LinkedIn Banner Size: The Complete Guide

The recommended LinkedIn banner size is 1584 x 396 pixels — a 4:1 ratio, minimum width 1128 pixels, file under 8 MB, PNG or JPEG. That is the whole answer to the search, and you can leave now with a clear conscience.

The reason people come back is that a banner exported at exactly 1584 x 396 can still look like a mistake. LinkedIn parks your profile photo over the lower left of it. The profile card rounds off the corners. The mobile app shows a narrower slice than your monitor does. So the tagline you carefully centred is sitting half behind an avatar, and the logo you tucked into the right edge is somewhere off-screen on a phone.

This guide covers the numbers first, then the things that quietly break them.

LinkedIn banner sizes at a glance

Every number here matches the specifications published on our Image Center pages, so the guide and the tools cannot drift apart.

What is the LinkedIn banner safe area?

The safe area is the part of a 1584 x 396 banner that survives every viewport and is not covered by your profile photo. In practice it is roughly the middle 62% of the width and the middle 68% of the height. Everything outside that is a gamble.

Two separate things chew into the edges. First, the mobile app shows a narrower horizontal slice, so expect the outer band on each side — around 220 pixels at 1584 wide — to be trimmed or partly hidden. Second, your profile photo sits over the lower left, roughly from 3% to 18% of the width and across the bottom half of the height. That corner is not yours. Design as though a circle has already been stamped there, because it has.

The practical layout that comes out of those constraints is boring and works: headline in the upper middle, one short supporting line beneath it, logo or mark to the right of centre rather than hard against the edge, and absolutely nothing you care about in the bottom left.

Why does my banner look blurry?

Nearly always because it was scaled up. If you design at 1000 pixels wide and export to 1584, every edge in the image gets invented by your software, and LinkedIn's own re-compression makes the guesswork visible. Start the canvas at 1584 x 396 and stay there.

The second cause is re-compression on top of re-compression. LinkedIn re-encodes whatever you upload. A JPEG exported from a JPEG that was exported from a JPEG has been through three lossy passes before LinkedIn adds a fourth, and it shows first in text edges and flat gradients. Export once, from the source file.

The third is thin, low-contrast type. A banner is displayed at a few hundred pixels wide inside the mobile app. Hairline fonts and 60% grey text do not survive that. If it would be hard to read across a meeting room, it will be impossible on a train.

What should the banner actually say?

It has one job: make it obvious in about two seconds what you do and who you do it for. That is it. It is not a mood board, it is not a place for your five service pillars, and it is definitely not a place for your email address in 14-point type that renders at four pixels tall.

Five to eight words as the headline. One short clause underneath if you need it. Repeat the same words in your profile headline and, if you have one, your company page tagline — repetition across surfaces is what makes positioning stick, and it costs nothing.

Leave contact details off. Nobody can copy text out of an image, and the people who most want to reach you are on a phone where it is illegible anyway. Put them in your About section where they can be tapped.

How to make a LinkedIn banner that works

1. Step 1

   Start a canvas at 1584 x 396

   Not A4, not 16:9, not whatever your template store suggested. If your tool has a LinkedIn preset, check the numbers anyway — several are still using sizes from years ago.

2. Step 2

   Mark the safe area before you design

   Drop in a guide layer with the safe area, the mobile crop and the profile photo overlap marked, then build underneath it. Our free banner templates come with all three already drawn.

3. Step 3

   Set the headline first, everything else second

   If the design only works once the decoration is in place, the design does not work. Type first, then background.

4. Step 4

   Check it at phone width

   Shrink the artboard on your own screen until it is about the width of a phone. Whatever you cannot read there, you will not be able to read on LinkedIn.

5. Step 5

   Export once, at exact size

   PNG for type and flat colour, high-quality JPEG for photographs. No upscaling, no print settings, no bleed.

6. Step 6

   Preview the real crops before you commit

   Upload it to our Banner Size checker to see the desktop crop, the mobile crop and the avatar overlap on your own image. It takes about ten seconds and saves the classic "why is my logo behind my face" moment.

Before you upload

• Exported at exactly 1584 x 396, never scaled up from smaller
• Headline and logo inside the middle 62% of the width
• Nothing important in the lower left corner
• Text readable when the whole image is shrunk to phone width
• No email addresses, phone numbers or QR codes in small type
• Checked against both light and dark interface themes
• PNG for type and flat colour, high-quality JPEG for photographs
• Same message as your profile headline

One more thing about dark mode

A banner built on a near-white background merges into the page for light-theme users and floats like a lightbox for dark-theme ones. Neither is fatal, but if you have a choice, a mid-to-dark background with light type behaves more predictably across both. Check it once in each theme and move on with your life.