Social media video sizes and safe zones for 2026

Most short-video apps want vertical 9:16 video: TikTok, Instagram Reels and Stories, YouTube Shorts, Facebook reels and Snapchat. They differ on length, from 60-second Story clips to 20-minute Reels, on file size, and on where their buttons cover the frame. The table below gives each platform's own figures, checked on October 15, 2026.

Full disclosure: I build ReelCaption, a caption tool, so this page leans on the part of each spec that decides where captions can go. Every figure links to the platform's own help, ads or developer page in the sources below.

Video specs by platform

"Own captions" means the app can write captions from the speech. "Caption file" means you can upload your own .srt or .vtt. "Not found" means I found no page from the platform that says so either way. "(ads)" marks a figure from an ads guide: Meta and TikTok publish their most precise specs there, and they are a good guide for ordinary posts too.

Where the buttons cover the frame

Every app draws its own interface over your video, and that is where captions get lost.

Meta's ads guides for Instagram Reels and Stories ask you to keep 14% at the top, 35% at the bottom and 6% at each side free of text. On a 1080 × 1920 Reel that is about 270 pixels at the top, 670 at the bottom and 65 at each side. The bottom band is large because Instagram puts your post text, the audio name and the profile row there.

TikTok publishes its safe zones as downloadable files on its ads help page rather than as numbers in the text. The like, comment and share buttons sit down the right edge, and your username, post text and sound name along the bottom.

Google's ad spec page for YouTube says only that overlays, calls to action and buttons may appear in different places, so leave room at the right edge and the bottom of a Short.

The safe zone checker draws these areas over a frame of your own video, for one platform or all of them at once. It is free and the video stays on your device.

Two other crops catch people out:

• Instagram's profile grid shows posts in a 3:4 frame, so it cuts the top and bottom off a 9:16 Reel. Keep the hook and the captions near the middle.
• Snapchat crops everything to 9:16. A wide clip loses its sides unless you crop it yourself first.

How long a video can be

Length limits changed more than any other spec in 2025 and 2026:

• TikTok's developer guide says all creators can post 3-minute videos, and some can post 5 or 10.
• Instagram lets you record and edit Reels up to 20 minutes, but says Reels over 3 minutes are not recommended to new audiences.
• Instagram shows up to 60 seconds as one Story clip and breaks longer videos into several.
• YouTube Shorts can be up to 3 minutes. Long YouTube uploads are capped at 15 minutes until the account is verified.
• Meta said in June 2025 that all videos on Facebook will be shared as reels, with no length or format restrictions.
• LinkedIn allows 15 minutes from a member profile and 10 from a Page.
• Snapchat Spotlight takes video Snaps of 5 seconds or longer and publishes no maximum.

X is the exception: its own pages disagree. The X Help page on videos says 140 seconds and 512 MB for accounts without Premium, while the X developer documentation gives up to 20 minutes and 8 GB by default. I could not settle it, so check the limit in the app before you cut a long video for X.

To cut a video down to a platform's limit, the trim video tool does it in your browser. To check whether a script fits before you film, paste it into the script timer.

Captions: burned in or a separate file

Each platform handles captions differently:

• TikTok lets creators add auto captions while editing, and viewers can show or hide them.
• YouTube writes automatic captions for long videos and Shorts, and takes .srt and .vtt files under Subtitles in YouTube Studio.
• LinkedIn offers auto captions to every member and Page in 10 languages, and takes an .srt from a desktop browser.
• Facebook takes caption files in SRT format.
• X lets you attach an .srt when you post from the web.
• Snapchat can write captions as a text layer from the quotation mark icon.

A caption file is a separate track that viewers can turn off, and the app decides how it looks. Burned-in captions are part of the picture, so they show on every app, survive a repost and look the way you styled them. On TikTok, Reels and Shorts, where the platform caption depends on the viewer, burn them in, and leave the app's own auto captions off so the words do not show twice. For long YouTube videos, upload a file. There is more on the choice in SRT vs burned-in captions.

Turning one video into every shape

A wide recording does not fill a 9:16 screen. The convert video to vertical tool crops it to 9:16, 1:1 or 4:5 and lets you choose which part of the frame to keep, in your browser. An iPhone MOV that another app will not open can go through the MOV to MP4 converter first.

ReelCaption keeps the size of the file you drop in, so caption each shape after you crop it. The platform guides cover where captions go on each app.

Sources

Each page was read on October 15, 2026. Instagram, Facebook and X build their help pages with script, so for those I used Meta's ads guides and X's developer documentation where the help page would not load.

• TikTok: Ads Help, In-Feed ads, developer media guide, accessibility
• Instagram: Reels ads guide, Stories ads guide, Reels, Stories
• YouTube: upload Shorts, upload limits, encoding settings, caption files, automatic captions
• Facebook: all videos as reels, reels publishing, caption files
• LinkedIn: video specs, Page video, auto captions, caption files
• X: media best practices, caption files
• Snapchat: post from the web, Spotlight, captions

Platforms change these pages often. If a figure here no longer matches the linked page, the linked page is right.