YouTube banner safe area explained: why your channel art gets cut off on phones

You made a banner that looks right in your design app and on your laptop. Then you open your channel on a phone and the channel name is sliced in half, the face in the photo is missing its forehead, and the upload schedule you put in the corner has vanished. Nothing is broken. YouTube is doing exactly what it always does: showing one image at several different crops, and keeping only a thin strip in the middle for small screens.

That strip is the safe area. Once you know its exact size and position, fixing the banner takes a few minutes. The YouTube Banner Size Converter has presets for the full upload and the safe area, so you can see what a phone viewer gets before you publish.

What YouTube officially specifies

YouTube’s help page on channel branding gives four numbers for the banner, and they are the only ones that are official:

Spec	Value
Minimum upload	2048 × 1152 px, 16:9 aspect ratio
Recommended upload (especially for TV)	2560 × 1440 px
Safe area for text and logos (at the minimum size)	1235 × 338 px, centred
Maximum file size	6 MB

The same page adds that the image “will get cropped on certain views and devices” and asks you not to add shadows, borders or frames. It doesn’t list accepted file formats for the banner; JPG and PNG are the safe choices.

The two safe-area numbers are the same thing

Most guides quote the safe area as 1546 × 423. YouTube’s help page says 1235 × 338. People reasonably assume one replaced the other. It didn’t: they are the same region on two different canvases.

1235 × 338 is measured on the 2048 × 1152 minimum canvas. Scale that canvas up to 2560 × 1440 (a factor of exactly 1.25) and the safe area becomes about 1544 × 423, which is the long-quoted 1546 × 423 with rounding. In proportional terms the safe area is always about 60% of the width and 29% of the height, centred. That’s under a fifth of the image’s total area.

So pick the canvas you’ll design on and use the matching number:

Canvas	Safe area	Left/right margin	Top/bottom margin
2560 × 1440	1546 × 423	507 px each side	about 508 px each side
2048 × 1152	1235 × 338	about 406 px each side	407 px each side

Those margins are what you type into your design tool’s guides. On a 2560 × 1440 canvas, put vertical guides at x = 507 and x = 2053, and horizontal guides at y = 508 and y = 931. Everything that must be readable goes between them.

What each device roughly shows

The table below uses the per-device figures that have circulated since YouTube’s older channel-art template, and that current creator guides still use. YouTube’s current help page no longer publishes them, and the desktop crop also changes with browser width, so treat these as a planning guide rather than exact pixels. The safe area is the part that is guaranteed.

Device	Visible part of a 2560 × 1440 upload
TV	The whole image, 2560 × 1440
Desktop	A wide band, about 2560 × 423
Tablet	About 1855 × 423
Phone	Only the centre, about 1546 × 423

Two things follow. First, everything above and below the 423 px band, about 70% of the image’s height, is seen only on TVs. If almost none of your audience watches on a TV, that region is decoration: fill it with colour, texture or the rest of a photo, but don’t put information there. Second, the left and right edges are seen on desktop and TV but not on phones. A logo pushed into the corner of the desktop band looks deliberate on a laptop and disappears on mobile, which is where most viewers are.

Laying out a banner that survives every crop

Start from a 2560 × 1440 canvas and draw your safe-area guides first, before placing anything. Then work from the centre outward.

1. Put the channel name and one line of text in the safe area. That is all most banners need. If you add a tagline or upload schedule, keep it short enough to sit inside 1546 px at a size that still reads on a phone.
2. Keep faces and products centred vertically. A portrait photo cropped to a 423 px tall strip loses foreheads and chins fast. Place eyes around the middle of the safe area rather than at the top third, where they’d sit in a normal photo.
3. Let the background bleed. Extend colour, gradients or the photo all the way to the canvas edges so TV and desktop viewers see a full image, not a box with empty borders.
4. Leave a little padding inside the guides. Different apps round the crop slightly differently. Keeping text 20 to 30 px inside the guides costs nothing and avoids letters clipped at the edge.

If you already have artwork that wasn’t designed this way, the quickest check is the YouTube Banner Size Converter linked above. Load your image, choose the Channel art — full upload preset to produce the 2560 × 1440 file, then switch to Safe area — visible on every device to see the 1546 × 423 centre on its own. If anything important is missing from that preview, it will be missing on phones. The tool scales your image to fill each size and centre-crops the overflow, the same way the banner is trimmed on screen. It runs in your browser, so the image is never uploaded to a server.

Getting under 6 MB without losing sharpness

A 2560 × 1440 PNG of a photograph can easily exceed the 6 MB limit. The fix is to reduce the file size, not the dimensions: a smaller upload is stretched on TVs and looks soft.

For a photographic banner, export as JPG at a high quality setting; a 2560 × 1440 photo usually lands well under 6 MB that way. For a banner that is mostly flat colour and text, PNG is fine and stays crisp around lettering. If either is still too big, the Image Compressor reduces the file while keeping the pixel dimensions. If you need a different size for something else, like a header on another platform, use the general Image Resizer.

The rest of your channel’s images

The same help page covers the other branding images, and they are easy to get wrong while you’re fixing the banner:

Asset	YouTube’s specification
Profile picture	JPG, GIF, BMP or PNG (no animated GIFs), up to 15 MB, renders at 98 × 98 px
Video watermark	Square, at least 150 × 150 px, under 1 MB
Video thumbnail	Separate rules; see the YouTube Thumbnail Resizer for the 1280 × 720 size

The profile picture renders tiny, so a logo or face with a plain background reads far better than a detailed scene. Upload it square and larger than the render size so it stays sharp on high-density screens.

Publishing and checking

In YouTube Studio, open Customization, then Profile, click Change next to the banner image, choose your file, and adjust the crop in the preview. Click Done, then Publish. After it is live, open your channel on an actual phone, not just a narrow browser window, and confirm the name and text sit inside the visible strip.

Checklist

• Canvas is 2560 × 1440 (minimum 2048 × 1152), 16:9.
• Guides at x = 507 and 2053, y = 508 and 931 on a 2560 × 1440 canvas.
• Channel name and any text sit inside the guides with a little padding.
• Faces and products centred vertically, not in the top third.
• Background bleeds to every edge; no borders, frames or shadows.
• File is 6 MB or smaller; compress rather than shrinking the dimensions.
• Checked the crop preview in YouTube Studio and on a real phone after publishing.