SpotCheck

TikTok, Reels and Stories safe zones

Vertical platforms draw their own buttons, captions and handles over your picture. Nothing is rejected for it — your end card just becomes unreadable underneath a share button.

Social safe zones

Not published: loudness or true peak, frame rate, audio, pixel dimensions. Nothing is asserted where the platform is silent.

Where the platforms draw their own interface over a vertical video. TikTok's zone is measured from TikTok's own downloadable safe-zone template (720x1280 reference, April 2025): 160px top, 440px bottom, 80px sides, and the engagement stack in the right 200px from 720px above the bottom edge down. The Reels and Stories zone is Meta's own Ads Guide (facebook.com/business/ads-guide/update/image/instagram-reels), which asks for roughly 14% of the top, 35% of the bottom and 6% of each side to be kept free of text, logos and other key creative elements. Neither platform rejects an upload for it; the text is simply covered on the phone, so this is a recommendation. Snapchat and YouTube Shorts publish no verifiable figures and are deliberately absent. The zones apply to 9:16 frames; on any other shape the check reports that and grades nothing.

TikTok publishes no pixel figures

There is no page listing TikTok's safe-zone numbers, which is why the figures circulating online disagree with each other. What TikTok does publish is a downloadable safe-zone template. The numbers here were measured from that template's own alpha channel, against its 720x1280 reference: 160px at the top, 440px at the bottom, 80px each side, with the engagement stack occupying the right 200px from 720px above the bottom edge downward.

When we checked third-party figures against the template, they were wrong on three of the four edges. If a number came from a blog rather than the template, assume it is wrong.

Meta states theirs as percentages

Meta's Ads Guide asks that roughly 14% of the top, 35% of the bottom and 6% of each side stay free of text, logos and other key creative. Neither platform rejects an upload for breaking these, so treat them as legibility rules rather than delivery gates.

Where these numbers come from

Every value above was read off the platform's own published page or document and carries the date it was read. Nothing here is inferred, and where a platform publishes no rule this page says so rather than filling the gap.

Specs move. If you are reading this long after those dates, check the source before trusting a number.

Know it passes before you deliver it

SpotCheck is a free Mac app that checks a video against these specs for you.

Download for macOSWhat it checks

Free. Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later. By downloading you agree to the license agreement.