Instagram Story size

A Story fills the screen, and parts of Instagram’s interface sit on top of it. Across the top run the progress bars, then your profile picture and name. At the bottom is the bar viewers use to reply, and on an ad, the call-to-action button.

Meta’s ads guide puts numbers on this for Story ads: leave roughly 14% of the top, 35% of the bottom and 6% of each side free of text, logos and other key elements. On a 1080 × 1920 Story, that is about 270 pixels at the top, 670 at the bottom and 65 at each side, leaving a clear box roughly 950 pixels wide and 980 tall.

Guides for ordinary Stories are less strict. Sprout Social and Hootsuite both give a safe area of 1080 × 1610 pixels, which leaves 310 pixels of height in total for the bars. Their area suits everyday Stories; Meta’s margins are the safer choice for anything that might run as an ad.

Meta’s publishing documentation recommends 9:16 for Stories to avoid cropping or blank space, and those are exactly the two things that happen to other shapes. The picture is either enlarged until it fills the frame, which cuts off its sides, or shown smaller with empty space above and below.

• A 3:4 phone photo loses a quarter of its width when enlarged to fill the frame, an eighth from each side.
• A 4:5 feed graphic (1080 × 1350) loses about 30% of its width.
• A square image loses about 44% of its width, so anything near its left or right edge is gone.
• A 16:9 landscape video keeps less than a third of its width if it is enlarged; left at its own shape, it plays as a band across the middle.

Tip: Reusing a feed post as a Story? Start a fresh 1080 × 1920 canvas and place the post inside it with room around the edges, rather than stretching the post until it fills the screen.

A single Story video can run for up to 60 seconds. Upload something longer in the app and it is split into a run of Stories, each up to 60 seconds. Scheduling tools that post through Meta’s publishing API have a fixed window: a Story video there must be between 3 and 60 seconds and no bigger than 100 MB.

Every Story disappears after 24 hours. To keep one visible, add it to a Highlight, which stays on your profile until you take it down.

For Story video ads, Meta’s ads guide recommends 1440 × 2560 pixels: the same 9:16 shape at a higher resolution. It accepts MP4, MOV or GIF files up to 4 GB and recommends H.264 compression. Ad videos under 16 seconds play in full, while longer ones may be split across several Story cards, and viewers may see a “Keep watching” option.

If a Story might end up as an ad, design it with the ad margins from the start. A layout that clears 14% at the top and 35% at the bottom also works as an ordinary Story, while the reverse is not true.

1. Start on a 1080 × 1920 canvas instead of resizing a finished design.
2. Export images as JPG or PNG. For a scheduling tool, use a JPEG under 8 MB in sRGB, as Meta’s API asks.
3. Export video as MP4 with H.264 compression and a fixed frame rate between 23 and 60 frames per second.
4. Keep captions and stickers out of the top and bottom bands described above.
5. Open the Story in the app’s editor on your own phone and check every edge before sharing it.