Twitter Header Size: What X Actually Publishes

Two pages on the same website currently rank for this question, and they give different answers. Canva’s header maker says a Twitter header should be 1500 × 1500 pixels. Canva ’s own size guide says 1500 × 500.

X says 1500 × 500 too, so the size guide has it right — but the disagreement is a useful reminder that a figure appearing on a large, familiar site has not necessarily been checked.

What size is a Twitter header?#

• 1500 × 500 pixels, a 3:1 ratio. X calls this the recommended size.
• JPG, GIF or PNG — but animated GIFs do not work, which X states and almost nobody repeats.
• Your profile photo sits on top of it at a recommended 400 × 400, so the lower left of the header is never fully visible.

What X actually publishes#

The figures come from X’s help article on customising your profile, which lists them inline with the editing steps rather than as a specification table.

Key facts, read from X’s help page on customising your profile on 21 August 2026: header photo, also called a banner, recommended 1500 × 500 pixels (3:1); profile photo recommended 400 × 400; bio up to 160 characters; JPG, GIF or PNG accepted, but X does not support animated GIFs for profile or header images. The page gives no file-size limit; the 10 MB figure in most guides is not on it. Because 1500 × 500 is recommended rather than a minimum, uploading larger at the same 3:1, for example 3000 × 1000, is fine. The same figures apply whether you call it the Twitter banner size or the X header size.

X also calls the header a “banner”, which is worth knowing because guides use the two words interchangeably and search results split between them.

Animated GIFs do not work, and X says so#

This is the most useful sentence on X’s page and we could not find it on a single result ranking for this query.

GIF is listed as an accepted format. In the same breath, X adds that it does not support animated GIFs for profile or header images. So a GIF will upload and then sit there as a still frame.

YouTube has the identical rule for channel profile pictures, see YouTube profile picture size.

Recommended, not minimum#

One of the pages ranking for this term describes 1500 × 500 as the minimum dimensions. X describes it as recommended. Those are different claims and the distinction changes what you should upload.

A minimum is a floor you must clear. A recommendation is a target, and a target can usually be exceeded to advantage — which here it can, because most people will view your profile on a screen that packs several physical pixels into each logical one.

Uploading at 3000 × 1000 keeps the same 3:1 shape and gives those displays something to work with. We wrote about how often this distinction gets flattened in our guide to social media image sizes, where a floor and a target regularly end up in the same column of the same table.

The 10 MB limit nobody can source#

Several pages state a 10 MB maximum for header images. It may well be correct. It is not on the X page that gives the dimensions and the formats.

That page is specific about a good deal — three formats, two sets of dimensions, a character count for the bio, and a caveat about animation — and it says nothing at all about file size.

Which is not an argument that the limit is invented, only that it belongs in a different column from the numbers you can point at. A practical header is a few hundred kilobytes anyway, so this is a limit most people will never approach.

The format choice is worth a moment for the same reason. Of the three X accepts, JPG suits photographs and PNG suits anything with flat colour, hard edges or lettering — a wordmark saved as JPG picks up visible fringing around the type that PNG avoids entirely. If your header is a photograph, use JPG; if it is a designed graphic, use PNG.

Your profile picture covers part of it#

A header is never seen whole. The profile photo overlaps its lower left corner, and on smaller screens the header is cropped at the sides as well.

There is no published safe area for this, so anyone giving you exact safe-zone pixels is measuring rather than quoting. The rule that survives every device is the same one that works everywhere else: keep anything that has to be read in the middle band of the image, and treat the lower left as occupied.

A 3:1 strip is an unusually wide, shallow canvas, which makes this harder than it sounds. Photographs with a single clear subject tend to survive it; busy compositions and anything with small text usually do not.

The 400 × 400 that sits on top#

X publishes the profile photo size on the same page and in the same breath, which is convenient because the two images are really one composition.

The recommended profile photo is 400 × 400 — square on upload, circular in display. That matters more than the pixel count: anything positioned in the corners of a square avatar is outside the circle and will not be seen. Logos with tight bounding boxes suffer worst here, and the usual fix is to add padding rather than to shrink the mark.

In practice that means leaving the left third comparatively quiet and putting anything that carries meaning — a tagline, a product shot, a horizon line — to the centre or right.

Did the size change when Twitter became X?#

This is the question underneath a lot of the searching, because people reasonably assume a rebrand of that scale rewrote the specifications.

It did not. X’s current help page gives 1500 × 500 for the header and 400 × 400 for the profile photo, which are the figures Twitter published under its old name. One of the pages ranking for this query makes the same point, and on this it is correct.

What did change is the vocabulary, and that is a genuine source of confusion when searching. The documentation says X, the help article calls the image both a header and a banner, and most people still type Twitter. Three names for one 3:1 rectangle is a reliable way to end up reading three different answers.

One quirk worth knowing during setup#

X notes something on the same page that has nothing to do with dimensions but explains a confusing first-run experience.

While you are initially setting up a profile, the option to change your display name does not appear until you have uploaded both a profile photo and a header photo. If you have ever wondered why the name field seemed to be missing on a new account, that is why — it is sequencing, not a fault.

Header size in inches and centimetres#

If your design tool insists on physical units, the conversion depends entirely on the resolution you choose, and none of these is more correct than the others.

DPI is meaningless for an image displayed on a screen; what X receives is 1500 × 500 pixels in every row of that table. Set your document in pixels if the tool allows it.

Getting an image into a 3:1 strip#

Almost no photograph is 3:1, so this is nearly always a crop rather than a resize, and the crop is where the decision lives.

Going from an ordinary photo to a 3:1 header discards most of the height. Squashing it to fit distorts faces in a way viewers notice without being able to name, and a default centre crop removes whatever was not in the middle.

Our free image resizer handles it in the browser, with no upload and no account. Set 1500 × 500, choose the point the frame should keep, and export.