How big should a printed QR code be?

One rule covers everything

A QR code wants to be about a tenth of the distance it will be scanned from. A menu read at 300mm needs a 30mm code. A poster read from three metres needs 30cm. That is the whole rule, and every row in the table below is that division plus a judgement about how far away the reader really stands.

Two assumptions sit underneath it. The code carries a short link, and the contrast is proper dark-on-light. Break either and the numbers move against you, which is what the sections after the table are about.

Sizes by scanning distance

Notes on the rows people get wrong:

• Business card. The one place the rule bends, because a card is scanned deliberately and close. 15mm is the practical floor for a short link, and the constraint is tight enough that cards have their own page.
• Shop window. Glass adds reflections the table cannot see. Test from the pavement, in daylight and after dark, not from inside the shop.
• Vehicle livery. The arithmetic assumes the vehicle is parked. Nobody scans a moving van, so size for where it parks, not for the traffic behind it.
• Roadside banner. A code read from a passing car is decoration. Size it for the person who walks up to the banner, and put the address in plain text beside it for everyone else.

Where a location falls between rows, take the bigger number. Nobody has ever reprinted a poster because the code scanned too easily.

A longer address needs a bigger print

The pattern is a grid of small squares, and the grid grows with what you put in it. A short link produces a grid 33 squares across. A full web address with tracking parameters on the end can push past 57. The printed width is shared out between however many squares there are, so at any given size the dense grid has smaller squares, and smaller squares are closer to the point where an ordinary camera stops resolving them. The print guide has the module arithmetic, including the size at which a square becomes too small to survive paper.

In practice: a code carrying example.co.uk/menus/spring-2026?utm_source=print needs roughly half as much width again as a code carrying a short link to the same page. Same destination, same wall, different print size.

This is why redirect hosts exist at all. A short host keeps the grid small, and the real destination sits behind it, where its length costs nothing. Ours is nine characters for exactly this reason. The honest price of the arrangement is dependence: that short link has to keep resolving for as long as the print exists, which is why ours keeps resolving after a subscription ends, and why it is worth reading what other vendors say happens when you stop paying before a print run, not after.

The border is inside these numbers

Every width in the table includes the quiet zone, the empty margin a scanner uses to find the pattern. On a 30mm code that is roughly 3mm of nothing on each side, and it is usually the first thing a designer deletes to make the layout breathe. It is not decoration. The print guide explains why it is load-bearing and what happens when a photograph runs underneath it.

When the space is smaller than the table says

Three things work. Shorten what the pattern carries, which usually means a redirect link instead of a full address. Move the code somewhere the reader can get closer to it. Or print one at the size you have, on the real stock, and test it at the real distance with a phone that is not yours.

What does not work is scaling the artwork down until it fits and hoping. The failures are not graceful. A code that is 20% too small for its distance does not scan slowly; it makes people stand there waving a phone at a wall until they give up, and none of them will tell you.

Once the size is settled, the file you send the printer decides whether the edges survive: SVG, EPS, PDF or PNG is its own question.