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

Meta's ads guide says 1440 × 1800 for Facebook feed; most spec sheets say 1080 × 1350. The four sizes you need, plus file types, sizes and durations.

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.

Each placement has its own spec page, linked to the platform's source: Facebook feed image, feed video, Stories, Reels image, Reels video, carousel and in-stream video; Instagram feed image, feed video, Stories image, Stories video, Reels image, Reels video and carousel. TikTok: in-feed video, with its safe-zone template drawn to scale, and carousel. YouTube: in-stream, bumper, Shorts and square video, with Google's reference overlays drawn to scale, and in-feed, the thumbnail frame, for which Google publishes no safe zone.

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

This table follows Meta's ads guide. Meta's other pages don't fully agree on feed: its placement table recommends 9:16 for Instagram Feed videos, and its best-practices page recommends 1:1 for single-image ads in Instagram Feed. How Meta fills a missing aspect ratio sets those pages side by side.

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 will run there, though Meta's best-practices page recommends 16:9.

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 Ads Guide for Facebook feed images lists the recommended resolution as 1440 × 1800, at a 4:5 ratio, with a 600-pixel minimum width (750 pixels tall for a 4:5 image) 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. That is a third more linear resolution.

Why the entire internet standardized on the smaller number is easy enough to guess: 1080 is the Instagram-native width everyone had memorized, one guide wrote it down, and every subsequent guide copied that guide rather than the source.

Update, September 2026. The 9:16 row above used to read 1080 × 1920, the same copied mistake. 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-color graphic with a three-word headline, you 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 Meta's side, with less control than if you'd exported it yourself.

The rest of the specs: file types, file sizes and durations

Size is the question everyone asks, but "what are the Meta ad specs" usually means the other half: what you're allowed to upload. Meta publishes those per placement too, and they are not the same across placements:

PlacementFilesDurationMinimum
FB feed, imageJPG/PNG, 30 MB—600 × 750 at 4:5; 3%
FB feed, videoMP4/MOV/GIF, 4 GB1 s – 241 min120 × 120 px
IG Reels, videoMP4/MOV, 4 GB0 s – 15 min250 px, or 500 px at 30 s+
FB in-stream, videoMP4/MOV/GIF, 4 GBsee belownone; 1080 × 1080+ advised

Two of those rows contradict something you'll read elsewhere, and the third is in the section below it.

Facebook feed video runs to 241 minutes. Spec sheets publish "15 seconds" or "60 seconds max" as though it were a ceiling. It isn't one. Those are advice about attention, republished as a technical limit. That is the same mistake as printing a recommended headline length as a hard cap. (What Meta actually recommends for video length is a separate question, and Meta's pages don't agree on it.)

Reels video has a tiered minimum width. 250 px for ads under 30 seconds, 500 px at 30 seconds or longer. It is the only tiered minimum in the guide and common spec sheets leave it out. The Reels post has the rest of what that placement publishes and nobody else prints.

Horizontal and 16:9: where Meta asks for it

If you're looking for a landscape size, the main answer is in-stream video, and it needs one step of arithmetic. Meta publishes "16:9 or 1:1" and "at least 1080 × 1080 pixels", a square figure for a placement that accepts a horizontal frame. Applied to 16:9 that recommendation means at least 1920 × 1080, because 1080 px wide at 16:9 is 1080 × 608 and falls short of it.

That 1920 × 1080 is our derivation, not a number on Meta's page. Meta's ads guide lists 16:9 and 1:1 side by side, but its best practices for aspect ratios say "For in-stream video: Horizontal 16:9 is recommended to fit the videos the ads are in."

For the Facebook right column, Meta's pages disagree. The placement table marks 1.91:1 "Recommended for both images and videos" there. The ads guide's right column image page says "Ratio: 1:1" at a resolution of at least 1080 × 1080, though its 254 × 133 pixel minimum is a 1.91:1 shape. The same page calls right column ads "a desktop-only format."

Everywhere else, horizontal is the wrong instinct. Feed is 4:5 and Stories and Reels are 9:16, both taller than they are wide, because the phone is. A 16:9 master is the single most expensive starting point for a Meta campaign: it gets letterboxed in feed and it loses roughly two-thirds of its width in 9:16.

In-stream duration is the entry the table above defers: Meta gives two ranges for the one placement, 5 to 15 seconds on desktop and 5 seconds to 10 minutes on mobile. No single figure can be right, and every guide prints a single figure.

Note also that in-stream carries different text lengths from feed — 125 characters of primary text and a 40-character headline, against feed's 50–150 and 27. Same account, same campaign, different character budgets.

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 you can exceed, but past those lengths Meta truncates on smaller screens, and you don't control where the cut lands.

Before you export

  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. The free ad size checker shows which placements a finished file fits and whether it falls short of the recommended size.
  3. Keep the reserved bands 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.
  6. Don't start from 16:9. In-stream video is the common placement that asks for a horizontal frame, and even there a 1:1 is accepted. For the Facebook right column, Meta's placement table says 1.91:1 and its ads guide says 1:1.
  7. Check the source. A number in fifty articles may just be copied fifty times. Meta publishes the specs itself, and 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 TikTok ships as templates rather than percentages, 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.