Video dimensions and safe zones for TikTok, Reels and Shorts

Nearly every "video size guide" answers the easy half of this question and stops. Yes, TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts all want a 1080×1920 vertical frame. That takes one line to say, it's been true for years, and knowing it doesn't stop your captions ending up underneath a Follow button.

The part that actually ruins videos is what each app draws on top of your frame. Your video is not displayed on a blank screen — it's the background layer under a stack of buttons, usernames, captions and progress bars, and every one of those sits in a place the platform decided, not you. This is the guide to that.

The dimensions, quickly

Getting the boring part out of the way, because it genuinely is this short:

That's it. They're identical, which is the whole reason "which aspect ratio for which platform" stopped being a real question — the convergence already happened. Export once at 1080×1920 and the frame is correct everywhere.

On the numbers that do change: maximum duration and maximum file size have all moved more than once in the last two years, on all three platforms, and any specific figure printed in an article like this has a short shelf life. We're deliberately not listing them. Check the platform's own current help page if you're near a limit — that's the only source that's reliably right on the day you read it.

Why the table isn't the answer

Here's the thing nobody tells you when they hand you the dimensions. Your 1080×1920 video plays full-bleed, edge to edge — and then the app draws its interface over the top of it. The caption, the username, the sound name, the like/comment/share column, the progress bar, and on phones with a notch or a home indicator, the system UI on top of that.

None of that is a border around your video. It's on your video. So the usable area — the part where you can put a face, a caption, or text that people need to read — is meaningfully smaller than the frame you exported. That usable area is the safe zone.

This is the single most common reason a clip that looked perfect in an editor looks broken in the feed. Nothing was exported wrong. The frame is right. The content was just placed where the interface lives.

Where each platform covers your video

The exact pixel heights shift between app versions, phone models and whether someone has a notch, so treat these as proportions rather than measurements to design against precisely. The pattern, though, is stable across all three:

• The bottom is the worst offender. This is where the caption, username, and audio attribution sit, and where the progress bar runs. Roughly the bottom fifth of the frame is contested on every platform, and on a post with a long caption it can be considerably more — because the caption grows upward into your video as it gets longer.
• The right edge holds the action column. Profile picture, like, comment, share, sound. Roughly the right sixth of the frame, running most of its height. Anything important placed on the right side of your shot competes with buttons.
• The top is the safest, but not safe. Search, navigation tabs and the system status bar live here. Less lost than the bottom, but not free space either.

Combine those and the genuinely reliable area — the part of your frame no platform is likely to cover on any phone — is the middle, roughly centred, and considerably smaller than the 1080×1920 you exported. Everything outside it should be treated as background: fine for scenery, wrong for the face you want people to see or the words you need them to read.

The numbers we actually use, and why

Concrete values are more useful than "leave some margin", so here are the ones burned into every clip this product renders, all expressed as a proportion of frame height or width so they hold at any resolution:

• Captions sit 8% of frame height off the bottom. At 1080×1920 that's about 154 pixels of clearance. That's deliberately generous: it clears the progress bar and most of the caption block, and it costs almost nothing visually because the very bottom of a vertical frame is rarely where the interesting content is anyway.
• Side margins are 6% of frame width — about 65 pixels each side at 1080 wide. This keeps a long caption line from running under the right-hand action column and stops text touching the screen edge, which reads as unfinished even when it's technically legible.
• Caption text is 3.2% of frame height — roughly 61 pixels tall at 1920. Large enough to read at arm's length on a phone without dominating the frame. It's worth knowing that caption size is a genuine tradeoff, not a styling whim: too small fails the people watching with sound off, too large covers the video you're captioning.

You don't have to use these exact numbers. But if you're placing text by eye and it keeps looking slightly wrong in the feed, "8% up from the bottom, 6% in from the sides" is a much better starting point than centring it and hoping.

Cropping from landscape: what actually goes wrong

Most short-form clips start life as landscape footage — a podcast recording, a webcam interview, a stream. Going from 16:9 to 9:16 means throwing away roughly three quarters of the horizontal frame, and how you throw it away matters more than any dimension in the table above.

The standard approach — and what we do — is to scale until the vertical frame is fully covered, then crop the overflow from the centre. That works well when the subject is centred, which for a single talking head it usually is. It works badly for a two-person interview where the speakers sit on either side of the frame, because the centre crop lands squarely on the empty space between them and cuts both people in half.

If your footage is framed that way, the honest answer is that no automatic centre crop will save it. Either reframe manually for those shots, or record with the crop in mind — knowing you'll eventually cut to 9:16 is a good reason to sit closer to the middle of frame than a landscape composition would suggest.

The other common mistake is padding instead of cropping: keeping the whole landscape frame and adding black bars top and bottom to fill 9:16. It preserves your composition, and it looks like a repurposed video immediately, which is exactly the signal you don't want in a feed of native vertical content. More on that in why AI-generated clips look AI-generated.

How to check your own video in two minutes

You don't need a template overlay or a plugin. The fastest reliable check is to upload the video to each platform as a draft and look at it in the actual composer, which shows the real interface over your real video on your real phone — every variable that a generic safe-zone template guesses at. Drafts aren't published and cost nothing.

What to look for, in order: can you read every caption line from start to finish; is anyone's face behind the action column; does the last line of text survive when you type a long caption. That third one catches the most people, because the caption block grows upward and a video that looked fine with a five-word caption breaks with a thirty-word one.

What changes, and what doesn't

Worth separating, because it decides how much of this guide you need to re-check later.

Stable: 9:16 and 1080×1920. All three platforms have wanted this for years and there's no sign of it moving — the phone is still a vertical rectangle. The general shape of the interface is stable too: the action column has been on the right and the caption at the bottom for the entire life of this format.

Changes regularly: maximum duration, maximum file size, supported codecs at the edges, and the exact pixel dimensions of interface elements. If a decision depends on one of those, get it from the platform rather than from any article — including this one.

The short version

Export at 1080×1920, 9:16, for all three platforms — that part is genuinely simple and identical everywhere. Then keep anything that matters out of the bottom fifth and the right sixth of the frame, because that's where the app's own interface lands. If you take one number away from this page, make it the 8%: keep your captions at least that far off the bottom edge and you've solved the most common version of this problem.

Related reading: what actually differs between TikTok, Reels and Shorts beyond the frame, and what makes a caption good once you've got it in the right place.