YouTube banner size

Every guide gives the YouTube banner size the same way: build at 2560 × 1440 and keep your text inside a safe area of 1546 × 423 pixels.

The first number is YouTube’s. The second one is not. Open YouTube’s own Manage your channel branding page and 1546 × 423 does not appear on it — not in that form, not anywhere. What YouTube publishes is a safe area of 1235 × 338, and it publishes it about a different canvas.

That sounds pedantic until you do the arithmetic, because the number everyone repeats is slightly larger than the one YouTube states. Building to it puts your logo marginally outside the only rectangle the platform has committed to.

All figures below were read from YouTube’s help center on September 7, 2026.

What YouTube publishes

Six lines, and that is the entire specification. Note what is missing: no list of accepted file formats. The JPG/PNG/GIF list you will find quoted everywhere belongs to the profile picture guidelines further down the same page, which also cap that image at 15 MB and say it renders at 98 × 98 px. The banner section says nothing about formats at all.

The safe area is published about the wrong canvas

Read the second line again: “At the minimum dimension”. The 1235 × 338 rectangle is stated about a 2048 × 1152 banner, which is the size YouTube tells you not to use. The size it recommends is 2560 × 1440.

So the number has to be scaled, and the scaling is arithmetic rather than specification:

Expressed as a share of the canvas, which is the form that survives any size: the safe area is 60.3% of the width and 29.3% of the height, centered. Roughly three fifths across and under a third down. That proportion is the durable fact; the pixel pairs are just it, measured at two sizes.

So where does 1546 × 423 come from?

It is very nearly the same rectangle. 1235 × 1.25 is 1543.75, and 338 × 1.25 is 422.5 — so YouTube’s own number, scaled, is about 1544 × 423. The universally quoted 1546 is 2 pixels wider than that.

Two pixels is nothing to a design. It is something to an argument, because it means the familiar figure cannot have been derived from the sentence YouTube publishes today. It is an older number that outlived its source and now circulates on its own, each guide copying the last.

Which is fine, as long as you know which one you are holding. If you want the figure with a published origin, use 60.3% by 29.3% and let it land where it lands.

One image, three displays

YouTube is explicit that the banner is a single file doing several jobs: the same image is used across computer, mobile and TV, and it shows differently depending on the device.

What they publish about that difference is one sentence — images “should accommodate the entire screen for larger devices but will get cropped on certain views and devices.” That is it. No per-device rectangle, no desktop strip, no tablet figure.

This matters because the guides do give you those numbers. You will read that desktop shows 2560 × 423 and that TV shows the full frame. Those are observations of how it renders, often accurate, and none of them come from YouTube. A layout is only ever guaranteed inside the one safe area, and the rest of the canvas is background that some viewers see and others do not.

Design accordingly: everything that has to be read goes in the middle three fifths. Everything outside it should look deliberate when it is cropped away, because on a phone it will be.

The rule people ignore

“Do not include any additional file embellishments (e.g. shadows, borders, and frames).”

That is a design instruction in a technical spec, and it is there because a drawn border stops being a border the moment the image is cropped. A frame that looks crisp on a TV becomes two stray vertical lines on a laptop and disappears entirely on a phone. The same goes for a drop shadow under your channel name: it is drawn at the size you made it and cropped at every other.

6 MB is closer than it sounds

2560 × 1440 is 3.7 megapixels. As a PNG of a photograph that lands well past 6 MB, and PNG is what most design tools export by default.

The fix is not to shrink the canvas. A JPEG at a sensible quality carries the same 3.7 megapixels in a fraction of the bytes, and a banner is almost always a photograph or a gradient — exactly the material JPEG was built for. Keep PNG for a banner that is flat color and lettering, where it is both smaller and sharper.

Getting an image to 16:9

Build straight to the figure. The YouTube banner maker starts at 2560 × 1440, offers 2048 × 1152 as the second export, and can draw the 1235 × 338 safe area over your picture while you position it — scaled to whichever canvas you picked, and never written into the file that downloads.

Decide the crop before anything else. 2560 × 1440 is 16:9, wider than a typical photograph, so a picture has to lose height — and the part it loses is the part you choose. The image resizer applies the crop and the target size in one pass, so the file is read once instead of being resampled by two tools in turn.

Find out what you are starting from. A source below 2048 across cannot make YouTube’s minimum without being enlarged, which adds pixels and no detail. Image dimensions reports what a file actually measures, and separates the stored pixels from the displayed ones for anything a phone rotated.

Land under 6 MB without touching the shape. Compress image hunts for the quality that meets a byte figure you name and leaves every dimension exactly where it is.

A thumbnail is a different job. It is 16:9 as well, but at a different size and with no safe area published at all — the numbers, and that absence, are in YouTube thumbnail size.

Checklist

1. Build at 2560 × 1440. That is YouTube’s recommended dimension, and 16:9 exactly.
2. Never go below 2048 × 1152. That is the stated minimum for upload.
3. Keep text and logos inside the centered 60.3% × 29.3% — about 1544 × 423 on the recommended canvas, and 1235 × 338 on the minimum one, which is where YouTube states it.
4. No borders, frames or shadows. YouTube asks for their absence, and cropping is why.
5. Stay under 6 MB. Choose JPEG for a photograph; a 3.7 megapixel PNG will not fit.
6. Assume the edges are gone. Only the middle is guaranteed on a phone.

Sources

• YouTube Help, Manage your channel branding — the banner image guidelines: “Minimum dimension for upload: 2048 x 1152 px with an aspect ratio of 16:9”, “At the minimum dimension, the safe area for text and logos: 1235 x 338 px”, “Recommended dimension (especially for TV): 2560 x 1440 px”, “Images should accommodate the entire screen for larger devices but will get cropped on certain views and devices”, “Do not include any additional file embellishments (e.g. shadows, borders, and frames)”, and “File size: 6 MB or smaller.” Read September 7, 2026.
• YouTube Help, Manage your channel branding — the profile picture guidelines, which are the source of the file-type list often attributed to banners: “JPG, GIF, BMP, or PNG file (no animated GIFs)”, “Image size should not exceed 15 MB”, “Image that renders at 98 X 98 px.” Read September 7, 2026.