LinkedIn Video Ad Specs: Size and Dimensions

LinkedIn video ads accept MP4 files between 75 KB and 500 MB, from 3 seconds to 30 minutes long, in four aspect ratios: 4:5, 9:16, 16:9 and 1:1. The hard pixel limits are 360 px minimum and 1920 px maximum on both width and height, which means vertical 9:16 tops out at 1080 x 1920. That is a ceiling, not a target, and it is the number most people get wrong: a master exported to Meta's Reels spec at 1,440 x 2,560 is over LinkedIn's maximum on both axes. Two more figures are widely misreported. The headline limit is 200 characters, not 70, and the introductory text limit is 600, not 150. In both cases the smaller number is LinkedIn's recommendation and the larger one is the actual maximum.

Everything below was read off LinkedIn's own video ad specifications page at business.linkedin.com in August 2026, on a document LinkedIn last modified on May 25, 2026. Where LinkedIn distinguishes between a recommendation and a technical requirement, so do we, because that distinction is where nearly every third-party spec sheet goes wrong.

LinkedIn video ad specs at a glance

LinkedIn video ad dimensions by aspect ratio

LinkedIn publishes a minimum and a maximum for each of its four supported shapes. These are the numbers to design against, and the maximum column is the one that surprises people.

1080 x 1920 is LinkedIn's ceiling, not its target

Almost every platform in paid social now asks you to upload above 1080p and lets the platform downscale. Meta is the clearest example: its own ads guide asks for 1,440 x 2,560 on Instagram Reels and 1,440 x 1,800 on the feed, and we cover that in detail in our Meta video ad specs guide. The habit that follows is to keep one high-resolution vertical master and push it everywhere.

That habit breaks on LinkedIn. LinkedIn caps width at 1920 px and height at 1920 px, full stop, and the 9:16 shape then binds vertical video to 1080 x 1920. A 1,440 x 2,560 Reels master is 33% too wide and 33% too tall for LinkedIn at the same time. It is not a quality recommendation you can ignore, it is the published maximum.

In practice this means your export ladder needs a LinkedIn rung. If you are producing one vertical master, produce it at 1080 x 1920 and upscale for Meta rather than the other way round, or keep two exports. It is a two minute change in an export preset that saves a rejected upload later.

Square video carries nearly twice the pixels of vertical on LinkedIn

This one falls out of the numbers and almost nobody points it out. LinkedIn's caps are 1920 on both axes independently. A 1:1 square ad can therefore run 1920 x 1920, which is 3.69 megapixels. A 9:16 vertical ad is limited to 1080 x 1920, or 2.07 megapixels, because going wider than 1080 at 1920 tall would push the ratio past the 9:16 minimum.

So on LinkedIn specifically, square is the highest-resolution shape available to you, by a margin of about 78%. On a platform where a large share of impressions still land on desktop, in a feed column that renders square well, that is a real argument for shipping a 1:1 cut rather than treating vertical as the default because TikTok and Reels trained you to.

The counter-argument is mobile share, which keeps climbing, and vertical still wins the screen there. The honest answer is to cut both, which is cheap if your source material is already vertical with a safe centre.

The headline limit is 200 characters, not 70

Search for LinkedIn ad copy limits and you will find 70 characters repeated everywhere as the headline maximum, and 150 characters as the introductory text maximum. Both come from LinkedIn's own page, and both are the wrong column.

LinkedIn lists these under Text Recommendations, and the entries read, verbatim, "70 characters. Maximum of 200 characters" for the headline and "150 characters. Maximum of 600 characters" for introductory text. The first figure is what LinkedIn suggests. The second is what the system accepts.

The recommendation is good advice and you should usually follow it, because a headline that truncates in the feed is a wasted headline. But the difference matters in two situations. If you are building ads programmatically and validating copy length before upload, validating at 70 will reject copy the API would have taken. And if you have a genuinely complex B2B proposition, having 600 characters of introductory text available rather than 150 changes what you can say above the fold on desktop.

The 5% aspect ratio tolerance nobody publishes

LinkedIn allows a 5% tolerance on aspect ratio. This is stated plainly on its spec page and appears in almost no third-party guide.

It matters more than it sounds. Editors and export presets round. A clip cropped to 9:16 from a 4K source can land at 1080 x 1918 rather than 1080 x 1920, and a strict ratio check would reject it. LinkedIn's tolerance means those near misses pass, which removes a class of upload failure that people usually diagnose as a mystery.

It is not licence to be sloppy. A 5% drift on a 1920 px height is about 96 px, so anything visibly off-ratio will still fail, and letterboxing to force a shape is still a bad idea because it wastes feed real estate.

Audio: AAC or MPEG4, and under 64 KHz

LinkedIn's audio requirement is short and slightly odd. The sound format must be AAC or MPEG4, and the sound rate must be "less than 64 KHz".

Standard delivery audio is 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz, so almost anything you export normally clears this comfortably. The reason to know it exists is that it is a hard requirement rather than a recommendation, and high sample rate masters from a music or post house, 96 kHz for instance, would exceed it. If your creative comes back from an audio vendor, resample to 48 kHz before you upload rather than after a rejection.

Note that LinkedIn does not publish a loudness target the way Snapchat does with its -16 LUFS figure, which we cover in the Snapchat ad specs guide. Mix to broadcast-normal levels and you will be fine.

3 seconds to 30 minutes, and what that actually means

LinkedIn's published duration range is 3 seconds to 30 minutes. Its marketing solutions page adds that the usable range depends on your objective, with shorter videos better for attention and longer formats better for depth.

Thirty minutes is a real limit but not a real plan. For paid social on LinkedIn the working range is 6 to 30 seconds for awareness and consideration, and up to about 90 seconds when you are talking to a warm audience that already knows the problem. We go into the trade-off in how long a video ad should be.

The 3 second floor is worth remembering if you are cutting hooks aggressively. Unlike Snapchat, which loops anything shorter than its minimum, LinkedIn simply will not take a sub-3-second file.

The call to action list is fixed

LinkedIn does not let you write your own button text. It publishes a closed list of call to action options for video ads: Apply, Download, View Quote, Learn More, Sign Up, Subscribe, Register, Join, Attend and Request Demo.

Read that list and you can see who LinkedIn thinks is buying. Register, Join and Attend are event marketing. Request Demo and View Quote are B2B sales. Apply is recruitment, which is a reminder that a substantial share of LinkedIn ad spend is employer brand and hiring rather than product marketing, and that the same professional audience your ads reach is the one your team is sourcing and screening candidates from. Download is the gated asset play that LinkedIn lead gen forms were built around.

The practical consequence is that your CTA has to be chosen from that list, so write the last line of your script to lead into one of those ten verbs rather than into a custom phrase you cannot use.

VAST tag video ads are a separate format

One thing that appears in LinkedIn's Marketing API documentation and in essentially no spec roundup: VAST Tag Video Ads are documented as their own ad format, alongside standard Video Ads, Document Ads, Event Ads and the rest.

VAST is the IAB standard for serving video creative from a third-party ad server. If you run creative through a vendor for verification, dynamic assembly or centralised reporting, that route exists on LinkedIn and is documented. The specs on this page govern the video file itself; the delivery mechanism is a separate decision, and it is one worth raising with your agency if you are already serving VAST on other channels.

Do LinkedIn video ads need captions?

No. LinkedIn lists video captions as Optional in its technical requirements, and it accepts an SRT file or burned-in text without preference. It is the only major requirement on this page that is genuinely up to you.

You should still caption. LinkedIn video autoplays muted in the feed, exactly as it does on Meta and TikTok, so an uncaptioned ad is a silent film for the first several seconds, which is the only part most people watch. Burned-in captions have one further advantage over an uploaded SRT: they survive being reposted, downloaded, or run through a third party player that ignores the sidecar file.

What size should a LinkedIn video ad be?

For vertical, 1080 x 1920 at 9:16. For square, up to 1920 x 1920 at 1:1. For landscape, 1920 x 1080 at 16:9. The absolute minimum on any axis is 360 px. Stay at or below 1920 px on both width and height, because those are LinkedIn's published maximums rather than guidance.

What is the max file size for LinkedIn video ads?

500 MB. There is also a minimum of 75 KB, which exists to reject broken or near-empty files rather than to constrain you. At 500 MB you have plenty of headroom: a 30 second 1080 x 1920 MP4 at a sensible bitrate lands well under 50 MB, so file size is rarely the constraint on LinkedIn.

What is the LinkedIn video ad thumbnail size?

LinkedIn asks the thumbnail to match the video's aspect ratio and resolution, in JPG or PNG, up to 2 MB. So a 1080 x 1920 vertical ad takes a 1080 x 1920 thumbnail. The custom thumbnail is optional but LinkedIn explicitly recommends it, and it is worth doing because the auto-selected frame is often a blink or a mid-word mouth shape.

How LinkedIn compares to the other platforms

LinkedIn is the tightest of the four on both resolution and file size, and it shares Snapchat's unusually wide duration envelope. If you are building one asset set for several channels, LinkedIn is the constraint that should set your vertical export, because everything else will accept a 1080 x 1920 file happily.

Making LinkedIn video ads without a shoot

Specs are the easy half. The hard half on LinkedIn is that the audience is at work, sceptical, and unusually good at spotting a stock-footage corporate video, which is why creator-style ads have started working on a platform that used to reject them.

If you are producing for LinkedIn at volume, the practical route is to make several angles rather than one polished film, and to cut both a 9:16 and a 1:1 version of each so you cover mobile and desktop placements. Our LinkedIn video ads use case walks through that workflow, and SaaS video ads covers the B2B angle specifically. If you are still sizing the channel, LinkedIn video ads cost has the benchmarks.

AdsGen takes a product URL and returns native 9:16 ads with captions burned in and the angle and hook already written, several distinct variations per pass, which fits LinkedIn's 1080 x 1920 vertical cap exactly as exported.