Marriage Biodata for a Groom: Format, Sample and What to Leave Out

A file lands in a WhatsApp group in Uttara at nine in the evening. Two pages, a passport photograph at the top, and a heading in Bangla. Three women read it on their phones within the hour. By ten past nine one of them has already written back a single line: bhalo, kintu aro janar dorkar. Good, but we need to know more.

That is the whole life of a patrer biodata. It is read fast, on a small screen, by people who are comparing it against four others. Most grooms treat it as a form to fill in. It is closer to a first impression that you get to write yourself, and almost everything that decides the outcome is in what you chose to include.

What the bride's side actually reads first

Families do not read a biodata top to bottom. In practice the eye goes to four things, roughly in this order: age, what you do and what you earn, your family and where they are from, and whether the whole document reads like a real person wrote it.

Everything else — hobbies, favourite food, a line about your ambitions — is decoration. It can help you sound human, but it will never rescue a biodata that is vague about work or evasive about family. The Daily Star has written about how tired this generation has become of the whole marriage process, and a large part of that exhaustion is people trading documents that say almost nothing.

The structure that works for a patrer biodata

Keep it to one page, or two at most, in this order:

1. Personal: name, date of birth and age, height, blood group, present address, permanent address.
2. Religion and practice: madhab or denomination if relevant, and an honest line about how you practise.
3. Education: degrees, institutions, years. Newest first.
4. Work: employer, designation, how long, and where you are posted.
5. Income: monthly figure or a narrow range, plus anything you support.
6. Family: father, mother, siblings with their occupations and marital status; the district the family is from.
7. Expectations: three or four lines about the kind of match and household you have in mind.
8. Contact: one guardian's name and number, not your own personal number.

A worked sample, line by line

This is a fictional example, written the way a good biodata reads.

• Name: Md Tanvir Hasan
• Date of birth: 12 March 1997 (age 29). Height: 5 ft 9 in. Blood group: B+
• Present address: Sector 11, Uttara, Dhaka. Permanent address: Chandina, Cumilla
• Religion: Muslim, Sunni. Prays five waqt, keeps a beard, family is moderately practising rather than strict.
• Education: BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2020. HSC 2015, Notre Dame College.
• Work: Senior engineer at a telecom equipment company in Dhaka since 2021. Office in Gulshan, no field posting.
• Income: Tk 95,000 a month, plus a yearly bonus. I contribute Tk 20,000 a month to my parents' household.
• Father: retired schoolteacher, Chandina. Mother: homemaker. Brother: 33, married, works in Chattogram. Sister: 24, studying for a master's, unmarried and living at home.
• Family home: we own our house in Chandina and rent the flat in Uttara. My parents live in Chandina and visit.
• Expectations: a graduate, practising, comfortable in both Bangla and English. My wife is welcome to work or study; we will decide together. After marriage we would live in the Uttara flat, the two of us.
• Contact: Md Rafiqul Hasan (father), followed by one number.

Notice what that sample does. It answers the questions the other side would have asked in the second phone call, so there is no second phone call needed to get past the basics. If you want a step-by-step walkthrough in Bangla before you write yours, this guide to building a marriage biodata is a sensible starting point.

Salary: how honest is honest

Inflating income is the single most common lie in Bangladeshi biodatas, and it is also the one most likely to be checked. Bride-side families ask colleagues, cousins, and sometimes people at the same company. Getting caught does not just end that proposal; it travels.

• Give a real monthly figure, or a narrow range such as Tk 70,000–80,000. A range of Tk 50,000 to two lakh is read as a refusal to answer.
• If your income is irregular — business, freelance, commission — say so and give an honest average over the last year.
• If you are a probashi, write the take-home figure after deductions, not the gross that sounds impressive. Families consistently over-read overseas salaries.
• Mention obligations you already carry: parents, a sibling's education, a loan. Nobody holds this against a man. Hiding it is what causes trouble in the first year.

Wedding costs and expectations have risen sharply, and The Business Standard's reporting on how inflation is reshaping the wedding market explains why both sides now scrutinise money earlier than they used to. Write your numbers so they survive that scrutiny.

Family details, and how much to give

For a groom, the family section carries more weight than most men expect. The bride's side is not being nosy. They are working out what her daily life will look like, and who will be in the house.

Give occupations and marital status for parents and siblings, and the district the family belongs to. Then answer the question every bride's family wants answered and few biodatas address: where will the couple live, and with whom. Joint family in the same flat, separate floor in the same building, separate home in another area — say it plainly. This one line prevents more broken engagements than any other.

What to leave out

• Your personal mobile number. Use a guardian's number, or a platform where contact stays private until both sides agree.
• Your NID number, passport number and full date-of-birth documents. A biodata gets forwarded; identity documents should not travel with it.
• Anything about the bride's complexion, height or weight in your expectations. It reads badly in 2026 and it filters out the wrong people.
• Salary claims you cannot show, and job titles that flatter the role.
• Long paragraphs about your personality. Two honest lines beat ten polished ones.

Three lines that get a biodata rejected instantly

1. Any hint about what the bride's family should give. Furniture, gold, a motorcycle, help with a business. Demanding or accepting dowry is a criminal offence under the Dowry Prohibition Act 2018, and amarjibon's position is simple: it has no place in a proposal, in a biodata, or in a marriage.
2. Fair, tall, slim. Written as a requirement, this line tells a good family exactly how the rest of the marriage will be conducted.
3. Must not work after marriage. You are entitled to your preference, but state it as a subject for discussion, not as a condition. Written as a condition, it removes most educated candidates before anyone has spoken.

A longer catalogue of these, with rewrites, is in 11 Biodata Mistakes, and the photograph has its own rules, covered in The Biodata Photo.

From a forwarded file to a verified profile

A biodata has one structural weakness: nothing in it is verified. Anyone can type a salary, a designation and a district into a Word file, and the bride's family has to spend two weeks finding people who can confirm it. That is the actual bottleneck in most proposals.

On amarjibon, a profile does the same job as a biodata but starts from a verified identity: every profile is NID-verified with a liveness selfie check. It is bilingual in English and বাংলা, families can be involved from the first conversation, and you can filter on district of origin, observance, education, profession and living arrangements. PremEngine does the matching in the background, and your phone number stays private until you decide to share it. For the general format rules, see How to Write a Marriage Biodata; for the bride's side of the same question, see Marriage Biodata for a Bride.

Related reading

• How amarjibon Keeps Your Marriage Search Halal, Safe and Verified
• Looking for a Doctor Bride or Groom in Bangladesh
• Best Matrimony Apps in Bangladesh (2026 Honest Guide)

**Create your free profile on amarjibon.com, or download the app on Google Play or the App Store.** Marriage, taken seriously.