What is a safe zone on TikTok, Reels and Shorts?

Every short video app draws its interface on top of the video: like, comment and share buttons down the right side, the account name, the post's caption and the sound across the bottom, tabs or search across the top. TikTok's Creator Academy puts the rule simply: keep your image centered and not covered by any buttons on the screen.

None of the apps publishes exact margins for ordinary posts, and they shift a little between phones and app versions. These are measured, rounded and on the generous side, on a 1080 × 1920 frame:

To be safe on all three at once, take the largest of each: 240 pixels from the top, 420 from the bottom, 60 from the left and 200 from the right. That leaves a 820 × 1260 area, about 50% of the frame. The bottom is the costly one: it's where subtitles traditionally go, and where every app puts the account name and the post's own text. Ads carry extra buttons, so they need more room at the bottom than these.

• Captions: in the lower middle, just above the bottom margin, where the eye drops after the face. Lower and the username sits on them; nearer the right edge and Shorts' buttons, 200 pixels wide, cover the last words. See burned-in captions and karaoke captions.
• A text hook: in the upper third, below the top bars (240 pixels on Shorts, 220 on Reels, 160 on TikTok). More in text hook.
• Faces: centered, in the upper half of the frame, so the bottom stays free for captions. A crop that follows the speaker keeps them there as people move.
• Your handle or a logo: small, inside the safe area. One tucked into a bottom corner ends up under the app's own username, and one on the right under its buttons.

If you post the same clip everywhere, lay it out for all three margins at once rather than re-editing it for each app: the combined area above works on every one of them. The rest of cross-posting short videos is in that guide.

Open the free safe zone checker, pick TikTok, Reels, Shorts or all three, and drop in a frame or the clip itself: it draws what each app covers over your video. It also gives you the margins as a 1080 × 1920 PNG to lay over the timeline in your editor while you place text.

The mistakes it catches most: captions set at the bottom of the frame out of habit, a hook headline under Shorts' search bar, a name or a punchline at the far right, and a wide video letterboxed onto a tall canvas with the subtitles left in the bar. For sizes and shapes generally, see vertical video.