TerradsTerrads
← All posts

Meta ad sizes: the four that matter, and the one number every guide copies wrong

Meta's own ads guide recommends 1440 × 1800 for Facebook feed. Almost every spec sheet online says 1080 × 1350. Here's which four sizes you actually need and why the difference matters.

ChrisUpdated September 15, 20266 min read

Most Meta advertisers need four sizes: 4:5 at 1440 × 1800 for Facebook and Instagram feed, 9:16 at 1440 × 2560 for Stories and Reels, 1:1 at 1080 × 1080 for carousels, and 16:9 or 1:1 of at least 1080 × 1080 for in-stream video. If you only make two, make 4:5 and 9:16.

Search for Facebook ad sizes and you'll get a dozen articles with a forty-row table: feed, right column, Marketplace, Audience Network, in-stream, Messenger inbox, on and on. Almost nobody needs forty rows. Most advertisers need four sizes, and one number in those tables is wrong nearly everywhere.

Which Meta ad sizes do you actually need?

RatioResolutionWhere it runs
4:51440 × 1800Facebook and Instagram feed — the default
9:161440 × 2560Stories and Reels
1:11080 × 1080Carousel cards, Marketplace, older placements
16:9 or 1:1At least 1080 × 1080In-stream video

If you only make two, make 4:5 and 9:16. Between them they cover feed, Stories and Reels, which is where the overwhelming majority of Meta spend goes. The 1:1 square is worth having for carousels. The in-stream row only matters if you're running in-stream video, and Meta's in-stream page accepts a 1:1 there as well as 16:9 — so the square you already made covers it.

The number everyone copies wrong

Look at the 4:5 row again: 1440 × 1800.

Nearly every spec sheet online says 1080 × 1350 for that placement. But Meta's own Ads Guide for Facebook feed images lists the recommended resolution as 1440 × 1800, at a 4:5 ratio, with a minimum of 600 × 750 and a 3% tolerance on the aspect ratio.

Both are 4:5. Both will run. The difference is that 1080 × 1350 is the minimum sensible size and 1440 × 1800 is what Meta actually asks for — a third more linear resolution.

Why the entire internet standardised on the smaller number is easy enough to guess: 1080 is the Instagram-native width everyone had memorised, one guide wrote it down, and every subsequent guide copied that guide rather than the source. It's a nice illustration of what "everyone knows" is worth in this category.

Update, September 2026. The 9:16 row above used to read 1080 × 1920 — this post was making the same mistake it was written to complain about. Meta's guide gives 1440 × 2560 for Stories and for Reels, image and video alike. We've corrected the table and written up the Reels version separately, because the placement carries three more numbers that nobody publishes.

Does it actually matter?

Sometimes, and predictably:

  • Type-heavy creative. Meta re-encodes uploads. Starting at 1440 wide means small type has more pixels to survive compression, and thin or condensed faces are where you notice it first.
  • High-DPI screens. A 1080-wide image on a modern phone is already close to being upscaled before Meta touches it.
  • Product detail. Texture, fabric, fine edges — the things that make a product shot look expensive are the first things compression eats.

For a flat-colour graphic with a three-word headline, you genuinely will not see a difference. For a photographed product with a paragraph of copy on it, you will.

Uploading larger than 1440 × 1800 doesn't help. Meta caps the file at 30 MB and re-encodes anyway, so a 4000px master just gets downsampled on their side — with less control than if you'd exported it yourself.

Safe zones are the part people actually get wrong

Sizes are easy. Where creative dies is Stories and Reels, where the interface sits on top of your ad. Meta's guidance is to keep roughly the top 14% and bottom 35% of a 9:16 frame clear of anything that matters.

That bottom third is bigger than most people expect, and it's where the profile row, caption, and CTA button live. Put your headline there and it ships underneath a button.

Two practical consequences:

  1. A 9:16 ad is not a 4:5 ad on a taller canvas. The usable area is a band in the middle. If you design at 4:5 and extend the background, your copy ends up in the danger zone by default.
  2. Always look at the placement preview before publishing. It is the only thing that shows you the real UI overlay, and it takes ten seconds.

The text limits nobody mentions

Meta's guide also publishes recommended text lengths, and they're shorter than most people write:

  • Primary text: 50–150 characters
  • Headline: 27 characters

Those two are the Facebook feed figures. The guide sets primary text per placement, and the vertical ones are much tighter — 125 characters on Instagram Stories, and just 44 on Reels. Check the placement page rather than assuming one number covers the account.

Twenty-seven characters is about four words. These are recommendations, not hard limits — you can exceed them — but past those lengths Meta truncates on smaller screens, and you don't control where the cut lands.

The practical version

  1. Make 4:5 and 9:16 first. Add 1:1 if you run carousels.
  2. Export 4:5 at 1440 × 1800, not 1080 × 1350. It costs nothing.
  3. Keep the middle band clear in 9:16 — top 14%, bottom 35%.
  4. Write the headline to about 27 characters and stop fighting truncation.
  5. Check the placement preview. Every time.

And the meta-lesson, which applies well beyond ad specs: when a number appears in fifty articles, that's evidence fifty people copied each other, not that the number is right. Meta publishes the specs itself. It takes a minute to check.

Sources

Related: why making one ad and resizing it is a bad habit, the sixteen layouts almost every performance ad uses, TikTok's safe zone, which — unlike Meta's — has no fixed size at all, and why Meta's safe zones are percentages rather than the pixel counts most guides print.

Terrads renders each placement at its native size instead of cropping one master down.