AGU 2026 Poster Size: 44 × 44 in, Deadlines & Guide

The poster rules for AGU26 changed this year, and the change is easy to miss if you are working from last year’s template. Boards are now shared, two presenters to a side, and the largest poster AGU will take is 44 inches square. The table collects the numbers a presenting author acts on, with the page each one comes from. The last two rows come from CCI Productions, the print vendor AGU names as official, not from AGU itself.

AGU26 dates and venue

AGU26 runs from Monday, 7 December to Friday, 11 December 2026, at the George R. Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. AGU now calls the meeting its Annual Meeting; its own San Francisco page describes the city as home to "the Annual Meeting (formerly Fall Meeting)", so the two names refer to the same event. The meeting runs in Pacific Standard Time, and the online program uses a 24-hour clock.

The online program and planner are live, and you need to be registered to save a schedule in them. The AGU26 Events mobile app follows in early November. Final poster abstract numbers, which carry your board number, are assigned in late November.

The next meeting is already on AGU’s calendar. AGU27 is set for 13–17 December 2027 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., and online. Its page gives months, not dates, for the 2027 cycle: session proposals in March and April, abstracts from June to August, and registration from August.

AGU 2026 poster size: 44 × 44 in on a shared board

AGU26 posters can be at most 44 inches wide by 44 inches high, which AGU also writes as 3.67 ft × 3.67 ft. The reason is the new board arrangement. Each side of an 8 ft wide by 4 ft high board is now shared by two presenters, with tape marking where one presenter’s space ends and the next begins. AGU says it borrowed the format from its Ocean Sciences Meeting so the poster hall could make room for seating and wider aisles, and it staggers the daily board numbering between morning and afternoon sessions to spread out the crowd.

Three rules come with the shared board, all from the Presenter Resources and Poster Sessions pages:

• Your poster and everything that goes with it, such as handouts or a sign, must fit inside your taped space and may not cross into your neighbour’s.
• Allow a 1 inch (2.54 cm) border, and keep images, text and logos at least 1 inch from the edge of the sheet.
• AGU says posters are "best positioned horizontally to match the layout of the display board". With a square maximum, that reads as advice to use the width you have rather than to print something tall and narrow.

The practical consequence is for anyone reusing a file. A 48 × 36 in landscape sheet is 4 in too wide for AGU26, and so is any poster built to fill a whole 8 × 4 ft board side. Scale the layout down to 44 in wide or less before you send it anywhere. AGU does not state how wide each taped space is. If the tape splits the side evenly, each presenter has 48 in, so the 44 in limit leaves about 2 in of board on either side of a full-size poster.

Type size and layout rules

Unlike many meetings, AGU gives minimum type sizes. The Presenter Resources page recommends:

• Paragraphs and captions: 24 point minimum, which AGU glosses as 0.9 cm high.
• Headers: 36 point minimum, glossed as 1.2 cm high.
• Font: a sans serif face such as Arial, Calibri, Tahoma, Lucida Sans Unicode or Verdana, for main text, headers and tables.
• Charts: diagrams and charts readable from 2 meters away, with different colours and textures or symbols for each line or bar.

The same page asks for specific content. The abstract title, your final abstract number, and the session date and time go at the top of the poster. Authors’ names and contact details must be clearly visible, or replaced by a QR code. The best-practice list adds the usual advice: keep the poster self-explanatory, group related ideas, label elements as I, II, III or A, B, C, avoid clutter, and include background, results and conclusion.

A legend at 24 pt takes more room than most people budget for, which is where a 44 in square gets tight. Our guide to writing a figure legend covers what a legend has to define; on a poster, cut it to the one sentence the reader needs and let the caption carry the rest of the explanation in conversation. For body copy, section heads and spacing beyond what AGU sets, the ranges in our guide on how to make a research poster come from university poster guides and fit inside AGU’s minimums.

How an AGU26 poster session runs

Poster and GeoBurst poster sessions run Monday to Thursday from 8:30 AM to 12:00 PM and from 2:15 PM to 5:45 PM PST, and on Friday from 8:30 AM to 12:00 PM PST. Each poster is displayed for one full day. The steps on the Poster Sessions page are specific:

• Set up between 7:45 and 8:30 AM on your assigned day, no earlier. A poster put up on a different day is removed. You may leave yours up for the whole day.
• Find your board. Boards are grouped by Scientific Neighborhood and section and numbered 0001 to 3950. The number after the hyphen in your abstract ID is your board: A11A-1346 means board 1346.
• Pins come from the Poster Assistance Desk. CCI’s FAQ says the desk is just inside the entrance to the Poster Hall.
• Be at the board for at least one hour during your scheduled session. If you will not be there for the whole session, post a sign with your viewing hours, or leave a note or a QR code with contact details when you step away.
• Take it down by 6:00 PM Monday to Thursday, or by 1:00 PM on Friday. Posters left after closing are recycled.

AGU is unusually firm about the last step. You must leave the board, the floor around it and anything underneath clean for the next presenter, and a failure to remove the poster and clean up "will be documented and may affect your eligibility to present at future AGU meetings". Session chairs are also told that commercial handouts are not permitted.

Tables and chairs are not provided as a matter of course. Accessibility needs go into the registration portal; other rentals are requested from the email address on the Poster Sessions page, with a discount for requests made by 13 November. AGU says equipment cannot be requested on site.

GeoBurst presenters also need a printed poster

GeoBurst sessions are 90 minutes, in person only, built around a 5-minute talk for which AGU offers an optional template. Every GeoBurst presenter must also bring a printed paper poster for a companion poster session, which may run at the same time as the talks or before or after them. The 44 × 44 in limit applies to these posters as well.

iPosters and online poster presentations

AGU26 runs its online posters through iPosterSessions. What you have to do depends on how you are presenting:

• Online poster presenters must create an iPoster for the online gallery. There are no dedicated online sessions. You schedule one or more text or video chat times inside the iPoster platform, and they appear as "I’ll be at my poster" in the gallery and the app. The online program marks online posters with an icon and gives them abstract numbers that start with VR, such as A11A-VR1234.
• In-person and GeoBurst presenters may add an iPoster to their paper one. The simplest route is uploading the PDF of the printed poster, which iPosterSessions calls PDF+. Its general FAQ gives a 50 MB limit for a PDF upload, and notes that conferences can switch features off.

The dates are the same for everyone. Instructions went out by email in late October. AGU asks you to publish by 2 December, when the gallery opens to attendees, and online presenters can keep editing until 13 January 2027. Published iPosters stay in the gallery during the meeting and through April 2027. AGU recorded an iPoster demonstration on 5 November, and a live "Powerful Posters" webinar with Melissa Marshall runs on 9 November from 12:00 to 1:00 PM EST; both are linked from Presenter Resources.

The cut-off for switching between in-person and online presentation was 5 November, set in the Speaker Center rather than in registration. Choosing "in person" or "online" when you register does not change your presentation format. One AGU page, Abstract Submissions, gives 6 November instead; the other four AGU pages we read give 5 November. Either way the date has passed, so if your plans changed, contact AGU through the meeting’s contact form now rather than waiting.

AGU26 dates still ahead

Most of the calendar is behind you by the time a poster goes to print. These are the dates left, read from AGU’s pages and CCI’s on 6 November:

• 9 November: last day to cancel registration for a full refund. The "Powerful Posters" webinar runs the same day.
• 13 November: discount deadline for renting a table or chair.
• 19 November: last day to book a room in the AGU hotel block.
• 23 November, 17:00 PST: CCI early-bird print orders close.
• Late November: final poster numbers, and so board numbers, are assigned.
• 2 December: iPoster gallery opens; publish by then for full visibility.
• 6 December: last day of the standard registration rate. Session chair training and CCI’s pickup booth open the same day.
• 7–11 December: AGU26.
• 13 January 2027: last day for online presenters to edit an iPoster.

AGU26 registration fees

Every presenter has to register, and registration is separate from both the abstract fee and AGU membership. The early rate ended on 5 November. From 6 November to 6 December the standard rate applies, and from 7 December the on-site rate. Member rates require 2026 membership taken out or renewed by 5 November; membership bought after that counts for 2027.

The refund rules are in the FAQ. Cancellations received by 9 November get a full refund. After that, refunds carry a $50 processing fee and are paid by the end of January 2027, and nothing is refunded for cancellations after 11 January 2027. Logging in to the online platform counts as virtual attendance, and a refund request after that is denied. AGU also offers a limited number of fee waivers and discounts, linked from the registration page, and a no-cost registration for Indigenous member scientists and community leaders whose application window has closed.

AGU26 abstract deadlines and fees

The abstract cycle is finished. Submission opened in mid-June and closed on the extended deadline of Wednesday, 5 August 2026, at 23:59 EDT. The late-breaking deadline was 29 September, and authors were emailed the acceptance, format and schedule of their abstracts on 1 October.

The fees, which are non-refundable and charged per abstract:

• $80 regular, $45 student.
• No fee for authors living in low or lower-middle income countries as the World Bank classifies them for fiscal year 2026; the waiver applies during submission.

AGU did not state a separate fee for late-breaking abstracts on any page we read. First authors had to be AGU members or members of an affiliated society, with membership waivers requested by 22 July, and authors could not ask for an oral slot: conveners and the program committee assign oral, poster or GeoBurst. Abstracts were payable by credit card only.

After the meeting, AGU gives a citation format for your abstract: Author(s) (2026), Title, Abstract (final paper number, for example AE14B-1234) presented at AGU26, 7-11 Dec 2026. AGU does not assign DOIs to abstracts. If you want one, the Presenter Resources page points to the ESS Open Archive, which requires the whole poster or presentation, not the abstract alone.

Printing an AGU poster at 44 × 44 in

AGU names CCI Productions as AGU26’s only official preferred poster printer and encourages presenters to use it, mainly because its prints are sized to the new board. You can print anywhere, as long as the sheet is within 44 × 44 in. AGU asks that posters printed elsewhere use recyclable paper and carry the recycling logo, or be on a reusable material if you plan to hang the poster again.

What CCI prints. One size, 44 × 44 in (111.76 × 111.76 cm). If your file is not square, CCI says it will "max out the width or height and trim accordingly", so send a square page if you want to know exactly what comes back. Its file rules:

• PDF preferred; JPG accepted; PowerPoint files are not, so export the slide to PDF with fonts embedded. CCI notes that PowerPoint works in RGB only.
• CMYK colour, with spot colours and RGB elements converted.
• At least 300 dpi at full print size. At 44 in, that is 13,200 pixels on a side for any raster image that fills the page, which is the practical reason to keep charts, text and diagrams as vector objects.
• Keep content at least 1 inch from the edge to avoid clipping.
• No proofs are sent. Preview the uploaded file at 100% from your cart before checking out.

When to order. Early-bird orders close at 17:00 PST on Monday, 23 November, and can be collected any time the booth is open. Standard orders need three business days, and rush orders placed by 12:00 PST on a weekday are ready the next business morning. Orders placed after 17:00 PST or at the weekend are not received until the next business day. CCI’s deadline table for the standard tier runs from 17:00 PST on Wednesday, 2 December for a Monday session to Tuesday, 8 December for a Friday morning session.

Where to collect. The pickup booth is in the South lobby of Moscone Center, near the Poster Hall entrance. It opens Sunday, 6 December from 12:00 to 18:00 PST, then 07:30 to 17:30 Monday to Thursday and 07:30 to 12:00 on Friday. Bring the order number from the pickup email.

Price. The product page showed $98, marked as a sale price against $128, for the option selected by default when we checked on 6 November. Its text did not list separate prices for the standard and rush speeds. CCI adds that California sales tax applies unless an exemption is confirmed before you order, and that a university’s federal or home-state exemption is not automatically valid in California.

If you are building the file yourself, set the page to 44 × 44 in from the start rather than scaling a 48 in layout down at the end, because type set at 24 pt on a larger page shrinks below AGU’s minimum when it is reduced. Our scientific poster templates page lists the page-size limits of common layout software.

If you are going to SfN as well, its boards work the other way: a single 6 × 4 ft landscape board per presenter, covered in our SfN 2026 poster guide.

Frequently asked questions

What size is an AGU 2026 poster?

At most 44 inches wide by 44 inches high (111.76 × 111.76 cm). Two presenters share each side of an 8 ft wide by 4 ft high board, with tape marking each presenter’s space, and the poster and everything attached to it must stay inside that space. AGU asks for a 1 inch border clear of text and images.

Can I reuse my 48 × 36 inch poster from an earlier AGU meeting?

Not as it is. A 48 in wide sheet is 4 in over the AGU26 maximum width of 44 in. Rescale the layout to 44 in wide or less, or rebuild it as a square page if you are printing through CCI Productions, the official printer, which prints one size only, 44 × 44 in.

What font size does AGU require on a poster?

AGU recommends at least 24 point for paragraphs and captions and at least 36 point for headers, in a sans serif font such as Arial, Calibri, Tahoma, Lucida Sans Unicode or Verdana. It also asks that diagrams and charts be readable from 2 meters away.

When are AGU26 poster sessions?

Monday to Thursday, 8:30 AM to 12:00 PM and 2:15 PM to 5:45 PM PST, and Friday 8:30 AM to 12:00 PM PST. Each poster is displayed for one full day. Set up between 7:45 and 8:30 AM on your day, be at the board for at least one hour of your session, and take the poster down by 6:00 PM (1:00 PM on Friday).

Is it too late to submit an abstract to AGU26?

Yes. General abstract submission closed on Wednesday, 5 August 2026 at 23:59 EDT, and the late-breaking deadline was 29 September. Acceptance notices went out on 1 October.

How much does AGU26 registration cost?

From 6 November to 6 December, in-person registration costs $965 for a regular member, $545 for a graduate student member and $1,170 for a regular non-member; on-site rates from 7 December are $150 higher. Registration is separate from the abstract fee, and every presenter must register.

When and where is AGU27?

AGU27 is scheduled for 13–17 December 2027 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., according to AGU’s AGU27 page. The same page says abstract submission opens in June 2027 and closes in August 2027, without exact dates.