Aspect Ratios for TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and YouTube: The 2026 Reference

Every short-form creator hits the same wall once: they spend hours editing a vertical video, post it, and discover the platform cropped the top of the title and the bottom of the hashtags. The video looks fine in the editor, terrible on the actual feed.

This is not a creator skill problem. It is an aspect ratio and safe zone problem. Once you know the rules, you stop running into the wall.

This post is the reference table I send people when they ask. Bookmark it if you are publishing across multiple platforms.

The fast answer

| Platform | Aspect ratio | Recommended pixels | Notes | |---|---|---|---| | TikTok | 9:16 | 1080 × 1920 | UI overlays bottom 350 px | | Instagram Reels | 9:16 | 1080 × 1920 | UI overlays bottom 400 px | | Instagram Feed video | 4:5 | 1080 × 1350 | Crops 1:1 in profile grid | | YouTube Shorts | 9:16 | 1080 × 1920 | UI overlays bottom 400 px | | YouTube long-form | 16:9 | 1920 × 1080 | Or 3840 × 2160 for 4K | | LinkedIn video | 1:1 or 9:16 | 1080 × 1080 or 1080 × 1920 | Square performs well | | X (Twitter) video | 16:9 or 1:1 | 1280 × 720 or 1080 × 1080 | 9:16 supported but lower priority | | Facebook Reels | 9:16 | 1080 × 1920 | Mirrors Instagram | | Snapchat | 9:16 | 1080 × 1920 | Strong UI bleed at edges |

That is the whole reference for 95% of cases. The rest of this post explains why these numbers are what they are, and what to do at the edges.

Why vertical won

A decade ago this would have been a controversial claim. Now it is settled. The reason is mobile.

People hold their phones vertically by default. The only times someone rotates their phone are deliberate acts: watching a long video, playing a game, taking a landscape photo. Scrolling through a feed is not one of those times. So the platforms optimized for what people actually do, and "what people actually do" is hold the device upright and swipe through full-screen vertical content.

Vertical also fills the screen on a phone in a way that 16:9 cannot. A 16:9 video on a 9:16 phone occupies about 30% of the screen. Vertical occupies 100%. The engagement difference is roughly what you would expect: full-screen content gets watched longer, generates more interactions, and gets recommended to more people.

This is why every short-form platform converged on 9:16. It is not coordination. It is convergent evolution driven by the device.

The 9:16 details

9:16 is the aspect ratio of a phone held vertically. Pixel-wise, the recommended canvas across every short-form platform is 1080 × 1920, sometimes 1440 × 2560 for premium device targeting. Some platforms accept 4K vertical (2160 × 3840), but the bandwidth cost rarely produces a visible benefit.

A few details worth knowing:

Frame rates. 30 fps is the universal default. 60 fps is supported on most platforms but eats bandwidth and rarely makes content feel better. Stick with 30 unless you have a specific reason.

Encoding. H.264 at around 8 to 12 Mbps for 1080p vertical is the safe range. Some platforms accept H.265, but the platforms re-encode everything anyway, so optimizing your upload bitrate past a sensible default mostly burns your laptop battery.

Color space. sRGB. Always. The platforms will mangle anything else.

Safe zones (the part everyone forgets)

The thing nobody mentions in the tutorials: the platforms overlay their own UI on top of your video. Captions, like buttons, share buttons, the user's username, the hashtag bar, the music attribution. All of this sits on top of the video, mostly along the bottom edge, sometimes along the right edge.

If you put important content in those zones, the platform UI obscures it. Your viewer cannot read your title because the like button is sitting on top of it.

Approximate safe zone rules of thumb for a 1080 × 1920 canvas:

TikTok. Keep critical content out of the bottom 350 pixels and the top 200 pixels. The right edge has a column of action buttons that overlay the rightmost 130 pixels. Caption and hashtags sit in the bottom 400 pixels.

Instagram Reels. Bottom 400 pixels and top 250 pixels are heavily UI-covered. Right side action buttons take roughly the rightmost 150 pixels. Captions can extend up to 600 pixels from the bottom when expanded.

YouTube Shorts. Bottom 400 pixels overlay-heavy. Top 200 pixels less so, but back button and channel info sit there. Right edge action buttons take roughly 130 pixels.

Snapchat. Aggressive UI bleeding. Keep critical content within the central 80% of the frame.

The practical rule: design your video so the most important visual content sits in roughly the centered middle two-thirds of the frame, both horizontally and vertically. Everything outside that area is at risk of being covered or cropped.

Every major editing app now has a "show safe zones" toggle. CapCut, DaVinci Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut, Descript. Turn it on. Leave it on.

Instagram's two ratios (this confuses people)

Instagram is the messy platform because it has two different vertical formats and they look different in different surfaces.

Reels (9:16). Full-screen vertical, plays in the Reels tab and on profile reel grids. Same dimensions as TikTok.

Feed video (4:5). Slightly less vertical, plays in the main feed and on profile grids. Anything taller than 4:5 gets cropped in the feed.

Most creators publish to both surfaces. The safe approach is to design for 4:5 in terms of where the critical content sits, then export at 9:16. That way the same video looks good in both the Reels tab and the Feed.

The other thing Instagram does is crop your video to a 1:1 thumbnail in the profile grid. So whatever sits in the centered 1080 × 1080 area is what people see when they browse your profile. Plan accordingly.

YouTube's split personality

YouTube has two completely different aspect ratio worlds, and both are first-class.

Long-form (16:9). Recommended 1920 × 1080 or 3840 × 2160. 60 fps is welcome here in a way it is not on the short-form platforms. This is the format for tutorials, video essays, podcasts on YouTube, sit-down talking-head content.

Shorts (9:16). Recommended 1080 × 1920. Capped at 60 seconds (or 3 minutes for some accounts in beta). Designed to compete directly with TikTok.

The algorithm distinguishes between them. A long-form video re-uploaded as a Short does not perform like native Shorts content. The recommendation systems are separate. The watch-time targets are different. Even the audience demographics are different.

If you are publishing a single piece of content to YouTube in both formats, treat the Short as a teaser or trailer, not a re-frame of the long-form. The Short's only job is to make the viewer want to click through to the long-form.

Square (1:1) and where it still works

Square video was the default on early Instagram and is now mostly legacy, but it has not disappeared.

LinkedIn rewards square format. The feed crops everything else.

X (formerly Twitter) handles square well in-feed and it stops the scroll better than 16:9.

Facebook supports both square and vertical, with mixed performance.

If you are producing once and posting to multiple business-oriented platforms, exporting a square version alongside your 9:16 version is the lowest-cost way to cover LinkedIn and X without making truly separate cuts.

AI video generation: matching the ratio in your prompt

This is the part most AI video tutorials skip. If you are generating a video with Sora, Veo, Runway, or any other model, the aspect ratio is usually a parameter you set explicitly. Some models infer from the prompt. Some default to 16:9 unless you specify.

A few practical notes for prompting:

Always specify the ratio. "9:16 vertical" or "16:9 landscape" or "1:1 square." Models will sometimes ignore this if your scene description implies a different framing, but in practice including the ratio in the prompt and as an explicit parameter is the safest combination.

Frame for safe zones in the prompt. If you are generating a 9:16 clip that will become a TikTok, mention in the prompt that the subject should be centered vertically with headroom and footroom. This compensates for the platform UI overlays even before you get to post-processing.

Crop is faster than re-render. If you generated 16:9 and decide you want 9:16, a center crop is much cheaper than re-running the prompt with a new aspect ratio. But it almost never works for face-centered shots, where the framing was tuned for the landscape composition.

If you are drafting prompts and want to test these dynamics, Reeprompt handles aspect ratio explicitly in its output, and PromptForge generates JSON prompts where aspect ratio is a structured field rather than buried in prose. Both are free.

A printable cheat sheet

If you want one summary to keep in your editor:

• TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Snapchat, Facebook Reels: 9:16 at 1080 × 1920
• YouTube long-form: 16:9 at 1920 × 1080
• LinkedIn: 1:1 at 1080 × 1080 (or 9:16 if it is vertical-native content)
• X: 16:9 at 1280 × 720 or 1:1 at 1080 × 1080
• Instagram Feed (if not Reels): 4:5 at 1080 × 1350

Frame the important content in the centered middle two-thirds of the canvas, regardless of platform. Turn on safe zones in your editor. Specify aspect ratio explicitly when generating with AI.

That is the whole game.