YouTube Shorts Safe Zone Checker
The YouTube Shorts safe zone is the slice of your 1080×1920 frame the app doesn't cover with its own buttons. Drop in a frame from your video to see exactly what gets hidden, adjust the margins for Shorts, TikTok or Reels, then download a transparent overlay template for your editor.
Drag a frame onto the preview, or use the button below.
1. Load a frame from your video
Your image stays in your browser — it's read locally and drawn to a canvas. Nothing is uploaded.
3. Fine-tune the margins — in pixels, on a 1080×1920 frame
Your safe area: 880 × 1360px
That's 58% of the frame. Anything outside the dashed box — titles, logos, subtitles, faces you need read — risks sitting under YouTube Shorts's interface. Keep the video itself full-frame at 1080×1920; only the important content moves inward.
4. Take the template with you
Drop the overlay PNG onto the top layer in Premiere, CapCut, DaVinci or Canva, set it to 25% opacity, and lay out your titles under it. Hide the layer before you export.
Skip the framing problem entirely
Leaxor renders finished 1080×1920 Shorts with captions already placed inside the safe zone — no overlay layer, no guesswork.
What actually covers your frame
The Shorts player draws its interface on top of your video, not beside it. Four regions do the damage, and they aren't equally costly — the bottom band is where almost every creator loses text.
Top band
Search icon, the Shorts label, and the progress bar on some devices.
Cheap to respect — nothing important belongs in the top 180px anyway. Just don't park a logo there.
Right rail
Like, dislike, comment, share and remix buttons, stacked vertically.
The rail is narrow but tall, so it clips the right edge of wide text for the whole video. Centre your titles.
Bottom band
Video title, channel name, subscribe button, sound attribution — the biggest UI region by far.
This is where creators lose text. If your captions sit low in the frame, they're under this block on every phone.
Left edge
Mostly clear, but the title wraps into it and some devices add gesture padding.
60px of breathing room is enough. It's the one margin you can safely tighten.
Safe zone dimensions by platform
Margins in pixels, measured on a 1080×1920 frame. These are deliberately conservative working figures rather than published constants — Google notes that overlays and calls-to-action appear in different places depending on format, campaign type and screen, and publishes transparent safe-area templates for advertisers precisely because the exact box moves.
| Platform | Top | Bottom | Left | Right | Safe area |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube Shorts | 180px | 380px | 60px | 140px | ≈ 880 × 1360 |
| TikTok | 130px | 480px | 60px | 140px | ≈ 880 × 1310 |
| Instagram Reels | 180px | 420px | 60px | 160px | ≈ 860 × 1320 |
| Safe on all three | 180px | 480px | 60px | 160px | ≈ 860 × 1260 |
One rule beats all four numbers: never shrink the export. Google's guidance is that a full 9:16 vertical asset fills far more of the screen than a letterboxed one. Fill the frame with video; keep the content that matters inside the box.
Using the overlay template in your editor
Download the PNG
Pick your platform preset, then grab the transparent 1080×1920 overlay. It carries the dashed safe box and labelled bands.
Top layer, 25% opacity
Drop it above every clip in Premiere, CapCut, DaVinci Resolve or Canva. Lock the layer so you can't nudge it.
Lay out inside the box
Titles, captions, logos, key subjects — all inside the dashes. Background video still fills the whole 1080×1920.
Hide before export
Toggle the layer off. Forgetting this ships a translucent grid on top of your Short, which is a memorable way to learn the step.
Building the captions themselves? The SRT caption formatter turns a transcript into a subtitle file with sane line lengths, which is half the battle — short lines are far easier to keep inside the safe box than long ones.
Five safe zone mistakes
Every one of these is invisible on a desktop timeline and obvious the second the video plays on a phone.
- 1
Burning captions into the bottom fifth of the frame, where the title and subscribe button live. Move them to the middle third.
- 2
Placing a channel logo bottom-right — the single most covered pixel in the entire vertical UI.
- 3
Exporting at 1080×1350 or adding letterbox bars to 'stay safe'. You just shrank your video in a full-screen feed.
- 4
Designing for Shorts, then cross-posting to TikTok, where the caption block sits far higher and swallows the same text.
- 5
Cropping a 16:9 edit to vertical without checking the result — the crop takes the centre, so subjects framed off to one side vanish.
Framing sorted? The rest of the upload matters just as much — generate YouTube hashtags for your Short, then check your thumbnail text reads at phone size.
Frequently asked questions
What is the YouTube Shorts safe zone?
The safe zone is the part of your 1080×1920 frame that the Shorts player doesn't cover with its own interface. The app draws the title, channel name, subscribe button and sound label across the bottom, an action rail down the right edge, and controls along the top. Anything you place in those bands — text, logos, captions, a face — sits under the UI on a real phone.
What are the YouTube Shorts safe zone dimensions in pixels?
As a conservative working figure on a 1080×1920 frame: keep important content roughly 180px from the top, 380px from the bottom, 60px from the left and 140px from the right, which leaves a safe area of about 880×1360. Google itself doesn't publish one fixed organic number — the overlay shifts with caption length, device and whether the video is an ad — so treat those as a floor and use the sliders above to match what you see in your own app.
Do TikTok and Instagram Reels use the same safe zone?
No, and the difference matters most at the bottom. TikTok's caption block and nav bar eat noticeably more vertical space than Shorts, so a title that clears the Shorts UI can still land under TikTok's caption. If you repost the same cut to all three, use the 'Safe on all three' preset — it takes the worst case in every direction.
Should I export my video smaller to avoid the safe zone?
No — always export the full 1080×1920. The safe zone is about where you place content inside the frame, not about shrinking the frame. Adding letterbox bars to dodge the UI just makes your video smaller on screen and looks amateurish in a swipe feed.
How do I use the safe zone overlay template in my editor?
Download the transparent PNG, drop it on the top layer of your 1080×1920 timeline in Premiere, CapCut, DaVinci Resolve or Canva, and drop its opacity to around 25%. Lay out your titles and captions inside the dashed box, then hide or delete the layer before you export.
Where should captions go on a YouTube Short?
Centred, in the middle third of the frame, roughly between 35% and 60% of the height. That's well clear of the bottom UI, well clear of the top controls, and it's where a viewer's eye naturally rests while they're deciding whether to keep watching. Captions parked at the very bottom of the frame are the single most common vertical-video mistake.
Is this safe zone checker free?
Yes — free, no sign-up, and no upload. Your image is read locally with the browser's own file reader and drawn onto a canvas, so the frame you drop in never leaves your device. You only pay if you go on to generate videos with Leaxor, which is pay-as-you-go at $0.10 per credit.
Or let the safe zone
take care of itself.
Leaxor renders vertical 1080×1920 Shorts with captions already placed in the middle third — script, animated characters, voiceover and burned-in text, all from one topic.
Make a ShortOr make faceless YouTube videos, compare credits and plans, or browse all free creator tools.