You spend twenty minutes perfecting your on-screen text. Then you post it and the caption covers the bottom line, the like button sits on top of your face, and your username runs straight through the key word.
Every vertical video app lays its own buttons, captions and labels over your video, and they’re all in slightly different places. The space that stays clear on every one is called the safe zone. Keep your important stuff inside it and nothing gets covered, wherever you post.
The short answer
For a standard 1080 × 1920 vertical video (9:16), keep text and faces roughly inside this box:
- From the top: at least 270 px down
- From the bottom: at least 670 px up
- From the left: at least 65 px in
- From the right: at least 160 px in
That leaves a clear area of about 855 × 980 px, sitting a little above the middle of the frame. It’s conservative on purpose: it clears Instagram’s large caption area, which is the biggest of the four.
If you only post to one app, you can use more of the frame. Here’s what each one covers.
What each app covers
These are approximate. Layouts shift between app updates, phone sizes and whether a caption is long or short. The figures below match the Safe Zone Checker, last checked in October 2026.
| App | Top | Bottom | Right-side buttons |
|---|---|---|---|
| TikTok | ~155 px (tabs) | ~400 px (name, caption, sound) | ~150 px wide, lower half |
| YouTube Shorts | ~155 px (top bar) | ~420 px (title, channel, sound) | ~160 px wide, lower half |
| Instagram Reels | ~270 px (top bar) | ~670 px (name, caption, audio) | ~150 px wide, just above the caption |
| Facebook Reels | ~270 px (top bar) | ~670 px (name, caption, audio) | ~150 px wide, lower middle |
Instagram and Facebook follow Meta’s own guidance, which asks you to keep text out of roughly the top 14%, the bottom 35% and about 6% from each side. That bottom 35% is why Reels is the strictest: a long caption can climb surprisingly high.
Why the bottom matters most
Every app stacks the most stuff along the bottom: your name, the caption, the sound or music label, and sometimes a product link or a “Follow” button. On a long caption that area grows when someone taps “more.”
Creators get caught by this most with burned-in captions (subtitles you add in your editor). Most editing apps put captions near the bottom by default, which is exactly where every app’s text goes. Move them up to about two-thirds of the way down the frame, or a little higher for Reels.
Why the right side matters
TikTok, Shorts and Reels all run a column of buttons down the right edge: like, comment, share, save and the sound disc. They sit in the lower half, so a face or product placed in the bottom-right corner gets partly covered.
The easy fix for talking videos: put your eyes on the upper third of the frame, and keep anything you’re holding up in the center rather than off to the right.
Covers have their own crop
The cover (thumbnail) has a second problem: on your profile grid, apps crop the 9:16 frame to a different shape.
- TikTok and Instagram show covers as 3:4 on the profile grid, which cuts off the top and bottom.
- YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels show the full 9:16 frame on the channel page.
- Pinterest shows 2:3 in the feed.
So keep the cover’s title in the middle of the frame, not near the top or bottom edge, or it gets cropped on your grid even if it looks fine in the feed.
Framing tips that keep you safe everywhere
- Eyes on the top third. Put the eyes on the upper grid line, not dead center. It looks natural and keeps your face clear of the bottom.
- Stack, don’t spread. In vertical video, put your face above and your hands or product below, instead of side by side.
- Text high and centered. Five to eight words, in the upper middle of the frame, with a few hundred pixels to spare at the bottom.
- Leave margin on both sides. Text that runs edge to edge gets clipped on some phones and covered on others.
- Shoot a little wider than you need. It gives you room to reframe for each app in the edit.
Check your own frame
Guidelines are useful, but the fastest check is to see your actual frame with each app’s layout on top. The Safe Zone Checker does exactly that: drop in a frame from your video and it shows what TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Facebook and Pinterest will cover, and how the cover crops on each profile grid. It also gives you free overlay images to load into your editor, so you can see the safe area while you place text.
For each app’s resolution, length and file limits, see Platform Specs.
Try it
Take a screenshot of the first frame of your last video. Open it in the Safe Zone Checker and switch between apps. If anything important is covered on the app you post to most, move it before your next post, and save the overlay into your editing app so you never have to guess again.
