Previous work has shown that in a two-dimensional periodic medium under focusing or defocusing cubic nonlinearities, gap solitons in the form of low-amplitude and slowly modulated single-Bloch-wave packets can bifurcate out from the edges of Bloch bands. In this paper, linear stability properties of these gap solitons near band edges are determined both analytically and numerically. Through asymptotic analysis, it is shown that these gap solitons are linearly unstable if the slope of their power curve at the band edge has the opposite sign of nonlinearity here focusing nonlinearity is said to have a positive sign, and defocusing nonlinearity to have a negative sign. An equivalent condition for linear instability is that the power of the gap solitons near the band edge is lower than the limit power value on the band edge. Through numerical computations of the power curves, it is found that this condition is always satisfied, thus two-dimensional gap solitons near band edges are linearly unstable. The analytical formula for the unstable eigenvalue of gap solitons near band edges is also asymptotically derived. It is shown that this unstable eigenvalue is proportional to the cubic power of the soliton’s amplitude, and it induces width instabilities of gap solitons. A comparison between this analytical eigenvalue formula and numerically computed eigenvalues shows excellent agreement.