The short version: Facebook ads run at four main dimensions worth remembering: 1080×1080 for feed, 1080×1350 for the vertical feed format Meta now favours, 1080×1920 for Stories and Reels, and 1200×628 for link ads with a landscape image. Everything else is a variation on those four, and the aspect ratio matters far more than the exact pixel count because Meta stretches, crops, and reformats your image the moment it leaves your hands.
The sizes that matter in 2026
I’ve built Facebook campaigns for clients since the platform still called them “Sponsored Stories,” and the sizing advice hasn’t changed much in structure, even though Meta keeps tweaking the recommended ratios. Here’s what’s live right now, placement by placement:
- Feed image (mobile and desktop): 1080×1080 (1:1) or 1080×1350 (4:5). Minimum accepted width is 600 pixels.
- Feed video: 1080×1080 for square, 1080×1920 for full vertical, minimum resolution 1080×1080.
- Stories and Reels ads: 1080×1920 (9:16), full screen, vertical only.
- Right column ads (desktop only, still exists, still cheap, still ignored): 1:1 minimum 254×254.
- Carousel cards: 1080×1080 per card, square works best because every card needs to match.
- Collection ads (cover image or video): 1200×628 landscape for the cover, then square or vertical product images underneath.
- Link ads with a single image: 1200×628 (1.91:1) has been the standard landscape ratio for years and it still is.
- Marketplace placement: 1:1 or 4:5, same files as your feed set.
If you only remember three numbers, remember 1080×1080, 1080×1350, and 1080×1920. That covers about 90% of what you’ll ever need to upload.
Feed ads: the format everyone gets wrong
For years the “correct” feed image was square, 1080×1080, and a lot of design templates floating around still assume that. Meta quietly shifted its own recommendation to 4:5 (1080×1350) because it takes up more vertical space on a phone screen, which means more thumb-stopping real estate before someone scrolls past. I switched every client account over to 4:5 as the default feed asset back when the shift happened, and average feed CTR across a batch of ecommerce accounts I was running went from around 1.1% to 1.4% within the first two weeks of the swap. Nothing else changed. Just the shape of the image.
Video in feed follows the same logic. Meta will accept anything from 9:16 up to 16:9, but a vertical or near-square video simply occupies more screen. If you’re repurposing a horizontal video shot for YouTube or a webinar recording, don’t just drop it into a Facebook feed ad as-is. It’ll sit in a small letterboxed strip and half your budget goes to impressions nobody looked at.
Stories and Reels: full screen, zero room for error
Stories and Reels ads run at 1080×1920, full 9:16, no exceptions. What most guides skip is the safe zone: Meta overlays your profile name, CTA button, and progress bar on top of your creative, and those elements eat roughly 250 pixels off the top and 250 off the bottom. Any logo, headline text, or product name sitting in that zone gets covered.
I once inherited a client account where the previous agency had designed one master creative, a 1080×1920 image with the product name and discount code stacked right at the bottom third, and the CTA button sat directly over the discount code on every single device. Nobody had spotted it because the preview in Ads Manager doesn’t always render the overlay the same way a live phone does. The fix took ten minutes once someone looked at it on a real phone rather than the desktop preview.
This is closely related to why Instagram Story videos turn blurry after posting, because Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram Stories and applies the same compression and cropping logic across both. If your source file is under 1080×1920 or heavily compressed before upload, expect the same softness on Facebook Stories ads too.
Carousel, Collection, and Marketplace: consistency beats cleverness
Carousel ads let you run up to ten cards, and the mistake I see most often is mixing aspect ratios between cards, one square, one landscape, one portrait, because someone grabbed whatever image was lying around. Keep every card at 1080×1080. It looks intentional and it stops the scroll feeling jumpy.
Collection ads need a 1200×628 cover, then a grid of square product shots underneath. This format was originally built with mobile shopping in mind and it still performs well for retail clients, particularly around Black Friday when people are scrolling one-handed on a train.
Marketplace placement quietly rides along with your feed placement in most campaigns, using the same 1:1 or 4:5 assets, so there’s rarely extra design work needed here unless you’re running Marketplace exclusively.
The text and file limits that get ads rejected or ignored
Pixel dimensions get all the attention, but the character and file limits cause more grief in practice:
- Primary text: Meta recommends 125 characters. You can go longer, up to 500, but anything past 125 gets a “see more” truncation on most devices.
- Headline: 40 characters before it truncates.
- Link description: 30 characters, and it often doesn’t show at all depending on placement.
- Image file size: 30MB maximum.
- Video file size: 4GB maximum, though anything over 500MB will slow down your upload and preview generation in Ads Manager.
- Text on image: Facebook stopped hard-rejecting images with too much text years ago, but its algorithm still quietly suppresses reach on image-heavy-text ads, so keep it minimal regardless of the rule technically being gone.
The mistake that costs real money
Here’s the bit most sizing guides won’t tell you straight: getting the pixel dimensions “perfect” for every single placement matters far less than people think, because if you use Automatic Placements or Advantage+ campaigns, which is most accounts by 2026, Meta will still push your creative into placements it wasn’t built for. You can upload a beautifully cropped 1080×1350 feed image and a proper 1080×1920 Stories version, tick every box, and Meta will still sometimes stretch or pad an asset into a placement it doesn’t fit, because the system is optimising for cost per result across the whole placement set, not for your design brief.
I had a jewellery client a couple of years back whose designer built one hero banner at a wide desktop ratio and reused it everywhere because “it looked nice.” We ran it across Automatic Placements without adding a proper vertical asset. Ten days in, spend was around £600, and roughly 40% of impressions had landed in Stories and Reels, where the wide image got center-cropped so hard the rings themselves, the entire product, were sliced off the edges. Click-through rate on that placement sat at 0.4%. The exact same product, same offer, same audience, but with a proper 1080×1920 crop added in, pulled 1.8% CTR once we fixed it. Same budget, same targeting, four and a half times the click rate, just from giving Meta the right shape of image instead of forcing it to guess.
The lesson isn’t “get every pixel exact.” It’s “give Meta at least one asset per aspect ratio family, square-ish, vertical, and landscape, and let the system pick,” rather than uploading one image and hoping it survives every crop the algorithm throws at it.
A simple workflow that covers every placement
This is the process I use when I’m briefing a client’s design team or building creative myself:
- Shoot or design at 1080×1920 first, vertical, because it’s the tightest crop and hardest to retrofit from a wide image.
- Keep any text, logo, or CTA inside the middle 1420 pixels vertically, away from the top 250 and bottom 250 pixel safe zones.
- Crop that same master image down to 1080×1350 for feed, then to 1080×1080 for carousel and right column.
- Export a 1200×628 landscape version separately for link ads and Collection covers, since cropping a vertical shot into landscape rarely works and usually needs a proper reframe or a second shot.
- Upload all four versions into the same ad set under Dynamic Creative or Advantage+ Creative and let Meta test which combination performs, rather than manually guessing which ratio will win.
If you’re building creative for Facebook alongside Instagram, it’s worth checking the correct dimensions for an Instagram post at the same time, since the two platforms share most of Meta’s ad infrastructure and a lot of the same crops apply. And if part of your team is also managing LinkedIn creative, the sizing logic is different enough that it’s worth a separate check of the LinkedIn post image dimensions rather than assuming Facebook rules carry over, because they don’t.
For the wider strategy sitting around these sizes, I’ve written before about the business marketing strategies for Facebook that move the needle beyond just getting creative sizing right, and if you want a running list of the tools that make building all these variants less painful, the 101 best Facebook tools list has design and resizing tools I still use myself.
This is one of 80 Facebook guides; the full index is Facebook: every guide in one place.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Facebook ad size for beginners?
Start with 1080×1350 for feed and 1080×1920 for Stories and Reels. Those two cover the majority of impressions most small business campaigns get, and both are simple to crop from a single vertical photo shoot.
Do Facebook ads have to be an exact size or will Meta resize them automatically?
Meta will resize and crop automatically if you don’t supply the right ratio, but the crop is rarely flattering and often cuts off the product or the text. Supplying separate assets for square, vertical, and landscape gives the algorithm proper material to work with instead of forcing a guess.
What is the safe zone for Facebook Stories and Reels ads?
Keep any text, logo, or CTA out of roughly the top 250 pixels and bottom 250 pixels of a 1080×1920 image, since that space is covered by the profile name, progress bar, and call-to-action button on most devices.
What file size and format limits does Facebook enforce for ads?
Images can be up to 30MB, and videos up to 4GB, though files over 500MB slow down upload and preview in Ads Manager. Accepted formats are JPG or PNG for images, and MP4 or MOV for video, encoded with H.264 compression where possible for the cleanest quality after Meta’s own compression pass.
