Facebook cover photo size

Ask what the Facebook cover photo size is and you will be told 851 × 315, or possibly 820 × 312. Facebook’s own help center gives that first figure, then two aspect ratios that contradict it and each other, and for a personal profile it gives no size at all.

That is not a criticism of the guides repeating one number. It is the reason a cover that looked right in the editor arrives on the Page with a third of it missing.

Everything quoted here comes from Facebook’s help center, read on September 7, 2026. Where a figure is worked out from those quotes rather than printed by Facebook, the text says so.

What Facebook publishes for a Page cover

Three shapes are named on that one page. 16:9 is 1.78:1. 2.4:1 is 2.4:1. And 851 × 315 works out to 2.70:1, which is neither of them.

The 851 × 315 figure is about weight, not shape

Read Facebook’s sentence again and notice what it is a claim about: that size and format loads fastest. It is advice on page weight, sitting in the same clause as an sRGB color space and a 100 kilobyte budget. It is not a statement about the frame your image lands in.

The frame is the aspect ratio, and Facebook gives two of them because a computer and a phone show the cover differently. That is the practical consequence, worked out here from Facebook’s own ratios rather than quoted from them:

• An image of 2.70:1 — the shape of 851 × 315 — is wider than either container. Filling a 16:9 frame with it means the frame is relatively taller, so the image scales up until it covers and the surplus width is discarded. Facebook says the cover left-aligns with a full bleed, which tells you which end goes: the right.
• Roughly a third of the width of an 851 × 315 file falls outside a 16:9 container, and about a ninth falls outside a 2.4:1 one. Both figures are arithmetic from Facebook’s ratios, not numbers Facebook has published.

If your logo sits on the right of an 851 × 315 cover and disappears on desktop, that is the whole explanation.

Build at 16:9 and let the phone crop the height

Between two published ratios, the one to build at is the taller one, 16:9. An image cut to 16:9 fills the desktop container exactly. On a phone the 2.4:1 container is relatively wider, so it keeps the full width and trims top and bottom instead — an ordinary, predictable crop, and the one everybody already expects from a banner.

Do it the other way round and there is no recovery. A 2.4:1 file has no picture at all above and below the band a 16:9 frame wants, so something has to be invented or the image has to be pushed off its own edges.

Facebook does not say where the vertical trim falls on mobile, so assume the center survives and the extreme top and bottom do not. Compare that with the published Twitter header size, where X names the band outright: 60 pixels off the top and bottom of a 1500 × 500 header could be cropped. One sentence, and it saves an afternoon of guessing.

A personal cover photo has no published size

This is the part that surprises people who have read four guides on Page covers. For a personal Facebook profile, the help article on adding or changing a cover photo carries exactly one requirement:

“Your cover image has to be at least 720 pixels wide.”

No height. No ratio. No file size. Facebook does say, on the Page article, that “the left side of your cover photo will be partially covered by your profile picture, and may be cropped and resized to fit different screens”, and that the profile picture overlaps the cover “by approximately 40 pixels on mobile devices”. Approximately, and measured in the rendered layout rather than in your file, so it is not a margin you can convert into pixels of your own artwork.

Practically: a personal cover built at 16:9 and at least 720 pixels wide satisfies everything Facebook has actually committed to, and the lower-left is where the portrait lands.

The profile picture, which does have numbers

Note the shape: it is stored square and displayed as a circle, so the corners of a 320 × 320 image are never seen. Facebook also suggests that “for profile pictures and cover photos with your logo or text, you may get a better result by using a PNG file”, which is the usual advice that flat color and lettering survive lossless compression and suffer under JPEG.

Getting a file into shape

Wrong proportions. Settle this before anything else, because a crop cannot be undone afterwards. The image resizer takes a target width and height and crops in the same pass, so the picture is read once instead of being resampled by two separate tools.

Unsure what you have. Image dimensions reports the stored and the displayed size separately. They differ for anything photographed on a rotated phone, and the displayed pair is the one Facebook measures.

Too heavy. Facebook’s 100 kilobyte figure is a loading-speed suggestion, not a rejection, but it is a reasonable target for a flat graphic. Compress image searches for a quality that lands under a size you name while the pixel dimensions stay exactly where they are.

Nothing to start from. Draw at the published shape instead of bending something else into it. The Facebook cover photo maker exports 16:9 at 1600 × 900, or that doubled, over a photograph or a flat background with your own wording, and it can outline the band the 2.4:1 phone container removes while you compose.

A square, for the profile picture. Square image crops to 1:1 without making you calculate the offsets, which is the shape Facebook stores before it draws the circle.

Paid is a separate specification. A cover photo and an ad image share a platform and nothing else: ads have their own ratio recommendation, their own per-placement minimums and a stated file-size ceiling, none of which appear on the cover photo page. Facebook ad size quotes those, with dates.

The other Meta surface. Instagram publishes its figures in a completely different form — not one recommended rectangle but a fixed width and a band of acceptable heights around it — which is worth reading before you assume the two networks answer the same way. Instagram post size quotes that band and the pixel pairs at each end of it.

A banner on another network. Facebook gives two ratios for the same cover and no rectangle, so any safe band you see for it — including the one on this page — was derived from those ratios by somebody. YouTube goes the other way and states an actual rectangle for a channel banner, which turns out to raise a different problem entirely: YouTube banner size has the figures and the arithmetic.

Checklist

1. Decide whether it is a Page cover or a personal one. Only the Page has a published shape.
2. Build at 16:9. It fills the desktop container exactly and crops predictably on a phone.
3. Keep the essentials away from the lower-left, where the profile picture sits, and out of the top and bottom bands that the mobile ratio trims.
4. Stay above 400 × 150, which Facebook states as the minimum, and above 720 pixels wide if it is a personal cover.
5. PNG for a logo or lettering, JPEG for a photograph. Facebook re-encodes either way.

Sources

• Facebook Help Center, Facebook Page profile picture and cover photo dimensions — the 16:9 and 2.4:1 ratios, the 400 × 150 minimum, the 851 × 315 sRGB JPG under 100 kilobytes, the approximately 40 pixel profile overlap on mobile, and the profile picture display sizes. Read September 7, 2026.
• Facebook Help Center, Add or change your cover photo on Facebook — “Your cover image has to be at least 720 pixels wide.” Read September 7, 2026.