Vertical video safe zones

Why that box, and how it was derived

Recommended universal safe area on a 1080x1920 frame: top 288px (15%), bottom 672px (35%), left 120px (11.1%), right 300px (27.8%). That leaves a usable rectangle of 660 x 960px at x 120-780, y 288-1248 - 61.1% of the width and 50.0% of the height. Derivation: it is the per-side maximum across the four platforms with published numbers, so it satisfies all of them simultaneously. Top is set by YouTube (288px, the deepest of the four; Meta 269, TikTok 240, Snapchat 192). Bottom is set jointly by Meta, YouTube and Snapchat, which all land on exactly 672px / 35% (TikTok's standard template is slightly shallower at 660px). Left is set by TikTok's 120px edge band (Meta 65, Snapchat 65, YouTube only 48). Right is set by TikTok's action-rail reserve of 300px (YouTube 192, Snapchat 162, Meta a badly optimistic 65). Two consequences worth passing to a prompt writer. First, the safe box is NOT centred: its centre sits at x=450, which is 90px (8.3% of frame width) left of the true centre line at x=540, so a subject composed dead-centre drifts under the action rail. Second, exactly half the frame height is unusable, so a vertical video is compositionally a roughly square window floating in the upper-middle of a tall frame. PARANOID VARIANT, if the video may ever run as a TikTok ad with an anchor button and a four-line caption: bottom rises to 1016px (52.9%) and the usable box collapses to 660 x 616px at y 288-904 - a landscape-ish window in the upper third. INSTAGRAM CROP OVERLAY, separate and additive: because an Instagram Reel is also re-cropped as a 1:1.55 cover and a taller-than-square grid tile, and because YouTube's player can compress to 1:1 on interaction, the subject must additionally survive a centred crop of roughly 4:5 to 1:1. Combining the two constraints, the genuinely bulletproof zone for a face or product is a centred region about 60% of frame width and spanning roughly 25%-50% of frame height.

Common questions

What is the safe zone for TikTok feed (In-Feed / For You)?

On a 1080×1920 frame, TikTok feed (In-Feed / For You) reserves 240px at the top and 660px at the bottom, with 120px on the left and 300px on the right. Source: official-template-measured, read on 2026-08-14.

What is the safe zone for Instagram Reels?

On a 1080×1920 frame, Instagram Reels reserves 269px at the top and 672px at the bottom, with 65px on the left and 65px on the right. Source: official, read on 2026-08-14.

What is the safe zone for YouTube Shorts?

On a 1080×1920 frame, YouTube Shorts reserves 288px at the top and 672px at the bottom, with 48px on the left and 192px on the right. Source: official, read on 2026-08-14.

What is the safe zone for Instagram Stories?

On a 1080×1920 frame, Instagram Stories reserves 269px at the top and 672px at the bottom, with 65px on the left and 65px on the right. Source: official, read on 2026-08-14.

What is the safe zone for Facebook Reels?

On a 1080×1920 frame, Facebook Reels reserves 269px at the top and 672px at the bottom, with 65px on the left and 65px on the right. Source: official, read on 2026-08-14.

What is the safe zone for Facebook Stories?

On a 1080×1920 frame, Facebook Stories reserves 250px at the top and 340px at the bottom, with not established on the left and not established on the right. Source: disputed, read on 2026-08-14.

What is the safe zone for Snapchat (Spotlight, Stories, Commercials - one shared spec)?

On a 1080×1920 frame, Snapchat (Spotlight, Stories, Commercials - one shared spec) reserves 192px at the top and 672px at the bottom, with 65px on the left and 162px on the right. Source: official, read on 2026-08-14.

Is the vertical video safe area centred?

No. The box that satisfies every platform sits 90 pixels, or 8.3% of frame width, left of the centre line, because every platform places its action rail on the right. A subject composed dead centre drifts under that rail.

How much of a vertical frame is actually usable?

On 1080×1920 the usable box is 660×960 pixels: 61% of the width and exactly half the height. A vertical video is compositionally a roughly square window floating in the upper middle of a tall frame.

Do LinkedIn and X publish safe zones for vertical video?

Not that we could find. Both are recorded here as not established rather than estimated, because a guessed safe zone is one somebody composes a shot to.

Practices worth keeping

• Reserve about a third of the bottom of the frame, on every platform. Three of the four platforms with published specs independently converge on exactly 35% (Meta across three placements, Google at 672/1920, Snapchat's diagram) and TikTok's standard template lands at 34.4%. This is the single most robust number in the whole research set - four publishers, arrived at separately, agreeing to within 0.6 of a percentage point.
• Reserve the right side much more heavily than the left. Every platform that models its action rail is strongly asymmetric: TikTok 11% left against 22-28% right, YouTube 4.4% left against 17.8% right, Snapchat 6% left against 15% right. Only Meta claims symmetry, and Meta's 6% right demonstrably does not cover its own action rail. The practical instruction is to offset the subject left of centre by roughly 8% of frame width.
• Sound is assumed ON, and captions are still mandatory. Google states sound 'has been shown to increase conversions by over 20%' on Shorts; Meta marks sound 'strongly recommended' on Reels; Snap expects audio on video ads; TikTok rejects ads with missing or muffled audio. But every one of them also recommends captions, so the working assumption is design for sound-off comprehension while producing for sound-on reward.
• Native-looking beats polished, per the platforms themselves rather than per marketing blogs. Google's official Shorts guidance is to 'Make your ads feel organic and social-first. Blend your ad creative with the surrounding organic content.'
• Do not set up a premise. Google's official Shorts guidance: 'there's no need to set up a premise or establish a storyline with lots of extra context.' Snap's official recommendation for a single image or video ad is 3-5 seconds, and TikTok's for TopView is 9-15 seconds. Across the three platforms that state a duration preference, the recommended lengths are far shorter than the permitted ones.
• Text must survive a white-on-white collision. TikTok states its captions and music attribution render 'in white with a uniform font that can't be customized', so a bright lower third makes platform-drawn text illegible over your footage. Snap independently asks for 'modern, legible fonts in large enough sizes and with strong color contrast'.
• Compose for more than one crop. Instagram re-crops a Reel to a 1:1.55 cover and a taller-than-square grid tile; Google states the YouTube player 'can compress up to a 1:1 aspect ratio' on interaction, cropping top and bottom. A frame that only works at 9:16 will fail somewhere.
• Treat conditional overlays as hard constraints when they are unpredictable. Snap explicitly says Dynamic CTA placement 'may also be dynamically selected' and that those variants 'do not appear in Ads Preview'. TikTok explicitly says the safe zone varies with caption length. Where the platform admits it cannot tell you, over-reserve.

Where sources disagree

Recorded rather than resolved. A platform contradicting itself is a fact about the platform, and hiding it would make this page look tidier than the field is.

• Meta contradicts itself on the bottom band: 35% on Instagram Reels, Instagram Stories and Facebook Reels versus 20% (340 pixels) on Facebook Stories, all in the same ads guide. Compose to 35%.
• Meta's percentage and pixel figures do not reconcile on Facebook Stories: '14% (250 pixels)' and '20% (340 pixels)' imply a reference frame of about 1786px tall, not 1920 or 2560. The percentages are the safer reading.
• TikTok contradicts itself on the right margin across two template generations: 27.78% total in the standard 720x1280 template versus 22.22% in the with-anchor 540x960 template.
• TikTok's bottom band ranges from 34.4% (standard, no anchor) to 52.9% (anchor plus four caption lines) - an 18.5-point spread within TikTok's own official templates, driven by caption length and the CTA button.
• Snapchat's own diagram prints both 35% and 45% bottom brackets without saying which format governs which.
• Snapchat official versus the secondary web: Snap's current diagram says 10% top / 35% bottom / 6% sides / 15% right rail, while a large and mutually-copying set of blogs still says 150px top / 330px bottom and mentions no side reserve at all. The blogs appear to be repeating a superseded spec.
• Meta's 6% side reserve versus everyone else's 15-28% right reserve. Meta is the outlier and appears simply not to model its own action rail. Do not build a cross-platform master on Meta's side figure.
• Whether an Instagram Reel is cropped to 4:5 in the home feed is asserted by many blogs but is contradicted by Meta's own Instagram Feed video placement page, which specifies 9:16 at 1080x1920 with 1% tolerance. Unresolved.
• Whether the Instagram profile grid tile is 3:4 or 4:5 after the 2025 change is disputed among secondary sources and no official statement was retrieved.
• Blog-circulated TikTok figures of 'top 130px, bottom 484px, right 140px, left 44px' on a 1080x1920 frame match neither of TikTok's official templates, and no source citing them names a primary source.

Low confidence, flagged

• TikTok's 80px blue side bands: TikTok's template marks them but does not label what they represent. They are read here as device-edge / crop margin rather than UI overlay, because no TikTok UI element sits there. The 11.11% value is measured reliably; the interpretation is inference.
• The 45% Snapchat bottom bracket: real and printed on Snap's official diagram, but unattributed to any format.
• Google's 288/672/48/192 is titled 'Vertical Video Ads' and spans in-stream, in-feed and Shorts across five campaign types. It is conservative for Shorts-organic rather than Shorts-specific.
• All TikTok numbers derive from advertising templates. TikTok publishes no organic safe zone, so the organic bottom band is smaller than stated by an unknown amount.
• Every platform's official page carried no visible publication or last-updated date. All dates in this file are retrieval dates, not source dates. These numbers should be re-verified against the templates and diagrams rather than trusted from a cache.

Method

Official platform documentation first. Where a platform publishes its safe zone only as a downloadable template or diagram rather than as text, the template/diagram was downloaded and measured pixel-by-pixel; those measurements are labelled 'official-template-measured' and the template URL is recorded. No zone value in this file is an estimate. Zones with no reliable source say 'not established'.