The published limits, and the one they imply
As of July 2026, an Etsy listing video has to be 5 to 15 seconds long, no more than 100 MB, and at least 500 px on its shortest side. The audio does not play on the listing, so a soundtrack is dead weight in both senses.
Those first two numbers are not independent constraints. File size is just bitrate multiplied by duration, so capping both length and size caps the bitrate you are allowed to spend:
Rearranged for a 15-second clip at the 100 MB limit, that is 53.3 Mbps. That is the real spec. Every other decision on this page is about staying under it — and it is worth noticing that a shorter clip does not buy you a lower bitrate requirement, it buys you a higher allowance: a 5-second clip could theoretically run at 160 Mbps and still fit. Short clips are forgiving. The 15-second maximum is where files fail.
| Video bitrate | 5 s clip | 10 s clip | 15 s clip | Verdict at 15 s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 Mbps | 5.0 MB | 10.0 MB | 15.0 MB | Very safe; fine for 1080 p |
| 16 Mbps | 10.0 MB | 20.0 MB | 30.0 MB | Comfortable 1080 p sweet spot |
| 25 Mbps | 15.6 MB | 31.3 MB | 46.9 MB | Generous; still half the cap |
| 45 Mbps | 28.1 MB | 56.3 MB | 84.4 MB | Typical 4K/30 — fits, barely |
| 53.3 Mbps | 33.3 MB | 66.7 MB | 100.0 MB | Exactly the ceiling |
| 90 Mbps | 56.3 MB | 112.5 MB | 168.8 MB | Typical 4K/60 — fails |
| 200 Mbps | 125 MB | 250 MB | 375 MB | Editing codecs (ProRes &c.) — fails |
Where the megabytes come from
An encoder's job is to describe a certain number of pixels per second. That number is the honest measure of how hard you are making it work:
- 1080 × 1080 at 30 fps — 35 million pixels per second
- 1080 × 1920 at 30 fps — 62 million
- 3840 × 2160 at 30 fps — 249 million
- 3840 × 2160 at 60 fps — 498 million, roughly 14× the first line
Apple's own documentation puts one minute of 4K/30 HEVC capture at more than 175 MB, which works out to about 43.8 MB for fifteen seconds — comfortably inside the limit. The mode that breaks things is 4K at 60 fps, which doubles that, and any capture in an editing codec, which multiplies it. If a 15-second clip off your phone is arriving at 200 MB, the cause is almost always one of those two settings rather than anything you did in the edit.
Resolution is a floor, and you are already over it
The 500 px minimum on the shortest side is low. A vertical 9:16 clip only has to be 500 × 889 to clear it; a square only 500 × 500. Any phone made in the last decade blows past that, which is why resolution is rarely the reason an upload is refused. The practical question is not whether you clear the floor but whether shooting 4K buys anything, and for a short muted loop shown at modest size, it mostly buys you file size. Our Etsy image sizes guide cites 1080 px on the shortest side as Etsy's recommendation for the video slot; 500 px is the number we can confirm as the hard floor. Shooting 1080 p and staying there leaves you a bitrate budget you cannot easily overspend.
Frame rate is a bill, not a feature
Doubling frame rate roughly doubles the data an encoder has to produce for the same picture. In exchange you get smoother motion — which matters for sport and for slow motion, and matters very little for a hand rotating a ceramic mug. At 30 fps a 15-second listing video is 450 frames, which is plenty of material for a loop. Shooting 60 fps to "keep options open" and then exporting at 60 fps is the single most common reason a perfectly ordinary clip lands over 100 MB.
If you shot 60 fps because you wanted the option of slow motion, take it: slowing 60 fps footage to half speed and exporting at 30 fps gives you smooth slow motion and halves the frame rate bill. What you should not do is carry 60 fps all the way to the export at normal speed.
What we could not confirm
Etsy's accepted container and codec list is not something we were able to verify from a primary source as of July 2026. Plenty of third-party articles print a list; we could not find it stated on an Etsy help page we could read, so this guide does not assert one. What can be said from the mechanics rather than from policy: H.264 video in an MP4 container is the most broadly decodable combination in existence, it is what phones and every editor export by default, and choosing it removes an entire category of failure. If a file is being rejected and you have already cleared length, size and resolution, re-exporting as H.264/MP4 is the cheapest next thing to try.
Two related cautions, both about how a file is captured rather than what Etsy accepts. Recording in HDR (Dolby Vision on recent iPhones, HDR10 on some Android devices) stores brightness information that only displays correctly on surfaces that understand it; where it is not understood, the clip is tone-mapped by whatever software is handling it and can come out flat or oddly dark. And recording in ProRes or a similar editing codec produces files in the hundreds of megabits per second, which the table above shows cannot fit. Both are settings you turn off in the camera app, not problems you fix in the export.
A settings sheet
Three exports that all land well inside the limits. Pick by the shape you want, not by what your camera happens to be set to.
- Square loop — the safe default
1080 × 1080 / 30 fps / H.264 / MP4 / ~16 Mbps
About 30 MB at the full 15 seconds. Matches the square shape marketplace grids favor, and leaves room to spare if you later trim differently.- Vertical — if the product is tall
1080 × 1920 / 30 fps / H.264 / MP4 / ~20 Mbps
About 37.5 MB at 15 seconds. The higher bitrate covers the extra pixels; the total is still barely a third of the cap.- 4K, if you insist
3840 × 2160 / 30 fps / H.264 or HEVC / ~45 Mbps
About 84 MB at 15 seconds — inside the limit with roughly 16 MB of headroom, which is not much. Any extra length, any bump to 60 fps, and it fails. There is very little upside for a muted loop.
Duration, file size and pixel dimensions are all readable from the file itself without uploading it anywhere. Our Etsy video spec checker reads them in the browser and tells you which of the three is the problem, which is usually enough to know whether you need to trim, re-export, or start again with different camera settings.
The order to fix things in
- Length first. Trimming is free and it scales everything else linearly. A 22-second clip cut to 15 loses roughly a third of its size on its way to being legal anyway.
- Frame rate second. 60 → 30 halves the bill and costs nothing anyone will notice in a product loop.
- Resolution third. 4K → 1080 p is a large saving and the floor is only 500 px, so there is enormous slack.
- Bitrate last. Lowering bitrate is the only one of the four that visibly degrades the picture, so it is the lever to reach for once the others are spent — not before.
Get into the habit of shooting 1080 p at 30 fps for listing videos specifically and the whole problem stops recurring. The limit was never really 100 MB; it was a camera setting you changed for something else and forgot about.