To set the background image of the relative new Actionbar in Android you can do the following: final ActionBar actionBar = getActionBar(); BitmapDrawable background = new BitmapDrawable(BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.raw.actionbar_background)); actionBar.setBackgroundDrawable(background); Note that the BitmapDrawable() is deprecated. So might might want to use BitmapDrawable(Resources) to ensure that the drawable has correctly set its target density.