A LinkedIn profile banner is 1584×396 pixels — a 4:1 letterbox that is wider and shallower than almost any other social header. The practical difficulty is not the resize, it is the layout: your profile photo sits over the lower-left of the banner on desktop, and LinkedIn is explicit that the rest of what stays visible depends on the viewer's browser window and screen resolution. Designs that look balanced in an editor routinely end up with their headline hidden behind an avatar or trimmed off an edge.
Why 1584 × 396?
1584×396 is LinkedIn's stated recommendation for a profile background photo, in JPG or PNG, under 8 MB. It maps cleanly to a 2× render of 792×198, which is why it stays sharp on retina laptops — the audience most likely to be viewing your profile. With an 8 MB ceiling, compression is almost never the constraint here. The constraint is composition, and LinkedIn is unusually candid about why.
There Is No Fixed Crop, and LinkedIn Says So
Most platforms publish a safe zone. LinkedIn instead notes that how your image appears may change based on the size of your browser window and your screen resolution. That is worth taking literally: the banner is a responsive element, so the visible slice moves as the window is resized, and no single rectangle is guaranteed to survive on every screen.
The practical consequence is that a banner built like a poster — headline across the middle, logo in a corner, edge-to-edge composition — is the wrong design for this slot. A banner built like a texture, where the meaning survives an arbitrary horizontal crop and nothing sits within a comfortable margin of any edge, is the right one. The 1350×220 preset on this page is a check, not a guarantee: if your composition still reads when trimmed to it, you have enough margin.
LinkedIn's Advice on Blurry Banners Is Backwards from Everyone Else's
If your background photo looks blurry or pixelated, LinkedIn's help page tells you to choose an image with a larger file size, and points at Trimage and ImageOptim — both lossless optimisers, neither of them a resizer. That advice reads as odd until you notice what it implies: the usual cause of a soft LinkedIn banner is a file that was already squeezed before upload, so LinkedIn's own re-encode has nothing left to work with.
So do the opposite of what you would do for a Facebook cover. Export at the full 1584×396, keep the quality high, and let the file be a couple of megabytes if that is what it takes — you have 8 MB to play with. LinkedIn adds one more note in the same place that is easy to miss: photos will look better than images with logos. Flat vector logos and hairline type are what its processing handles worst.
Profile Banner Versus Page Cover
These are two different images with two different specs, and reusing one for the other is the most common LinkedIn sizing mistake. A member profile background is 1584×396 — 4:1, up to 8 MB. A company or Career Page cover image is 1512×256, which is closer to 5.9:1, and capped at 3 MB; for those, LinkedIn recommends a high-resolution JPEG rather than a PNG.
The two are not close. Scale a 1584×396 profile banner down to 1512 wide and it stands 378 pixels tall against the 256 a Page cover needs — 122 pixels, nearly a third of its height, has to be cut. Whatever was vertically centred in the profile version will not be centred in the Page version. Resize each one separately.
Composing for a 4:1 Strip
- Your profile photo overlaps the lower-left on desktop. Keep that corner empty.
- Fine text under about 24px at this size becomes unreadable once LinkedIn scales the banner down on smaller screens.
- A 4:1 strip is only 396 pixels tall at full width — roughly a quarter the height of a laptop browser window. Anything designed to be read at a glance has to be a single short line.
- Do not compress hard to save bandwidth. LinkedIn allows 8 MB and handles a generous file better than a thin one.
Nothing is uploaded — the resizing runs in your browser. How that works, and why it matters.
Dimensions verified: 2026-09-08 · source