YouTube Profile Picture size: 800 x 800 pixels.

YouTube's channel branding page asks for a JPG, GIF, BMP or PNG without animation, under 15 MB, that renders at 98 by 98 pixels. It names no upload size at all. 800 by 800 pixels is the figure earlier versions of that page recommended and it remains the sensible export, because the same file is drawn at up to 160 pixels in the channel header and at twice that on a high-density screen.

The picture is a circle, so the corners of the square go. It appears beside every video title in search and the home feed at roughly 36 to 48 pixels, next to comments at about 24, and larger only on the channel page itself. At the sizes that matter, a mark or a face is legible and a wordmark is not, which is why so many channels use the mark alone and put the name in the channel title.

The channel picture has been separate from the Google Account photo since 2021, so changing one leaves the other alone, and edits can take a few minutes to appear everywhere. Upload a square: YouTube crops a rectangle to a centered square you can nudge but not resize. Reuse the same mark you use on other networks, since people often meet a channel through a shared Short with only the avatar for context.