Video safe zones for Reels, TikTok and Shorts

Design a vertical video on a laptop and the frame looks like yours. Open it on a phone and roughly a third of it is somebody else’s: a caption, a username, a music ticker, a column of round buttons down the right, a sponsored label, and whatever the operating system draws at the top and bottom. The headline you centred beautifully is now behind a Follow button.

Why the frame is not yours

A 1080 by 1920 file is delivered whole. What is drawn on top of it is decided by the app, at run time, from things you do not control: how long the caption is, whether there is a call-to-action button, whether the viewer has a system gesture bar, and which experiment they happen to be in this week.

That is the reason so few of these numbers are published. A safe zone is not a property of the format, it is a property of a layout that changes.

What each platform actually publishes

The table at the foot of this post is the honest state of it as of 1 September 2026, and the short version is that only one of the three big vertical surfaces publishes anything numeric at all, and it is not the number you want.

TikTok is the most candid. Its ad specification page says outright that “the safe zone size is determined by the dimension, ad caption length, and any additional formats used”, and then, instead of figures, offers five downloadable template files: a standard in-feed set, an in-feed with anchor set, right-to-left Arabic versions of both, and a profile cover. If you are running TikTok ads, download those. They are the only authoritative answer and they are drawn to scale.

TikTok does publish frame minimums: vertical at 540 by 960 or larger, horizontal at 960 by 540, square at 640 by 640, and ad captions that display at most four lines. That last one matters, because caption length is the variable that moves the bottom edge.

YouTube publishes nothing about safe areas. Its Shorts documentation covers eligibility and nothing else: up to three minutes, square or vertical aspect ratio, uploads capped at 1080p. No margins, no overlay diagram.

LinkedIn publishes exact frame sizes and no safe area. Nine by sixteen is accepted from 360 by 640 to 1080 by 1920, with a 5% tolerance on the ratio.

Meta is the frustrating one. There is an article, its title is “About text overlays and the Safe Zone for ads in Stories and Reels”, and the Meta Business Help Centre renders its body in the browser. Ten fetches on 1 September 2026 returned the page title and no content. The figures widely repeated elsewhere, 14% from the top and 35% from the bottom, trace back to that article and are quoted by tools rather than by Meta in any page that could be read. They may well be right. They are not sourced here, because sourcing them would mean citing a blog citing a blog.

A working box, and why it is a recommendation

Since three of the four surfaces publish nothing, the honest thing is to give you a conservative box and label it as such.

On a 1080 by 1920 frame, keep every headline, logo, price and legal line inside roughly the middle: about 250 pixels clear at the top, about 700 clear at the bottom, about 80 clear on the left and about 200 clear on the right.

Those are not platform figures. They come from what sits where. The top strip carries the account name, the sound attribution or the sponsored label. The right rail carries the profile, like, comment, share and audio buttons, and it is the reason the right margin is more than double the left. The bottom is the worst of it, because it stacks the caption, the handle, the music ticker and, on an advertisement, a full-width call-to-action button.

Checking it yourself in five minutes

This is the part worth doing, because it beats any published number.

Export a version of your video with a bright grid or four solid corner blocks in it. Post it as a private or scheduled draft on each platform. Screenshot the playing video on the phone you actually care about. Open the screenshots side by side and look at which blocks are covered.

You now have measured margins for the app versions your audience is on today, which is better information than a specification page written a year ago. The video frame to image tool on this site will pull a still out of the file so you can compare it against the screenshot at the same size.

Where the captions sit

If the captions are burned into the file, their position is yours to know rather than guess.

In this builder the caption pill is centred at the bottom, 120 pixels above the bottom edge on a vertical video, 56 on a square one and 44 on a landscape one, at 30 point type on vertical and capped at 72% of the frame width. Words light up as they are spoken.

One hundred and twenty pixels is a deliberate compromise. It is high enough to clear a system gesture bar and low enough to stay out of the way of your own layout. It is not high enough to clear a TikTok advertisement’s call-to-action button, so if that is your placement, check a real screenshot rather than trusting the inset. There is more on how captions behave across scripts and languages in the voiceover language guide.

Landscape, and the Shorts classifier

One thing people get wrong in the opposite direction. YouTube does not turn landscape videos into Shorts. The published rule is square or vertical, and three minutes or less. A 16:9 upload is never eligible, and YouTube’s own advice for keeping a video long-form is to use a wider aspect ratio.

So a landscape video is not at risk. A 1:1 one under three minutes is, and if you did not want it in the Shorts feed, the fix is the frame shape, not the length. The other half of that decision is how long the video should be, which varies more by placement than the margins do.

Before you export

Three checks, in order. Put the frame in front of the union of what everyone covers, not the average. Read the whole thing at phone size rather than laptop size, because 30 point type that looks generous on a monitor is small in a hand. And take one real screenshot on one real phone. The five minutes that costs is cheaper than a campaign with the price behind a Follow button.