Half of Your Vertical Video Belongs to the App

A Reel, a Short and a TikTok are the same 1080×1920 frame, and all three apps draw their own interface straight on top of it. A caption block across the bottom, a column of buttons down the right, a bar at the top. Whatever you put under those is still in your export and invisible to everyone watching.

The awkward part is that nobody agrees on how much. Three guides published this year put TikTok’s bottom margin at 250, 400 and 484 pixels. That is a spread of 234 pixels — more than a tenth of the frame — on a single edge of a single app. Pick the smallest and your caption gets buried. Pick the largest and you have thrown away a band of picture for nothing.

So we measured it, on 13 September 2026. Here is the method and the numbers.

How we measured it

The trick is to make the browser lie about its shape. Each app’s mobile player letterboxes a 9:16 video inside a taller window, which puts its controls partly outside the video and makes the measurement meaningless. Force the viewport to exactly 9:16 — 375×667 — and the video element fills it precisely, corner to corner.

At that point every control sits on top of the frame in the same proportions the app uses, so reading each element’s bounding box and scaling by 1080/375 = 2.88 puts it straight onto a 1080×1920 canvas. No guessing, no screenshots, no ruler.

YouTube Shorts

Measured on YouTube’s own mobile player:

• 138 px at the top — the top bar
• 299 px at the bottom — the channel row and the subscribe button
• 138 px on the right — the action rail, which runs from 1218 px down
• 46 px on the left — where the channel avatar sits

The bottom is the one that surprises people. 299 pixels is nearly 16% of the height, and it is exactly where most creators put their caption because it looks empty in the editor.

TikTok

Same method, TikTok’s mobile player:

• 422 px at the bottom — the caption block, on a two-line caption
• 179 px on the right — the action rail, running from 809 px to 1757 px
• 140 px at the very bottom — the bottom bar, inside the 422

So the real figure sits close to the largest of the three published numbers and nowhere near the smallest. But the honest answer is not a number at all: that 422 was measured on a two-line caption, and a longer caption pushes the block higher. Anyone quoting one value for TikTok’s bottom margin is quoting one caption length.

One number we did not measure is TikTok’s top bar. Logged out, its web player carries an “Open app” banner the real app does not have, and measuring that would describe the website rather than the app. The tool uses published guidance for that zone and labels it as such.

Instagram Reels, and why it is not measured here

Reels resisted the same treatment. Logged out, Instagram renders the video at 375×622 — not 9:16 at all — underneath a “Watch this reel in the app” interstitial. There is no honest way to map controls from that onto a 1080×1920 frame, so the Reels zones come from published guidance: roughly 108 px at the top, 320 at the bottom and 60 on each side.

We would rather label four zones as estimates than average somebody else’s numbers and present the result as a measurement. Every zone in the checker carries its own tag for exactly this reason.

Put the three together: 841 × 1360

If you post the same file to all three — which nearly everyone does — what matters is the intersection, the worst case on each edge:

• 138 px clear at the top (Shorts)
• 422 px clear at the bottom (TikTok)
• 179 px clear on the right (TikTok)
• 60 px clear on the left (Reels)

That leaves 841 × 1360 pixels, which is 55% of the frame. Just over half. The other 45% is the app’s, and no amount of design work gets it back.

This is not an argument for filling only the middle. Backgrounds, faces and motion should absolutely run to the edges — that is what makes a vertical video feel full. It is an argument about text, logos, prices, arrows, subtitles and anything else that stops working the moment it is half covered.

What to do with it

Two things, both quick. First, stop guessing: drop your clip into the Safe Zone Checker and look at your own footage with the zones on top of it. It runs in your browser and uploads nothing, so an unpublished video is fine.

Second, take the overlay into your editor. The checker exports a transparent 1080×1920 PNG of any single platform or of all three at once — put it on a top layer in Premiere, Resolve, CapCut or Canva, line your titles up under it, and hide the layer before you export. That one layer is worth more than any number in this article, because it survives the next time an app moves its buttons.

If the source is not vertical yet, the Image Resizer will get a still to size, and the YouTube Thumbnail Tester does the same job for a 16:9 thumbnail.

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