TikTok banner size: what to design at, and why

Think about where the banner sits. It is the artwork behind your avatar, username and bio — a horizontal strip across the top of the profile, roughly twice as wide as it is tall. A 16:9 frame at 1920 × 1080 matches that strip: wide enough to fill it, with room for a subject in the middle and space either side for the layout’s own text.

That is also where the third-party advice specific to this feature lands. A guide written about the native profile background recommends designing wide — about 1920 × 1080 — and keeping key content centred, on the grounds that the visible area shifts between devices. That is a single source and it is not official, but it is the one number circulating that agrees with the shape of the band. Treat our figure exactly the same way: a sensible default, not a rule.

The centring rule is the part that does the real work. Nobody knows the banner’s true proportions, so build the image so that the middle carries the meaning. If the frame turns out taller, squarer or narrower than expected, the crop removes edges rather than the subject.

Where 9:16 still matters is everywhere else on TikTok. 1080 × 1920 is the documented size for photo posts and video covers, so every asset in our library also ships in that shape. Design the wide banner, and if you want the same artwork on your grid, take the portrait version rather than re-cropping the wide one — a hard crop from 16:9 into 9:16 throws away most of the picture.

TikTok lays the top row of your profile grid out side by side. Post three portrait images in a row and they read as one wide banner across the top of your profile, behind nothing — just your own posts. Because it uses ordinary posts rather than a feature that is still rolling out, it works on every account today.

The canvas is 3240 × 1440, divided into three tiles of 1080 × 1440 each — a 3:4 portrait per tile. Build the artwork as one image at that size, then cut it at exactly 1080 px and 2160 px.

A 1920 × 1080 asset will not slice into this. 3240 × 1440 is 2.25:1, which is wider than 16:9, and each tile is a tall 3:4 rectangle. Our banner files have neither the extra width nor the height the tiles need, so turning one into a three-pin banner means re-cropping and re-composing, not cutting. Build the 3240 × 1440 canvas as its own piece of artwork and keep the wide banner for the background slot.

Ordering matters because the grid reads newest-first. The convention reported by the guides is to post the right tile first and the left tile last, so that the final post lands leftmost where a viewer starts reading. Post them, then pin all three so nothing newer pushes them out of the row.

Two practical warnings. Keep text away from the two seams — each tile is cropped slightly differently in the grid, and a word crossing a boundary will be sliced. And source the artwork at 3240 px wide or more, because each tile is 1080 px natively and upscaling shows.

Reported by two independent third-party guides. It is a community convention, not a specification TikTok has published, and the exact grid crop can change with the app layout.