A Twitter/X profile header is 1500×500 pixels at a 3:1 ratio — narrower than a Facebook cover and deeper than a LinkedIn banner, so nothing carries across between them. Like the others, the real constraint is what covers it: your profile picture sits over the lower-left, and on mobile the header is reported to crop from the top and bottom rather than the sides.
Why 1500 × 500?
1500×500 renders sharply across the range of widths X uses for headers without being large enough to trigger heavy compression. The 3:1 ratio is the interesting part: it is close enough to the other platforms' banner shapes to look interchangeable and far enough away that nothing actually transfers.
Why No Other Banner Transfers to 3:1
The ratios of the major header formats cluster just close enough together to be misleading, and the arithmetic is worth seeing rather than taking on trust. Scale a Facebook cover — 851×315, about 2.70:1 — to 1500 pixels wide and it stands 555 pixels tall against the 500 you need: 55 pixels have to come off, roughly 27 from the top and 27 from the bottom if it is centred. That is enough to clip a headline but not enough to look like a deliberate crop, which is precisely why reused Facebook covers look subtly wrong here rather than obviously wrong.
A LinkedIn banner fails in the other direction. At 1584×396 it is a true 4:1, so scaled to 1500 wide it is only 375 tall — 125 pixels short. Filling the header means either enlarging it by a third, which softens it, or cropping 25% off the width. And a 16:9 YouTube thumbnail scaled to 1500 wide stands 844 pixels tall, so fitting it into 500 keeps under 60% of its height. Three different failure modes, one cause: 3:1 is its own shape.
How Confident to Be in These Numbers
Worth being straight about: X's help pages sit behind a challenge that blocks automated checking, so unlike the YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn pages on this site, the figures here could not be re-verified against the platform's own documentation. They come from third-party consensus, which for the dimensions is unusually solid — 1500×500 at 3:1 is quoted consistently everywhere, and it matches what the upload interface produces.
Two details are shakier. The mobile crop is commonly given as about 60 pixels off the top and bottom, which matches the general advice to keep content vertically centred but is not a number to design tightly against. And the file-size ceiling is quoted variously as 2 MB and 5 MB by different sources. The disagreement costs you nothing if you simply target the lower one: 1500×500 is 750,000 pixels, so even 2 MB allows about 2.8 bytes per pixel, and a quality-85 JPEG of a header image normally lands in the low hundreds of kilobytes. Staying under 2 MB is free insurance against whichever limit is real. (Checked 2026-09; treat as consensus rather than specification.)
Composing Around the Profile Photo
- Your profile photo overlaps the lower-left. Keep that corner clear.
- The reported mobile crop takes roughly 60 pixels from the top and bottom, not from the sides — the opposite of Facebook. Keep content vertically centred.
- At 500 pixels tall over 1500 wide, the header is a band rather than a picture. Compositions with a single horizontal subject survive; anything with vertical structure gets cut.
- Target under 2 MB. Sources disagree about whether the real ceiling is 2 MB or 5 MB, and at this size the lower target costs no visible quality.
Nothing is uploaded — the resizing runs in your browser. How that works, and why it matters.
Dimensions verified: 2026-08-05 · Third-party consensus; help.x.com blocks automated access — platform specs change; check against the platform if it matters.