LinkedIn Banner Size — Free, Fast & Private
The LinkedIn banner — the platform calls it the background photo — is the widest image most people will ever prepare: 1584×396 pixels, a ratio of exactly 4:1. Four times as wide as it is tall. Nothing that comes out of a camera is that shape, which is why nearly every banner starts life as a crop of something else, and why the upload either goes smoothly or turns into a wrestling match with LinkedIn's own adjustment box. The file requirements are the easy part: JPG or PNG, up to 8 MB — a ceiling so generous that file size is almost never the failure. The shape is the whole game.
Profile banner vs company page banner — two different specs
A recurring mistake in banner templates: treating personal profiles and company pages as one canvas. They are not. A personal profile banner is 1584×396 (4:1). A company page banner is 1128×191 — proportionally even wider, closer to 5.9:1, and considerably smaller in absolute pixels. Reuse a profile banner on a company page and the platform crops a horizontal slice out of its middle; design at the company spec and stretch it onto a profile and it arrives blurry. If you manage both, produce both files from the master artwork — two crops, two exports. The same distinction applies to templates you download: check which of the two shapes the template actually targets before building on it.
The 4:1 chip makes the profile banner exact
This is one of the few platform shapes the cropper above supports as a locked preset: select the 4:1 chip and the frame keeps banner proportions while you position it. From there, exactness is mechanical rather than approximate — resize the locked crop to a max width of 1584, and since the ratio was fixed before scaling, the height comes out at precisely 396. To be clear about what the tool is doing: there is no direct enter-width-and-height field, and this page will not pretend there is. Ratio lock first, width second is the honest and exact route, and it also happens to be less error-prone than typing dimensions, because the shape cannot drift while you fine-tune the framing. For the company banner's odd 5.9:1 strip, use Free mode and aim wide; LinkedIn's uploader shows you the final placement before committing.
Design around the headshot — it sits on top of your banner
On a personal profile, the banner is not displayed clean: your circular profile photo overlaps its lower-left region, and on phones the overlap shifts with the narrower layout. Anything placed behind that circle is decoration for nobody. The reliable pattern is to treat the left third of the banner as occupied territory — background colour, texture, sky — and compose the message in the right two-thirds, vertically centred. Names, taglines, credentials, and logos all live safely there. Display rendering also varies a little across desktop and mobile widths, so leaving breathing room at the extreme edges costs nothing and prevents clipped descenders. None of this is in the official spec sheet, which is precisely why banners that technically meet the spec still manage to hide their own headline.
Sharpness at 1584 wide: start big, never stretch
Because 396 pixels of height is not much, every pixel of it counts, and upscaling shows immediately as softness across the one image that spans your entire profile width. The rule is the same as for any spec: crop from a source at least as large as the target. A modern phone photo is several times wider than 1584, so crops from photographs have headroom to spare; the risk case is graphics exported small or images pulled from the web. Under the 8 MB cap you also have room to be gentle with compression — a banner-sized JPG at high quality is typically a few hundred kilobytes, and PNG is the better export when the design is flat colour and text, where JPEG's photographic compression leaves faint halos around letters. The platform-wide compression settings are covered on the compress-for-LinkedIn page.
The rest of LinkedIn's image slots
The banner shares your profile with a 400×400 profile photo (displayed round — check the corners survive), and feed posts render best around 1200×627. Company pages add a 300×300 logo. Each slot has its own geometry, and none of them can be produced by cropping the banner artwork — the shapes are too different. The resize-for-LinkedIn page walks each placement; the social media image sizes reference holds the complete cross-platform table if LinkedIn is one of several profiles you maintain.