What Size Is a TikTok Banner? Start With the Canvas

One phrase, three different boxes

Type the phrase into a search box and three unrelated rectangles come back. A three-post row, a single grid cell and the band behind your avatar all answer to the same label, and none of them substitutes for another. Work out which box you are filling before you read a number; the figure only means something after that.

Notice that the first two figures are one measurement used twice. Three cells at 1080 across give the canvas width; a lone cell is 1080 × 1440 because a cell stands taller than it sits wide. The third box carries no measurement at all — an omission most size pages slide past without comment.

Here for a single figure? Take 3240 × 1440 for the three-post row, and take "undocumented" for the header. The rest of this page either justifies those two answers or prises them apart from the numbers they get mistaken for.

The figures, and what stands behind each

Three rows to start with, since most people arrive wanting something they can act on now. Each button carries its setting straight into the splitter. All three values are community convention for the three-post layout; not one is a TikTok specification.

The third row cannot carry a figure: the header has none, and your avatar lands over its lower-left corner. Its button falls back to the three-post layout — the one route that never depends on the missing number.

Below that: five figures worth committing to memory, then the full table with the column doing the real work — what stands behind each number.

Keeping them in a single table is a deliberate choice. Across the web the banner figures and the media figures are quoted in the same breath; a page will confidently state that a TikTok banner is 1080 × 1920, which is the size of a post. Put the two families side by side with their standing attached and the confusion stops being possible.

Where 3240 × 1440 actually comes from

Width is plain arithmetic: 1080 multiplied by three. Height is the half people ask about. At 1080 across, a 3:4 cell stands 1440 tall — and 3:4 is exactly the shape the grid imposes when it lays a 9:16 cover into three columns.

Everything that follows rests on one habit: cut a single file once, into exact thirds. Crop three images separately and each drifts by a handful of pixels, so the seams jog — you end up with three lookalike pictures instead of one picture continuing across them. Two smaller habits come out of the drawing itself.

1. Leave the gutters alone Official

   Those dark strips are gaps the app inserts between columns. Add a border, a shadow or a gutter of your own and you now have two of everything. The three-column layout is documented; the spacing arrives with it, so artwork has no reason to imitate it.

2. Hold subjects off the edges User report

   The dashed inset runs about 5% in from the border. Faces, type and marks belong inside it. In the grid a cell has unrelated posts pressed against both sides, and anything riding the outer edge reads as part of the neighbour instead of part of your picture.

The taller variant, and why it usually loses. A second convention exists — 3240 × 1920, sliced into three 1080 × 1920 cells — and it tempts people because each piece then matches a video exactly. But if the grid shows a window nearer 3:4, as the cover guidance describes, that extra 480 px of height buys pixels the grid discards, while everything you placed near the top and bottom slides out of frame. Commit to 9:16 cells only after checking your own grid and finding it shows them whole. Unconfirmed

Someone has done the arithmetic for you. The splitter exports either canvas — 3240 × 1440 or the taller 3240 × 1920 — with the thirds marked and the files already numbered in publishing order. It works inside the tab and never sends the photo anywhere. Prefer doing it by hand? Any editor that offers a fixed-size crop will do; the make guide covers the order and the pinning around it.

What your source shape costs you

Every question about size is really a question about cropping. The cell has one shape, your photograph has another, and something must give, because a cell is filled rather than letterboxed. The longer dimension is trimmed from both ends; the middle of the picture survives.

Two rules cover most of what follows:

• Compose for the cell, not the canvas. Nobody ever views your 3240 × 1440 file. They see three cells, each about a third of a phone's width, so inspect every third at that size first. A third that reads badly alone will drag the whole row down with it.
• Never stretch. Squeeze a 9:16 photo into a 3:4 cell by scaling one axis and you widen it roughly 33%: faces broaden, circles turn into ellipses. Crop instead. A cropped photograph still looks like a photograph; a stretched one never does.

The header nobody has measured

The honest answer is unpopular, so here it is undecorated: no pixel size for the profile background has been published. Researching this, we found no official help page covering the feature in any respect — not the wording of the control, not how it crops, not a single dimension — though users do report seeing options labelled Add background and Change background. Any figure another page hands you is that author's working number, nothing more.

What you get instead of a number is a set of constraints. Build wide. Keep the subject within the central half. Leave the lower-left corner empty, since that is where your avatar and bio land. Export no narrower than 1080 px — not as a banner rule, but because 1080 is the documented width of the full-screen frame, and anything narrower than a post gets upscaled on a modern handset. Unconfirmed

Testing is cheap. Export one source twice, once at 3:1 and once at 5:1, and give the files different names. Within seconds one of them looks wrong on your own phone — a faster and more reliable answer than any table somebody else published.

If the control is missing entirely, no size will rescue you. The background is an account-level option rather than something persistence unlocks: the get guide shows where it lives, and the not-showing guide sets out the four reasons it can be absent. The three-post row needs no option at all, and its figures are the ones above.

The neighbours that borrow the name

Most of the time, a number quoted as a "TikTok Banner size" describes a neighbouring surface instead. These figures are real and documented, they belong to something else, and they matter twice over: they set the pixel budget your banner shares, and one of them is where the 1440 originates.

One row earns a second sentence. A cover goes up at 9:16 and is displayed near 3:4 on the grid. That single crop accounts for the existence of a 1440 px cell, and for the disappearance of any caption placed at the top of a cover. Build the three-post row and this is the mechanism your cells are shaped to match. User report

Remember the pixel budget. Video uploads get re-encoded and capped at 1080p, so a 4K master buys nothing but a longer upload — 1080 across is the useful ceiling. Photos are recompressed as well, which is why a clean 1080-wide export beats an aggressively sharpened one: compression amplifies sharpening artefacts before anything else.

Keeping the size alive through the upload

Size takes the attention; the file decides whether that size survives contact with the uploader. Six habits, each worth adopting once, each applying to a lone photo post exactly as it does to three cells.

• JPEG at quality 80–90 for photographs. Files come out smaller and the loss is invisible at grid size. Reserve PNG for flat colour and crisp lettering, and expect several times the weight for the same pixel count.
• sRGB, never CMYK. Anything prepared for print can shift hue or drain of colour the moment a browser and the app re-render it.
• Flatten transparency. An alpha channel can resolve to black. Flatten onto the background colour you actually intend.
• Stay far below the documented ceilings. The nearest published limits are 5 MB for an avatar, 10 MB for a cover and 20 MB for a carousel image; a cell is an ordinary photo post, so there is no reason to approach them. A 1080 × 1440 JPEG at quality 85 typically lands under 600 KB.
• No painted borders, gutters or device frames. The grid already supplies spacing. A fake frame around one cell reads as an error once three of them sit together.
• Type no smaller than 4% of the cell height — about 58 px in a 1440 px cell. A cell displays at roughly a third of a phone's width, so a 12 px line lands as 4 px: legible at 100% on a monitor, absent on a handset. If a line must be read, set it larger than looks correct on your screen.

Seven checks before the third post goes up

Seven checks, arranged in the order that catches mistakes earliest. Every one costs nothing now and a re-cut later, because the grid goes public the instant the third post lands.

1. Canvas at 3240 × 1440 — or 3240 × 1920, but only once you have confirmed your own grid displays 9:16 cells in full.
2. Every third measures exactly 1080. One file sliced into three equal parts, not three files cropped by eye.
3. Nothing important lands on a third line. Faces, marks and type sit inside the dashed inset.
4. Each cell works alone at about 360 px across, the width a phone actually grants it.
5. Nothing vital in the top or bottom 12.5% of a cell — the strips a 3:4 window would drop. On the 1440 canvas the cell already equals the window, so this is a check rather than a task.
6. No borders, shadows or painted gutters. The app draws the seams; adding your own makes the row look fractured.
7. Flattened, sRGB, JPEG. No alpha channel, no CMYK profile, and no 4K file aimed at a 1080-wide slot.

Fail a check after publishing and the remedy is a re-cut plus three new posts. The make guide covers publishing order and pinning, including a section on failure modes that says what to examine first.

Questions about numbers

Related guides

Every figure here is graded in sources and methodology at the foot of the page — S03 for the three-post canvas, S29 for the media dimensions, S07 for the design-use rule that keeps app screenshots off this page.