Instagram Reel size

Reels are watched full screen on a phone held upright, and that screen is a 9:16 frame. Meta’s publishing documentation recommends 9:16 for Reels so the video is neither cropped nor padded with blank space. At 1,080 pixels wide, 9:16 works out at 1,920 pixels tall: full HD turned on its side.

Instagram is looser about what it will take. Its help centre says you can upload a reel in any shape from 1.91:1, a wide landscape, to 9:16, and that reels should have a minimum resolution of 720 pixels and a minimum frame rate of 30 frames per second. Meta’s publishing API, which scheduling tools use, accepts almost any shape on paper, caps the width at 1,920 pixels and still recommends 9:16.

Tip: Filming on a phone? Hold it upright and record in 1080p. The clip comes out at 1080 × 1920 and goes into Reels with nothing to resize.

The grid crop is the one that surprises people, because it trims the top and the bottom, exactly where editors like to put a title. A heading in the first 240 pixels of the frame looks fine while the Reel plays, then vanishes from the tile on your profile. Sprout Social and Hootsuite both give 1080 × 1440 as the grid view, which matches the 3:4 grid Instagram moved to in 2025.

A Reel is never shown bare. The like, comment and share buttons stack up the right-hand side, and your username, the caption and the audio name run along the bottom. Meta’s ads guide turns this into margins for Reels ads: keep text, logos and other key elements out of the top 14%, the bottom 35% and 6% at each side.

On a 1080 × 1920 frame, those margins come to about 269 pixels at the top, 672 at the bottom and 65 at each side. Put another way, anything that must be read belongs between roughly 270 and 1,250 pixels down from the top edge.

Sprout Social’s guide asks for less: about 250 pixels clear at the top and 340 at the bottom. That leaves more room for on-screen captions, but Meta’s margins are the ones to follow for any Reel you might later run as an ad.

Meta’s publishing API, the route scheduling tools take, accepts Reels from 3 seconds to 15 minutes long and up to 300 MB. Instagram has raised the in-app limit several times, and its help centre now describes recording and editing reels of up to 20 minutes.

Length also affects who sees a Reel. Instagram’s help centre notes that reels over 3 minutes won’t be recommended to new audiences, so a long Reel is likely to reach mostly people who already follow you. To find new viewers, keep the Reel to 3 minutes or less and cut a short version of longer material.

Ads have their own figures. Meta’s ads guide lists Reels ads of up to 15 minutes, recommends 1440 × 2560 pixels, and takes MP4 or MOV files of up to 4 GB.

The cover is the still image people see before they tap play, including on your profile grid. Instagram’s help centre recommends 420 × 654 pixels, a 1:1.55 shape. Meta’s API takes a JPEG cover of up to 8 MB and recommends 9:16, and Sprout Social’s guide plans the cover at 1080 × 1920, like the video itself.

Whichever figure you start from, the plan that works is the same: make the cover the full 1080 × 1920, then keep the title and any face inside the middle 1080 × 1440, the only part the grid shows.

Tip: A frame grabbed from the middle of a clip is often blurred by motion. A designed cover with large, centred words reads better as a small tile, and Instagram lets you upload one in place of a frame.

1. Set the editing project to 1080 × 1920 before you cut anything, rather than reframing a finished landscape edit.
2. Export at 30 frames per second or more; Instagram’s help centre names 30 as the minimum.
3. Use MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio, a combination Meta’s API accepts.
4. For a scheduling tool, keep the file under 300 MB and the bitrate at 25 Mbps or less, the ceilings in Meta’s API documentation.
5. Posting from your phone? Turn on “Upload at highest quality” in Instagram’s media quality settings first.
6. Watch the finished Reel on your phone and pause wherever text appears to check that it clears the buttons.