Instagram Reel safe zone

Meta’s ads guide for Reels asks for the top 14%, the bottom 35% and 6% at each side to stay free of text, logos and other key creative elements, so the profile icon and call-to-action don’t cover them and nothing important is lost if the edges are cropped. Percentages carry over from one canvas to the next; an editor needs pixels.

Whatever the canvas, the clear box is only about half the height of the frame, and the 35% at the bottom is what costs the most. That margin is sized for ads, where a call-to-action joins the caption at the bottom, which is why third-party guides suggest smaller margins for everyday Reels.

Instagram never shows a Reel bare. Its controls are drawn on top of the video, and they are bunched along the right edge and the bottom rather than spread evenly.

• Right edge: a column of buttons, starting with like, comment and share, with the more menu and a small square for the audio further down, and counts under some of them.
• Bottom left: your profile photo, username and a Follow button, then the first line or two of the caption and the name of the audio. Labels such as Paid partnership make that block taller.
• Ads: a Sponsored label by the account name and a call-to-action button such as Learn more or Shop now, which makes the bottom block taller still.
• Top: Instagram’s navigation for the Reels viewer, including the camera button. It is less crowded than the bottom, but a title pushed against the top edge ends up behind it.

Tip: Tapping “more” opens the caption over the video, and a long caption can then cover a large part of the frame. Keep the first line short, and don’t put anything essential low in the picture.

Meta gives both sides the same 6%, about 65 pixels on a 1,080-pixel frame. Its guide presents the margins as protection against the profile icon, the call-to-action and cropping at the edges; it doesn’t single out the column of buttons. On a phone that column is wider than a 65-pixel strip, so a line of text that runs close to the right edge can end up under the heart or the share arrow.

• Centre short titles, or align them left, so their right end stays well away from the buttons.
• Break a long on-screen sentence into two short lines rather than one wide one.
• When the shot allows, frame faces and products slightly left of centre, so the buttons sit over background.
• Screenshot one of your published Reels that has text near the right edge, see where the icons fall on your phone, and set your own right margin to match.

Most Reels carry two kinds of on-screen text: a title or hook at the start and subtitles throughout. Each has a natural place inside the box. On a 1080 × 1920 frame:

The profile grid adds one more limit, for the cover. A Reel’s tile shows the middle 1080 × 1440 of the frame, from 240 to 1,680 pixels down, and Sprout Social notes that the grid always displays at 3:4. Meta’s box, from 269 to 1,248 pixels down, sits wholly inside that slice, so text placed for the viewer also survives on your profile.

Meta publishes its figures for ads, and Hootsuite’s guide repeats them for Reels ads. Sprout Social’s guide is gentler, asking for 250 pixels clear above your text and 340 below. That leaves more room on an everyday Reel, at the risk of a caption line or a label covering the lowest words. Which to follow depends on the Reel.

1. Make a 1080 × 1920 PNG with a transparent middle and see-through red bands: 269 px at the top, 672 px at the bottom, 65 px on the left, and on the right whatever your screenshot test showed.
2. Put it on the top track of the timeline and stretch it across the whole edit.
3. Place titles, subtitles and stickers so they never touch the red.
4. Hide or delete the overlay track before exporting, or it will be burned into the video.
5. Export at 1080 × 1920. A different shape gets cropped or padded by Instagram, which shifts everything you placed.
6. Keep the PNG for every Reel. Without the extra band on the right, it also suits Stories, which have no column of buttons.