Instagram story size

Search for the Instagram story size and every result agrees: 1080 × 1920. It is on the blogs, in the AI answer at the top of the page, and in most of the design tools.

Meta does not say that. What Meta’s Ads Guide currently recommends for an image in Instagram Stories is 1440 × 2560 pixels, read on September 7, 2026. Same 9:16 shape, a third more pixels in each direction.

Neither number is a rule. Both are recommendations, and 1080 × 1920 still works. But if you are going to build to a published figure, it is worth knowing which figure is actually published.

What Meta publishes for an Instagram story

Those come from the Awareness Image Ad Specs on Instagram Stories page of the Meta Ads Guide, read September 7, 2026.

The same numbers cover Reels and Facebook Stories

This is the part worth knowing before you build three different files. The Ads Guide gives identical geometry for all three vertical placements:

• Instagram Stories — 9:16, 1440 × 2560, 30 MB, minimum width 500.
• Instagram Reels — 9:16, 1440 × 2560, 30 MB, minimum width 500.
• Facebook Stories — 9:16, 1440 × 2560, 30 MB, minimum width 500.

All three carry the same 14% / 35% / 6% safe-area sentence, worded almost identically. The differences between the three pages are in the text recommendations, not the picture: an Instagram Reels ad is given 44 characters of primary text, an Instagram Stories ad 125, and a Facebook Stories ad 125 plus a 40-character headline.

So one exported image is correct for all three. There is no separate reels size to chase.

The safe area is nearly half the height

Meta’s sentence is a percentage of your asset, which means it scales to whatever canvas you build on. Worked through:

The percentages are Meta’s; the pixels are arithmetic on them. Read the bottom figure again: 35%. Add the 14% at the top and 49% of the story’s height is outside the area Meta suggests keeping clear. Roughly half of a full-screen canvas is there to be covered by the profile icon at the top and the call-to-action and reply bar at the bottom.

That is why so many stories have their tagline half-hidden behind a “Send message” button. The design was fine. It was just built in the wrong half.

Note Meta’s hedge, because it is theirs and not ours: “Consider leaving roughly”. This is advice about where the interface tends to sit, not a boundary anyone has committed to holding still. It is worth designing to and not worth treating as a specification.

The 1% tolerance is the one that bites

“Aspect Ratio Tolerance: 1%” is easy to skim past and is the requirement most likely to get your image altered without your asking.

9:16 is 0.5625. A 1% tolerance leaves almost no room: 1080 × 1920 is exact, and so is 1440 × 2560, but a canvas you sized by hand to something like 1080 × 1900 is 1.05% off and outside it. Outside the tolerance, the image is cropped or padded to fit, and which of the two you get is not up to you.

Build to an exact 9:16 and the question never arises.

Where these numbers do not come from

Every figure above is from Meta’s advertising documentation. That is worth saying plainly, because Instagram’s own help center does not publish a story size anywhere.

The one page Instagram does publish about resolution is about photos you share to the feed. It states that a photo is uploaded “up to a width of 1080 pixels” and kept at its original resolution when the aspect ratio is “between 1.91:1 and 3:4”. A story is 9:16 — taller than 3:4, and therefore outside everything that page describes.

So the honest position is this: the ad specs are the only published numbers that describe a full-screen vertical Instagram image, they are current, and they are what any sensible person would build to. They are not a promise about organic stories, because no such promise exists.

Which number should you actually use?

1440 × 2560 if you are exporting from a design tool or starting from a large photo. It is what Meta currently recommends, it costs nothing but file size, and it gives the platform room to downscale rather than upscale.

1080 × 1920 if your source is a phone screenshot or an image you already have at that size. It is exactly 9:16, it is comfortably over the 500-pixel minimum, and stretching a 1080-wide picture to 1440 invents detail that was never in it.

What matters far more than the choice between them is the shape and the safe area. A 9:16 file with its message in the middle 1268 × 1306 will look right. A perfectly sized file with the headline behind the reply bar will not.

Getting an image to 9:16

Start from the canvas instead. If you are composing rather than converting, the Instagram story maker builds on the 9:16 canvas directly, exports at either pair, and can draw Meta’s 14 / 35 / 6 clearance over your layout while you place the words — on screen only, never in the file.

The width is what you sacrifice. No camera produces 9:16, so a photograph has to give up most of its horizontal field to become a story. Decide which part survives before anything else; the image resizer takes the crop and the target numbers together and draws once, rather than handing a resampled picture to a second tool.

Know your starting pixels. A file shot in portrait on a phone often stores its pixels sideways and leans on an orientation flag to turn them. Image dimensions separates the two readings, and the one Meta measures is the one you see.

Feed posts are not this shape. Instagram’s feed stops at 3:4, so a story file sent there gets cropped and a feed file stretched into 9:16 loses its edges. The Instagram photo resizer covers that other band, where the rule is one width and a range of heights instead of a single canvas.

Thirty megabytes is generous, until it isn’t. A 1440 × 2560 PNG of a photograph can clear it. Compress image hunts for the quality setting that meets a byte target you choose, leaving every dimension alone.

Checklist

1. Export at an exact 9:16. 1440 × 2560 is Meta’s current recommendation; 1080 × 1920 is the same shape and still fine.
2. Keep anything that has to be read inside the middle — clear of 14% at the top, 35% at the bottom, and 6% at each side.
3. Remember that 35%. Nearly half the height of a story is interface, not canvas.
4. Stay inside the 1% ratio tolerance, which in practice means not sizing the canvas by hand.
5. JPG or PNG, under 30 MB, at least 500 pixels wide.
6. The same file works for Instagram Reels and Facebook Stories. Meta publishes the identical geometry for all three.

Sources

• Meta Ads Guide, Awareness Image Ad Specs on Instagram Stories — “Ratio: 9:16”, “Resolution: 1440 x 2560 pixels”, “Image File Type: JPG or PNG”, “Maximum File Size: 30MB”, “Minimum Width: 500 pixels”, “Aspect Ratio Tolerance: 1%”, and the 14% / 35% / 6% safe-area sentence. Read September 7, 2026.
• Meta Ads Guide, Awareness Image Ad Specs on Instagram Reels and Awareness Image Ad Specs on Facebook Stories — identical ratio, resolution, file size, minimum width and safe area. Read September 7, 2026.
• Instagram Help Center, Image resolution of photos you share on Instagram — “up to a width of 1080 pixels” and ratios “between 1.91:1 and 3:4”, written about feed photos. Read September 7, 2026.