 12 characters per inch font, Toronto Metropolitan asks for 10 to 15 characters per inch alongside its 10 to 12 pt rule, Guelph prefers a pitch of 10 to 12 characters per inch, and Trinity Western caps its 11 or 12 pt rule at 10 characters per inch. Modern proportional fonts have no fixed pitch, so in practice these clauses are read as a legibility standard rather than a measurement anyone verifies.

One rule is nearly universal and easy to breach: the same typeface throughout, including the title page, the bibliography and the appendices. Brock, McMaster, ETS and Polytechnique all state it explicitly.

Line spacing: 1.5, double, and the exceptions

1.5 spacing is the modal requirement, but double spacing is close behind and the split does not follow provincial lines. Carleton, Queen’s, Wilfrid Laurier, Trent, Laurentian and Tyndale require double in Ontario; TELUQ, UQTR, UQO, UQAC and Sherbrooke require double in Quebec; UNBC and Adler Vancouver require it in British Columbia. The University of Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan, York and Windsor set 1.5 as a floor. Western and Ontario Tech accept anything from 1.5 to 2.

The exceptions matter more than the main value, because they are where reviewers find errors:

• Long quotations, usually beyond three lines (Universite de Montreal, Polytechnique) or five lines (Queen’s) or 40 words (TELUQ), are indented and single spaced.
• Footnotes and endnotes are single spaced almost everywhere.
• Bibliographies, tables of contents and lists are single spaced at INRS, UQAM, ETS, Laval and Sherbrooke, but stay double spaced at Queen’s, where the rule covers the bibliography.
• The abstract runs against the trend: it must be double spaced at the University of Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan and Brock, even where the body is 1.5, and single spaced at ETS and INRS.

A few institutions allow single spacing for the whole body. Concordia states plainly that the thesis can be single spaced, Guelph prefers single for electronic documents, McMaster allows single or double, and the Bishop’s class has disabled double spacing. Do not carry an assumption from one university to another.

Pagination: why theses start at i, ii, iii, iv

The dominant Canadian convention has three parts. The front matter is numbered in lowercase roman numerals. The title page counts as page i but its number is not printed. The body restarts at arabic page 1 at the introduction or chapter 1 and runs continuously through the bibliography and appendices.

That is why the first visible page number in most theses is ii or iii rather than i. At the University of Toronto and York the abstract is page ii. At Guelph both the title page and the abstract are suppressed, so visible numbering starts at iii. At Windsor the title page and the committee page are suppressed, so the declaration is iii. At Polytechnique roman numbering becomes visible at iii. Concordia puts the abstract at iii.

Three institutions break the pattern and are worth flagging:

• Universite de Montreal forbids roman numerals outright. The guide states that roman pagination is to be avoided, including in the front matter, the bibliography and the appendices. One continuous arabic sequence, folio at the bottom centre, and the first page of each chapter is counted but not numbered.
• Royal Roads also runs one arabic sequence with no roman numerals, the title page counted but left unnumbered.
• Brock does not number the prefatory pages at all, in either numeral system.
• McGill leaves the position of page numbers to the author and publishes no roman numeral rule, requiring only that whichever convention you choose is applied consistently.

Placement is also prescribed more often than students expect. TELUQ puts the number at the top right, 2.5 cm from the edge, which is unusual in Quebec. ETS alternates top right on odd pages and top left on even pages for double sided printing. Western puts preliminaries at the bottom centre and the body at the top right. ENAP uses bottom right.

Universities that prescribe nothing, and what that means

Eight institutions in the table publish no usable page setup at all: Waterloo (no paper size, font, spacing or margin value, the supplied .dotm and Overleaf templates define them), uOttawa centrally (values exist only in faculty examples, such as the Faculty of Education’s 2.5 cm and 12 pt Times New Roman), Laurentian (only the template default of Times Roman 12 pt double spaced), NOSM (rules sit behind the intranet in GS-010), Algoma (no public guide at all), UVic (which publishes only pagination and a recommended abstract length), Royal Roads (which defers to APA and publishes only pagination) and Vancouver Island University (whose thesis resources page lists style guides as unlinked text). OCAD publishes a font range and no margins.

Universite de Sherbrooke is a different case. There is no university-wide standard: roughly eleven faculty or centre protocols coexist, several behind a login. The values in the table come from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities protocol and do not bind other faculties.

The practical consequence is the same in every one of these cases. When the university publishes nothing, the official template becomes the rule, and when there is no template either, the faculty or the supervisor decides. Get the answer in writing before you format 200 pages.

A note on Concordia

Concordia is the single value in this table most often reported wrong. An earlier automated summary of ours stated 1.5 inch margins and double spacing for Concordia. Both are incorrect. The Thesis Preparation Guide sets 1.0 inch (2.5 cm) on all four sides, with no exemption for tables and figures, and says explicitly that the thesis can be single spaced. The preferred fonts are Times New Roman 12 pt or Arial 11 pt. If you saw the other numbers from us, ignore them and use the guide.

Check these five things before you deposit

1. Left margin against the binding rule. If your university expects a bound copy, the left margin is wider than the others: 1.25 in at Toronto, UBC, Simon Fraser, Trinity Western and Thompson Rivers, 32 mm at UNBC, 38 mm at Western, Trent and Ontario Tech, 3.8 cm at McMaster and ETS, 4 cm at UQTR, 4 to 5 cm at HEC.
2. Body font floor, not just the recommended size. A 10 pt body passes at Toronto and fails at Western.
3. Abstract spacing. It is frequently different from the body, in both directions.
4. The first visible page number. Confirm whether it is ii or iii, and whether roman numerals are used at all.
5. One typeface throughout, including the title page, bibliography and appendices.

Sources: official graduate studies pages, style guides and templates linked in each row of the tables above. Last verified: Ontario values 2026-07-02, Montreal and Quebec values 2026-08, British Columbia values 2026-09-03, page compiled and rechecked 2026-09-03.