Safe zones for Shorts, Reels and TikTok: where to put text
Where the app covers your vertical video, and how to frame faces, text and products so every viewer can see them.
What a safe zone is
Vertical video apps play your video full screen at 9:16 (usually 1080 × 1920 pixels), then draw their own buttons and text on top of it. The safe zone is the part of the frame that stays clear. Anything outside it, like a face, a price, a product or your on-screen text, may be hidden for every viewer.
What covers your video
- Along the top: tabs, the search icon and sometimes a camera or menu button.
- Down the right side: a column of buttons for likes, comments, shares, remixes and the audio track. This is the area people forget most often.
- Across the bottom: your username and follow button, the first lines of your caption, the audio label, and sometimes product tags, location or a progress bar.
Approximate sizes on a 1080 × 1920 frame
These figures are approximate, based on typical phone layouts. The exact space changes with the phone, the app version, the length of your caption and whether a viewer has expanded it. Treat them as a buffer, not an exact spec.
| Area covered | YouTube Shorts | Instagram Reels | TikTok |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top | about 200 px | about 220 px | about 180 px |
| Bottom | about 420 px | about 440 px | about 500 px |
| Right side | about 190 px | about 150 px | about 170 px |
| Left side | about 50 px | about 50 px | about 50 px |
One layout that works on all three
If you post the same video everywhere, design for the strictest combination of the zones above. Keep anything important inside a box roughly 830 pixels wide and 1,200 pixels tall, starting about 220 pixels from the top and 60 pixels from the left edge. That keeps it clear of the main controls on Shorts, Reels and TikTok at the same time.
- On-screen text: put it in the upper-middle part of the frame. No app places controls there.
- Burned-in subtitles: most editors put them at the very bottom by default, right under the caption area. Move them up to around two thirds of the way down the frame.
- Faces and products: keep them centered or slightly left, away from the button column on the right.
- Your first frame: it often becomes the cover, so make sure its key text sits in the center too. Instagram crops Reel covers in your profile grid.
Check before you post
Every app updates its layout now and then, and some phones have taller screens or larger text settings. Before posting something important, scrub through your video with the safe zone overlay on, or watch the published video once on your own phone and pause on the moments with text.
Last checked September 2026. Platforms change their rules from time to time, so if something here doesn't match what you see in the app, trust the app and let us know.