Video safe zones for Reels, TikTok and Shorts

The safe zone for Reels, TikTok and Shorts on a 1080 by 1920 frame is the box left after 269 px at the top, 672 px at the bottom and 65 px on each side, which is Meta’s published 14%, 35% and 6%. Widen the right margin to about 140 px for TikTok’s button rail and that one box clears all three apps.

The reason it matters: 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 sets it out. Only one of the three big vertical surfaces publishes a safe zone as numbers, and that is Meta.

Meta publishes the numbers. Its Business Help Centre article on text overlays and the safe zone for Stories and Reels ads gives 14% of the frame clear at the top, 35% at the bottom and 6% on each side. On 1080 by 1920 that is 269, 672 and 65 pixels. It is written for Reels ads and applies to Facebook Reels as well, and because an advertisement is the most crowded layout, it is a sound baseline for organic posts too.

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 no safe area. Its Shorts documentation covers eligibility: up to three minutes, square or vertical aspect ratio, uploads capped at 1080p. Measured on a phone, the Shorts overlay takes about 180 pixels at the top and 390 at the bottom, with a wider margin on the side where the buttons sit, so it fits inside Meta’s box. TikTok’s measured overlay, about 130 at the top, 484 at the bottom and 140 on the right, fits too, except on the right.

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.

One box for all three apps, in pixels

On a 1080 by 1920 frame, keep every headline, logo, price and legal line inside this box: 269 pixels clear at the top, 672 at the bottom, 65 on the left and 140 on the right. The top, bottom and left come from Meta’s published figures. The right is widened to clear TikTok’s measured button rail.

The margins follow 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, with 30 pixel type on vertical, capped at 72% of the frame width. Each word lights up as it is spoken when the voice supplies word timings, and the letters type on when it does not.

That puts the captions inside the bottom band, not inside the box above. A 120 pixel inset clears a system gesture bar, but Meta’s 672 pixel margin and TikTok’s measured 484 both reach higher, so on an advertisement with a caption and a call-to-action button the pill can be covered. Organic posts carry a shorter bottom overlay, so it usually shows. If the video will run as an ad, check a real screenshot, and keep anything the viewer must read in the frame itself, inside the box. 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 pixel 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.