YouTube banner size, and the 82 percent of it nobody is guaranteed to see

Export your channel banner at 2560 x 1440 pixels, 16:9, as a file under 6MB. Then put everything that has to be read inside a centred box of roughly 1544 x 423, because that is the only part of the image YouTube guarantees will be visible on every device. On a television your whole banner shows. On a phone, a strip through the middle shows. Those are the same file and they are not the same picture.

The numbers, straight off Google's page

These sit inside a collapsed section on the channel branding page, which you have to click open. That is almost certainly why so many guides carry them secondhand.

82 percent of your banner is not guaranteed to be seen

This is the number worth taking away and no guide we read had done the division. Google gives a minimum canvas of 2048 x 1152 and a safe area of 1235 x 338 inside it. So:

• Width: 1235 divided by 2048 is 0.603. Just over 60 percent of the width survives everywhere.
• Height: 338 divided by 1152 is 0.293. Only 29 percent of the height does.
• Area: 0.603 multiplied by 0.293 is 0.177. 17.7 percent of your banner is safe. The other 82.3 percent is not.

Put plainly, you are designing a 16:9 image in which a letterbox strip through the middle carries the entire message, and the rest exists so the thing does not look empty on a television. That is an unusual brief and it is the reason most channel banners look like a logo floating in a gradient. The gradient is doing real work. It is the part that gets cropped.

Why the crop is so severe, and why the rule about borders exists

A YouTube banner is the only image on this site's size guides that has to work on a television. Google says so directly, giving the television as the reason for the larger recommended file. A channel opened on a TV app shows the banner nearly in full and nearly edge to edge. The same channel on a phone shows a short wide strip, because a phone screen has no room for a 16:9 header above the content.

That is a wider spread of crops than any other format covered here, and it explains the instruction that reads oddly at first: do not include shadows, borders or frames. A border is a design element defined entirely by the edges of the file, and on this format the edges are the part that disappears. Frame a banner nicely and a television viewer sees a framed image while a phone viewer sees two unexplained vertical lines with nothing joining them.

It is the same failure this site keeps running into in different clothes. On the LinkedIn banner a profile photo covers one corner. On a Facebook cover the phone crops in from both sides. On a YouTube thumbnail a duration badge sits in the bottom right of every single one. Four formats, four different mechanisms, one lesson: find out what covers or removes part of the image before you decide where the words go.

What actually belongs in the safe strip

You have about 1544 by 423 pixels of certainty. That is a wide, short letterbox, and it fits fewer words than people expect. YouTube's own creator guidance suggests one specific thing to put there, which is more concrete than most platform advice gets.

• Your upload schedule, if you keep one. This is YouTube's own recommendation and it is the rare piece of branding advice that answers a question a visitor actually has, which is whether this channel is still alive.
• What the channel is about, in one short line, in the words a viewer would use rather than a tagline.
• Your name or logo, once. It is already above the banner in the profile picture, so repeating it large is the most common way this space gets wasted.
• Nothing that needs to be clicked. A banner is a flat image. Links belong in the channel link fields, where they are tappable.
• No border, no frame, no drop shadow, which YouTube asks for directly and which the crop explains.

The other thing worth knowing is how little this decision matters relative to its neighbours. A banner is set once and then left for a year or two. The image that has to be remade for every single upload is the thumbnail, and that one has a genuinely recent specification change most guides have not caught up with. If the visuals are settled and the question is when to publish, the posting time studies are the more useful hour.

If you take one thing from this: build the banner inside the middle strip, then extend the background outwards to fill 2560 x 1440 and expect nobody on a phone to ever see it. For every other network, the full size guide collapses most formats into two files, and Instagram's post size has its own page because the grid changed underneath it.