LinkedIn image sizes, and why the centred safe zone advice is wrong
Your banner is 1584 x 396 and every guide agrees on that. Where they go wrong is what to do inside it: they tell you to centre your content, which is advice borrowed from Facebook, and on LinkedIn it puts your logo directly behind your own profile photo.
Upload your LinkedIn banner at 1584 x 396 pixels. Every guide agrees on that and they are right. Then ignore the next thing they tell you, which is to keep your content inside a centred box of 1350 x 220, because your profile photo sits on the bottom left of that banner and a centred box runs straight through it. On LinkedIn the safe area is not the middle. It is the right.
Our articles are still written by humans!
Get human written articles in your Google feed.
The sizes, and which ones you can trust
There are only two numbers on this page that every source we checked agreed on. That is worth knowing before you memorise the rest of them.
| What | Size | How confident |
|---|---|---|
| Personal profile banner | 1584 x 396 | Unanimous across five guides |
| Company page cover | 1128 x 191 | Unanimous across the three that covered it |
| Profile photo | 400 x 400 | Agreed, shown as a circle |
| Company page logo | 400 x 400 | Agreed, 268 x 268 given as the minimum |
| Feed post, portrait | 1080 x 1350 | Guides disagree. This is the one we would use |
| Feed post, square | 1080 x 1080 | Agreed |
| Link preview image | 1200 x 627 | Agreed |
| File limits | JPG or PNG, up to 8MB | Agreed |
Why the centred safe zone is wrong here
The two newest banner guides on this search both tell you to keep your important content inside a centred 1350 x 220, and they give the same number, which is usually a sign that one of them read the other. It is advice with a real origin: it is how a Facebook cover works, where the phone crops in from both sides and only the middle survives.
LinkedIn has a second problem that Facebook does not. A LinkedIn banner is cropped between screen sizes like any other banner, and nobody publishes by how much, so a centred allowance for that part is a reasonable guess. But it is not the thing that ruins most LinkedIn banners. Your profile photo, a large circle, is laid over the bottom left corner. That is not a crop, it is an occlusion, it is certain rather than estimated, and it sits in one corner rather than on both edges. A symmetrical safe box does not describe it and cannot protect you from it.
The practical rule is duller than a number and it survives LinkedIn moving things around, which it will: put everything that has to be read in the right half of the banner, and treat the bottom left as background. A texture, a continuation of a photograph, a colour field, all fine down there. A word or a logo, not fine.
The company page cover is a different shape, and this is where it goes wrong
A personal banner is 1584 x 396, which is 4:1. A company page cover is 1128 x 191, which is closer to 5.9:1. Those are not the same rectangle and one file does not serve both.
This catches people out constantly, because the two jobs feel identical and get done in the same afternoon. Take the personal banner, upload it to the company page, and LinkedIn fits a 4:1 image into a 5.9:1 frame by taking the top and bottom off it. Anything vertically centred survives. Anything that sat near the top or bottom edge, which on a well designed banner is usually the strapline, does not.
- 1584 x 396 for your own profile. The one behind your face.
- 1128 x 191 for the company page. Half the height, proportionally much wider.
- Export both from the same artboard rather than resizing one into the other, so you control what gets left out.
- The company cover has no profile photo over its bottom left, it has the page logo, which sits lower and smaller. The right-half rule is looser here.
The feed post, which is the only one you make more than once
Everything above is furniture. You set a banner once and then leave it alone for two years, which is why it is not worth memorising and is worth doing properly. The feed post is the opposite: it is the size you will export every week for as long as you keep this up.
The good news is that you already have it. 1080 x 1350 posts to LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook without a second export, which is the whole argument of the full size guide. LinkedIn's feed is more forgiving than Instagram's about ratio and less forgiving about text: a portrait image takes up more of the screen on the way past, and this is a platform where people scroll fast and read captions.
| Where it goes | File | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Feed post, portrait | 1080 x 1350 | The default. Takes the most vertical space |
| Feed post, square | 1080 x 1080 | Works, takes less room on the way past |
| Link preview | 1200 x 627 | Set by the page you are linking to, not by you |
| Document or carousel | 1080 x 1350 per page | Portrait, because it is read on a phone |
What actually goes on a banner
Most business banners are a logo on a gradient, which wastes the largest piece of visual space LinkedIn gives you. The logo is already on the page, in the photo, next to your name. The banner is the only place to answer the question the person looking at your profile actually has, which is what you do and whether it is relevant to them.
- One line saying what you do, in the words a client would use rather than the words on your website.
- Set it in the right half, which the diagram above is the argument for.
- Nothing that needs to be clicked. A banner is a flat image, so a URL or a phone number on it cannot be tapped, copied or read aloud by a screen reader.
- No small type. It renders at a fraction of its export size on a phone, and 1584 pixels of width becomes a few hundred.
If LinkedIn is a serious channel for you rather than a profile you keep tidy, the banner is the smallest decision on it. What goes in the feed every week is the one that takes the time, and the LinkedIn algorithm rebuild changed what that feed rewards more than any size change ever will. For the sizes on every other network, the full guide collapses most of them into two files, and Facebook's cover photo has its own page because its safe area genuinely is centred, which is where this whole confusion started. YouTube's channel banner is the extreme version of the same problem: its safe area is centred too, and it is under a fifth of the image. The same trap catches the profile text as well, which is why the headline examples in circulation are measurably the wrong length.
Frequently asked questions
What is the correct LinkedIn banner size?
1584 x 396 pixels for a personal profile, as a JPG or PNG up to 8MB. Every maintained size guide we checked agrees on that figure. A company page cover is a different shape at 1128 x 191.
What is the safe zone for a LinkedIn banner?
LinkedIn does not publish one. The commonly quoted centred 1350 x 220 is borrowed from formats that crop from both sides, and it fails here because your profile photo covers the bottom left. Keep anything that has to be read in the right half.
Is the LinkedIn banner size the same for a company page?
No, and this is the most common mistake. A personal banner is 1584 x 396, roughly 4:1. A company page cover is 1128 x 191, roughly 5.9:1. Uploading the personal file to a company page crops the top and bottom off it.
What size should a LinkedIn post image be?
1080 x 1350 for a portrait feed post, which is the same file that posts to Instagram and Facebook. Square at 1080 x 1080 also works and takes less vertical space. Link preview images are 1200 x 627.
What size is a LinkedIn profile photo?
400 x 400 pixels. It is displayed as a circle, so anything in the corners of a square file is cut off. A company page logo is also 400 x 400, with 268 x 268 given as the minimum.
How we researched this
- Five maintained size guides were read for this article and their numbers compared against each other rather than copied from whichever one ranked first. Where all five agree, the number is stated plainly. Where they disagree, the disagreement is printed, because a specification everybody repeats and nobody checks is how a wrong number survives for a decade.
- Two numbers came back unanimous across every source read: the personal banner at 1584 x 396 and the company page cover at 1128 x 191. Those are the two you can rely on.
- The feed post sizes are where the guides fall apart, and one of them prints a set of figures that cannot all be true at once. That is shown in the article with the contradiction left visible, rather than resolved silently in our favour.
- The safe area argument in this article is ours and it is reasoning rather than a specification. LinkedIn publishes no safe rectangle and no overlap figure for the profile photo. What we have done is point out that the widely copied centred box cannot be right, because the thing that obscures a LinkedIn banner sits in one corner rather than on both edges. The direction is defensible. Any pixel figure for it, including ours, is an estimate and is labelled as one.
- One limitation on sourcing, since we link LinkedIn's own help centre below. That page renders its text through scripting and we could not read it to quote from, so nothing here is presented as a quotation from LinkedIn. It is linked because it is the canonical page for a reader to check.
- We sell a tool that writes and designs social posts. It makes feed posts, not banners, which is said plainly in the disclosure rather than stretched into a pitch.
Sources
