Facebook ad sizes by placement, and the safe-zone numbers nobody can source

Upload 1440 x 1440 pixels for a square feed ad, 1440 x 1800 for 4:5, and 1440 x 2560 for Stories and Reels. Images cap at 30 MB, videos at 4 GB. That covers the question most people are asking. The harder part is what happens to that single file once Meta delivers it across every placement at once, and where the safe-zone numbers everyone publishes actually come from.

How this was checked. For this query in the United States on 10 August 2026, Google returned an AI Overview, an image pack, and an organic set in which three of the top results are Meta’s own documentation. The AI Overview still quotes 1080 x 1080 as the recommended feed size, which is one spec generation behind. Meta’s own domains are closed to automated retrieval, so every number below comes from published third-party documentation, each carrying the date its source was last updated. Where those sources contradict each other, this page prints the contradiction rather than picking a winner. Twenty-five safe-zone guides were collected for that comparison, and on the single most important measurement they cluster into five incompatible answers.

The sizes that cover every placement, checked 10 August 2026

Three uploads cover the entire placement grid. Everything else is a variation on them.

Ratio	Upload at	Covers
1:1 square	1440 x 1440	Feed, Marketplace, carousel, right column, search results, in-stream fallback
4:5 portrait	1440 x 1800	Feed and profile feed on Facebook and Instagram, Threads feed
9:16 vertical	1440 x 2560	Facebook and Instagram Stories, Facebook and Instagram Reels

The 1440 series is the current recommendation. Shopify on 28 May 2026 and Surfside PPC on 6 August 2026 print it in full; Hootsuite on 16 July 2026 and TheOptimizer on 8 June 2026 print it for the feed ratios but still list a 1080-series figure for the vertical placements. The 1080 series that most cheat sheets and the AI Overview lead with is now the accepted floor, not the target.

Minimums, which are a different number from recommendations and are routinely conflated with them:

Placement	Minimum accepted
Feed, carousel, collection	600 x 600 px (1:1), 600 x 750 px (4:5)
Stories	500 px wide
Reels	600 px wide
Right column	254 x 133 px
Audience Network	398 x 208 px
Video, any placement	120 x 120 px

What happens between the minimum and the recommendation is documented by exactly one source, Conversion Studio on 9 August 2026, which says Meta upscales the file rather than rejecting it and you get visible blur and compression artefacts. Single-sourced, so treat it as such — but it matches what every other guide implies when it calls 600 pixels “a floor, not a target”.

Two ratio changes that older sheets get wrong. Right column moved from 1.91:1 to 1:1, so any guide still listing 1200 x 628 for it is stale. And 4:5 has displaced 1:1 as the default feed ratio, because at a fixed feed width it occupies about a quarter more mobile screen height for the same spend.

Where the published safe-zone numbers stop agreeing

This is the part no cheat sheet will tell you. The safe zone is the region of a full-screen vertical ad that platform interface elements do not cover: profile name and close button at the top, caption, audio ticker, call-to-action button and the like-comment-share rail at the bottom and right.

Every guide publishes a number for it as though it were a fact. Collected across twenty-five published guides, the same measurement comes back like this, all on a 1080 x 1920 frame, nearly all from sources updated in 2026:

Measurement	Values published	Spread
Stories, top reserve	250, 263, 270 px	20 px
Stories, bottom reserve	250, 280, 340, 380, 672 px	422 px
Reels, top reserve	108, 200, 250, 270 px	162 px
Reels, bottom reserve	320, 340, 400, 450, 672 px	352 px
Side reserve	0, 35, 40, 65, 150 px	150 px
Resulting Stories safe box	950 x 1270, 950 x 1420, 1080 x 1420 px	—

The Reels bottom reserve is the one that matters most, and the published range runs from 320 pixels to 672 pixels. That is a 2.1x difference on the single number that decides whether your call to action is readable. It is 18% of the frame height in open dispute.

Three things about that table are worth stating plainly.

Not one of the twenty-five sources links a Meta page as the origin of a specific safe-zone figure. Several link Meta’s help centre in general terms; several publish a downloadable overlay template, and none of those templates is Meta-hosted. The percentages most of them quote — 14% top, 20% or 35% bottom, 6% sides — are attributed to Meta by paraphrase only.

Six of them assert that Meta unified the safe zones for all four vertical placements in March 2026. None cites a changelog, a help page or a release note for that date. It may well be true. It is currently folklore.

At least one source contradicts itself inside a single table, listing Facebook Stories at 263 top and 250 bottom, Instagram Stories at 269 and 672, and then a shared safe box for all placements that matches neither row.

The same softness shows up in the placement count. Cropink puts the number of Meta ad placements at 19 as of 12 February 2026. TheOptimizer’s guide of 8 June 2026 opens by claiming “25+ placements” and then enumerates “20+ distinct surfaces” further down the same article. Nobody outside Meta can settle it, so treat any published count as an estimate.

A conservative safe-zone envelope you can design against

You cannot resolve the disagreement from outside Meta. You can render it harmless. Take the most restrictive value published for each edge and a layout that clears it clears every rival figure at once.

These are derived numbers, not Meta’s, and the method needs stating precisely, because two of the values in the table above are not what they look like. The rule is: the largest reserve published for that specific placement, on a 1080 x 1920 canvas, setting aside the sources that collapse Stories and Reels into a single shared figure — which is where the 672 in the Stories row comes from. The 150-pixel side figure is likewise not a general margin: it is the Reels engagement rail, so it applies to the right edge of Reels and nowhere else.

Edge	Stories	Reels
Top	270 px (14.1%)	270 px (14.1%)
Bottom	380 px (19.8%)	672 px (35.0%)
Left	65 px (6.0%)	65 px (6.0%)
Right	65 px (6.0%)	150 px (13.9%)
Safe box	950 x 1270 px, from y=270	865 x 978 px, from x=65, y=270
Share of frame that is safe	58.2%	40.8%

The headline consequence: under this envelope less than half the Reels frame is reliably yours. Not the middle 80%, not the “roughly the centre” that most guides suggest — 40.8%, and it sits above the vertical centre, not on it. A composition centred in the frame puts its focal point inside the caption and audio ticker region.

Percentages, not pixels, are the durable unit here, because every fixed-pixel figure in circulation is anchored to a 1080 x 1920 canvas and none of the sources restates them for the 1440 x 2560 upload they simultaneously recommend. Carried across at the same percentages, the envelope becomes: Stories 360 top, 507 bottom, 87 sides, safe box 1266 x 1693; Reels 360 top, 896 bottom, 87 left, 200 right, safe box 1153 x 1304.

The 292-pixel gap between the Stories bottom reserve and the Reels bottom reserve is the single most common reason one 9:16 asset reads correctly in Stories and fails in Reels. If you only ever design one vertical, design it to the Reels envelope and accept that Stories gives you dead space.

What one asset loses when it runs across every placement

Leave every placement switched on, upload one file, and Meta will deliver it everywhere. The ad is approved, it spends, and nothing in the interface tells you which surfaces mangled it.

Your asset	Feed and profile feed	Stories and Reels	Marketplace	Threads feed	Carousel
1:1 square	Native, loses about a fifth of the mobile height a 4:5 would hold	Letterboxed, black bars top and bottom	Native	Native	Native, this is the carousel standard
4:5 portrait	Native, optimal	Letterboxed	Force-cropped to square	Native, the recommended ratio	Cropped to 1:1
9:16 vertical	Auto-zoomed or cropped	Native, edge to edge	Force-cropped to square	Centre-cropped to 4:5 bounds	Cropped to 1:1

Two details that guides get wrong in opposite directions.

The bars are black. Multiple 2026 sources describe letterboxing on Meta ad placements and every one of them describes plain black bars. None of them documents a blurred or gradient fill on an ad placement, despite that behaviour being widely assumed. If you have seen a blurred backdrop, it was organic Reels or another platform.

Carousel cards must share a ratio. That much is documented. What practitioners report on top of it is that mixed-ratio cards do not each render at their own shape — Meta takes the first card’s ratio and crops the rest to match, so a single 4:5 card slipped into a square carousel silently reframes every card after it.

The fix is placement asset customisation — the “edit per placement” path in Ads Manager — which lets you swap the whole media file, the crop, the video thumbnail, the primary text, the headline and the call-to-action per placement. One constraint is worth knowing before you plan around it: ads created from an existing post ID cannot use it at all, because they inherit the original post’s creative. Set it up at creation, before delivery starts, rather than editing a live ad, since creative edits re-enter the learning phase.

The placement count nobody can verify, and the placements that quietly died

Meta does not publish a single authoritative count, which is why the third-party figures range from 19 to 25 and above. What can be dated is the churn, and cheat sheets are slow to reflect it.

Retired, with dates:

• Instagram Explore feed — removed in Graph and Marketing API v26.0, effective 29 July 2026. Requesting it explicitly now returns an error and delivery redistributes elsewhere.
• Messenger Stories — deprecated in the same 29 July 2026 release. The failure mode here is nastier: the value is silently stripped from ad set create and update calls, so the request still succeeds and nothing appears in the logs.
• Messenger Sponsored Messages — creation removed in Marketing API v20.0, announced 21 May 2024.
• Reels post-loop ads — removed November 2025.
• Flexible ad format — dropped as a standalone option in ad setup from March 2026 and absorbed into Advantage+ creative.

Added: Threads feed went globally available in the week of 26 January 2026 and is switched on by default in both Advantage+ and manual placements. If you have not deselected it since January, you are running there — and anything taller than 4:5 is being centre-cropped to Threads bounds.

Still live, despite frequent claims otherwise: right column, Facebook in-stream video, Messenger inbox and the whole Audience Network including rewarded video.

Advantage+ creative can change the frame after you approve it

Placement geometry is only half the problem. Meta’s creative enhancements can alter the rendered frame itself, and several of the frame-altering ones ship enabled.

The enhancements that change geometry rather than decoration, per Sprinklr’s enumeration updated 7 August 2026, are: visual touch-ups for images, visual touch-ups for videos, expand image, adapt to placement, and flexible media. Adapt to placement re-renders your image at 9:16 for vertical surfaces. Expand image generates new pixels at the edges to fill a ratio you did not supply.

Which of them are on by default is genuinely unsettled — one 2026 source lists nine, another lists seven, and the two lists do not match. What is consistent across sources is that frame-altering enhancements are among the defaults.

The part worth internalising: modification can happen per impression, at delivery, based on what the system predicts will perform for that viewer. There is no preview of the variant a given person saw. Practitioner reports describe brand colours shifted, saturation raised, product photography cropped at the edges as an animation zooms, and approved copy rewritten into variations that were never tested.

Toggles live at the ad level under creative and optimise media, and account-wide defaults under advertising settings in Business Settings. If your brand has a colour specification, turn the visual ones off before you argue about pixel dimensions.

File, codec and duration limits that degrade an upload

Meta re-encodes every upload, unconditionally. That single fact reorders the priorities: your export settings matter, your file size mostly does not.

Spec	Value	Notes
Video containers	MP4, MOV	Some sources also list GIF; MP4 and MOV are the only two every source agrees on
Video codec	H.264	Support for H.265/HEVC is claimed, denied and called “causes processing delays” by three different 2026 sources
Audio	Stereo AAC, 128 kbps or higher	256 kbps recommended by one source
Frame rate	Fixed, progressive scan, square pixels	30 fps is the safe figure; whether 60 is accepted is disputed
Max file size	4 GB video, 30 MB image	Universal agreement
Image types	JPG, PNG	No source lists WebP among the recommended types, and one notes Meta accepts it without documenting it

Durations, which are the most placement-specific numbers in the whole spec set:

Placement	Duration
Feed and video feed	1 second to 241 minutes
Stories	1 second to 2 minutes
Reels	1 second, no maximum stated by the most recent sources; older ones say 90 seconds
Ads on Reels, the overlay unit	4 to 15 seconds
In-stream, mobile	5 seconds to 10 minutes
In-stream, desktop	5 to 15 seconds
Marketplace, mobile	5 seconds to 10 minutes
Marketplace, desktop	5 to 15 seconds

The in-stream desktop ceiling of 15 seconds against the mobile ceiling of 10 minutes is the trap in that table. One in-stream video ad, delivered across both, is a 40-fold difference in permitted length on the same line item.

On re-encoding, the practitioner consensus is consistent and useful: a well-encoded 200 MB file is indistinguishable from a 3.8 GB one after Meta’s pipeline processes it. Export MP4, H.264, 1440-series resolution, fixed frame rate at 30 fps, progressive, square pixels, AAC at 128 kbps or better, and do not run a compression pass of your own before uploading — you are only stacking a second generation of loss on top of Meta’s. No source publishes a hard bitrate limit; the upload recommendations that exist range from 5 to 30 Mbps at 1080p and contradict each other.

Character limits are truncation points, not rejection rules

Ads Manager will accept a headline far longer than the published limit and the ad will run. What the numbers describe is where the interface cuts the text off, or drops the field entirely.

Placement	Primary text	Headline	Description
Facebook feed	125	27	not shown
Instagram feed	125	40	not shown
Facebook Stories	125	40	not shown
Facebook Reels	40	55	not shown
Ads on Reels, overlay	60	10	not shown
Marketplace	125	40	30
Search results	125	40	30
Right column	not shown	40	not shown
Audience Network	125	25 or 40, sources disagree	30

Facebook Reels at 40 characters of primary text is the binding constraint across any broad placement mix, and a 10-character headline on the Reels overlay unit is tighter than most brand names plus a verb. Write for the shortest slot, not the longest one.

Two corrections to widely circulated numbers. The 63,206-character figure is the organic Facebook post limit and does not apply to ads; 2,200 is the Instagram caption limit and likewise does not. And precise desktop-versus-mobile truncation counts do not exist in any credible source — the sources that address it say truncation varies with device width, font size setting, language, and whether the copy contains emoji or line breaks. Any cheat sheet quoting an exact desktop figure invented it.

The 20% text rule is dead and has been since 7 September 2020, when Meta stated it would no longer penalise ads with higher amounts of text in auctions and delivery. Less text still tends to perform better, which is why the advice persists. It is not a delivery cost. Guides updated in 2026 that still describe four tiers of reach throttling by text density are reprinting a system retired nearly six years ago.

One master export, four crops, and the two files worth keeping

The workflow that survives all of the above is to design once at the tightest envelope and derive everything from it, rather than resizing a finished layout and discovering what the crop ate.

1. Build at 1440 x 2560, 9:16. Place every element that must be legible inside the Reels envelope: 360 pixels clear at the top, 896 at the bottom, 87 on the left, 200 on the right. That leaves a 1153 x 1304 working area.
2. Keep the focal point above centre. The Reels safe box sits high in the frame. A layout centred on the canvas centre is already inside the reserved zone.
3. Derive 1440 x 1800 by cropping the vertical, not by rescaling it. The 4:5 crop takes the middle of your 9:16 composition and inherits its focal point. Re-shooting or re-laying-out for 4:5 is where most of the extra production cost hides. On filmed material this decision moves upstream to the shoot itself, because a vertical cut stops being a crop once the subject sits near the frame edge.
4. Derive 1440 x 1440 from the 4:5, same principle, one more centre crop.
5. Export text as a separate layer. Every re-cut moves the text block, and flattened text means redoing the layout instead of nudging a group. This is the same reason a 3D pipeline re-renders a new angle while a 2D one redraws the frame — where the reusable layer sits decides what a variant costs.
6. Upload the vertical to vertical placements and the crops to the rest, through placement asset customisation, rather than letting one file be letterboxed into four surfaces.

Two files are worth archiving per campaign: the layered 9:16 master, and a flattened 9:16 with the envelope bands drawn on top. The second one settles arguments with whoever asks why the logo cannot sit in the bottom corner.

How to check a spec yourself instead of trusting a cheat sheet

Every number on this page has a date attached because these specs move, and the guides that carry them move slower. Two of the retirements above were still being listed as live placements by guides updated weeks afterwards.

There is exactly one source of truth you can reach without waiting for a publisher: the placement preview in Ads Manager. Build the ad, leave every placement on, and step through the preview dropdown placement by placement before you publish. It renders your actual file against the current interface, which is a stronger check than any published pixel figure, including the envelope on this page. What it will not show you is the per-impression variant an enhancement generates at delivery — for that, the only control is switching the enhancement off.

Meta’s own Ads Guide remains the canonical specification, and it is the page every guide in the top ten is paraphrasing, usually months late and without saying so.

Where none of this is worth your afternoon, that is what an agency is for. Our Facebook Ads team maintains the placement matrix and the master templates so the creative arrives already cut for the surfaces it will run on, which is a different job from designing one image and hoping.

When this page was checked: all specs verified against published sources on 10 August 2026. The safe-zone envelope is derived from twenty-five third-party guides, not published by Meta. Re-verify anything load-bearing before a large production run.