Facebook cover photo size and safe area

Three numbers that get confused

Search for this size and you will find at least three answers, each correct about something different. Meta's help page gives a minimum of 400 by 150 pixels, below which an upload is refused or looks poor, and a recommended file of 851 by 315 saved as an sRGB JPG under 100 kilobytes, which it says loads fastest. Many guides still quote 820 by 312, which was for years given as the size a cover displayed at on a computer. None of these is the size to design around on its own. What matters for design is the shape of the visible area on each kind of screen, and those shapes are not the same.

What a phone does to a wide banner

Buffer's current guide lists the desktop display at 851 by 315, a shape of about 2.7 to 1, and the phone display at 640 by 360, which is 16 to 9. Fit the same image into both and the phone has to fill a much taller box. Scaled to the phone's 360 pixel height, a 2.7 to 1 image would be about 972 pixels wide, and only 640 of those fit on screen. So a phone shows roughly the middle two thirds of the cover's width and trims about a sixth from each side. The top and bottom stay in view. Text or a face near either end of the banner is exactly what disappears.

The profile picture and the Page furniture

The cover is not shown alone. The profile picture sits over or just below its lower left edge, depending on the layout and screen, and the Page or profile name, buttons and navigation sit under it. On a phone the whole cover is small, so fine text that reads on a laptop turns into texture. The safe arrangement is a centred band holding one short line or a logo, a background image whose subject sits in the middle, and nothing important in the lower left quarter. Decorative colour and texture can run to every edge, because losing some of it costs nothing.

When the cover matters

A cover is the largest image a visitor sees when they land on a Page from a search, a post or a shared link, and for many small businesses it is also the one that stays unchanged for the longest. That makes it worth updating for things with a clear life, like a season, a launch, a sale weekend or an event, and then changing back. A cover that still advertises last Christmas signals a Page nobody maintains. Leave prices and short-lived details out unless you are prepared to swap the image when they expire.

Common mistakes

Setting a line of text across the full width, so both ends are cut on a phone. Placing a logo in the lower left, where the profile picture covers it. Using small type that is legible only at desktop size. Uploading a photograph whose subject stands at the edge of the frame. Squeezing a portrait photograph into a banner, which leaves either a crop through someone's head or a blurred background. And saving text-heavy artwork as a low quality JPG, which fringes the letters before Facebook recompresses the file again on upload.

The Facebook Cover canvas in the flyer builder

The flyer builder has a Facebook Cover canvas at 820 by 312 pixels, and each of the 199 designs is authored natively for it rather than scaled from another size. PNG and JPG exports capture at twice the canvas, so the file leaves at 1640 by 624, well above Meta's 400 by 150 minimum. Its shape, about 2.63 to 1, sits within 3 percent of the 851 by 315 recommendation, so a thin strip at the top or bottom may be trimmed; keep content off the extreme edges. Switching a flyer to this size swaps in the design's cover layout and carries content across by slot, and style changes made here are stored for this size only.

Questions people ask