Story Dimensions: The Right Size for Instagram, TikTok & Facebook (2026)

Story dimensions are 1080 × 1920 pixels on every platform that matters, and that part is easy. The part that quietly ruins good work is everything layered on top of those pixels: the profile row, the caption, the reply bar, the column of buttons down the right edge. Your canvas is the same everywhere. How much of it stays visible is not.

This guide has the exact numbers for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube Shorts, and Pinterest, plus the safe-zone margins each one eats, the video specs that stop uploads failing, and a single template size that survives all of them. Our image sizes tool has the same dimensions in a lookup format if you just need the number right now.

Story dimensions at a glance

One size, six platforms. Nobody deviates, because they all inherited the same phone screen.

Why 9:16 became the universal vertical

A 9:16 frame is a 16:9 widescreen video stood on its end. Phones are held that way roughly 94% of the time, so a full-bleed vertical fills the whole display with no black bars and no thumb-reach compromise.

Snapchat set the shape in 2013. Instagram copied Stories wholesale in 2016. TikTok launched vertical-only. By the time YouTube built Shorts, arguing for a different ratio would have meant asking creators to re-export everything, so Shorts is 9:16 too. That accident of history is genuinely useful: one export can serve six destinations, which is why a repurposing workflow is worth setting up at all. Our guide to repurposing content across platforms covers the rest of that pipeline.

Why 1080 wide and not 720 or 1440? It is what the platforms display. Upload smaller and the app stretches your pixels to fill 1080, which softens edges and text. Upload much larger and you gain nothing while feeding the compressor a bigger file to squash. 1080 × 1920 is the sweet spot, and it has been for years.

Instagram Story dimensions and safe zone

1080 × 1920, 9:16. The interface sits on top:

• Top ~250px: your profile picture, username, timestamp, and the close button.
• Bottom ~250px: the "Send message" reply bar and the share arrow.
• Left and right ~50px: tap targets for skipping forward and back.

So your real design area is about 1080 × 1420 in the middle. Put a headline in the top 200px and Instagram's own username label lands on it. Put a call to action in the bottom 200px and the reply bar swallows it.

Stickers take space too

Two extra things eat the frame when you use them. A link sticker wants roughly 200px of clear room wherever you drop it, and it renders on top of whatever is underneath. A poll or question sticker is bigger, closer to 300px tall including its tap area.

How long a card runs

Photos display for 5 seconds. Video runs up to 60 seconds per card, and a longer clip gets split across consecutive cards, so plan for a cut every 60 seconds rather than being surprised by one mid-sentence. For every other Instagram format, feed and carousel included, our Instagram image sizes guide has the full set.

Instagram Reels: same canvas, different safe zone

This is the mistake I see most often. Stories and Reels are both 1080 × 1920, so people design once and post to both. Then the Reel version has its subtitle sitting under a two-line caption and a like button.

Reels take more of the frame:

• Bottom ~420px: the account name, caption, audio ticker, and the "more" expander.
• Right ~180px: the vertical rail of like, comment, share, save, and the spinning audio disc.
• Top ~130px: lighter than Stories, mostly the back arrow and camera icon.

There is a second crop worth knowing. The Reel plays as a full 9:16, but the profile grid shows a portrait 4:5 thumbnail cropped from the center of your cover frame. Anything that lives in the top or bottom fifth of your cover is gone from the grid. If your Reel cover has a title bar at the very top, your profile page will not show it.

The practical rule: design to the Reels safe zone, which is tighter, and a Story version will always fit. Doing it the other way round breaks.

TikTok dimensions and the safe zone that surprises people

1080 × 1920, 9:16. TikTok publishes safe-zone margins for its ad formats, and they apply just as well to organic posts because the interface is the same:

That bottom number is not a typo. TikTok stacks the username, the caption, the sound name, and the CTA button in the lower fifth of the screen, so nearly a quarter of your frame is spoken for. A subtitle burned in 300px from the bottom, which looks fine in your editor, sits behind TikTok's own text in the app.

The right-hand 140px carries the profile, like, comment, bookmark, share, and sound icons. Anything you put there, a logo especially, gets a button on top of it.

Video specs that matter for TikTok: MP4 or MOV, H.264, up to 10 minutes recorded in-app. In-app file limits are tight, around 72MB on Android and 287MB on iOS, while a web upload accepts up to 4GB. If a long, high-bitrate clip refuses to upload from your phone, that limit is usually why, and uploading from desktop fixes it.

Facebook Story dimensions

1080 × 1920, 9:16. Facebook's own guidance is to keep text and logos within the middle 1080 × 1420, which is roughly 250px clear at the top and bottom. Same shape as Instagram, unsurprising given they share an ad system.

Photos display for 5 seconds, videos run up to 60 seconds, and anything longer is trimmed rather than split. Facebook also compresses harder than Instagram in my experience, so fine text under about 30px tall gets mushy. Size type up rather than down.

A note on cross-posting: a story you push from Instagram to Facebook keeps its pixels but loses interactive stickers, so a link sticker or poll that carried the whole point of the story arrives as a flat image.

Snapchat story dimensions

1080 × 1920, 9:16, and Snapchat is the most forgiving of the group on layout. Its interface is thinner: roughly 150px at the top for the account name and timestamp, 150px at the bottom for the reply field, and about 64px on the sides.

Snaps cap at 60 seconds each. Snapchat compresses aggressively for slower connections, so high-contrast graphics survive better than subtle gradients, which band visibly.

YouTube Shorts dimensions

1080 × 1920, 9:16. YouTube's own recommendation is 9:16 or anything narrower than square, and it treats a video as a Short if it is vertical and 3 minutes or less.

Interface load:

• Bottom ~250px: title, channel name, description snippet.
• Right ~110px: like, dislike, comment, share, remix.
• Top ~80px: search and settings icons.

Shorts show up in more surfaces than Stories do, and some of them crop. In the Shorts shelf on a channel page, the thumbnail is a tall crop from the center of the frame. Keep your key visual centered vertically and it survives every surface. Same as Reels, essentially, so the two are near enough interchangeable in production.

Pinterest and LinkedIn vertical

Pinterest takes 1080 × 1920 for video Pins and vertical Idea Pins, though the format Pinterest actually prefers for still Pins is 2:3 (1000 × 1500). If you are already exporting 9:16, it works; if you are designing for Pinterest first, 2:3 fills more of the grid.

LinkedIn has no Stories. It launched them in 2020 and killed them in September 2021. Vertical video still works on LinkedIn, but it goes in the feed as a normal post, where it renders at up to 9:16 in a portrait player. Design it like a Reel, not like a Story, because there is no tap-through and no reply bar.

The safe zone, summarized in one number

Six platforms, six sets of margins, one number to remember: keep everything important inside the middle 1080 × 1080 square of your 1080 × 1920 canvas.

That is a centered square with 420px of breathing room above and below. It clears TikTok's brutal 483px bottom margin with a little room to spare, clears every Reels element, clears the Instagram reply bar, and survives the 4:5 grid crop. It costs you some canvas, and it means never having to check a chart again.

When you want more of the frame, drop the second safe-zone tier: 1080 × 1420 centered (250px top and bottom). That works everywhere except TikTok, where you then have to move your lower text up.

Video specs beyond the dimensions

Getting the pixels right and the encoding wrong still produces a bad story. Here is what to export:

Two of these are worth spending a sentence on.

Bitrate

Under about 6 Mbps, fast motion and fine detail smear into blocks after the platform re-encodes. Above roughly 15 Mbps you are uploading a bigger file that gets compressed to a similar result anyway. 8 to 12 is where the quality curve flattens.

Color space

Exporting in Rec. 2020 or a log profile without conversion is why a video that looked rich in your editor comes out washed out and grey on a phone. Convert to sRGB or Rec. 709 on export.

What actually happens when the ratio is wrong

Worth knowing, because the failure modes differ and each one tells you what you did:

• Upload a 1:1 square to Stories. The app scales it to fit the width and fills the top and bottom with a blurred, stretched version of your own image. It looks unfinished.
• Upload a 4:5 portrait. Similar, less obvious, still noticeably letterboxed.
• Upload a 16:9 landscape. You get a small horizontal strip in the middle of a blurred field. Text in it is unreadable on a phone.
• Upload 720 × 1280. Correct ratio, too few pixels. It gets upscaled to 1080 wide and small text goes fuzzy at the edges.
• Upload 4K vertical (2160 × 3840). It works, then gets downscaled and re-compressed. No visible gain, a much slower upload, and a higher chance the app times out on a weak connection.

Only the last one is harmless. The rest are visible to your audience.

A pre-post checklist

Run this before anything vertical goes out:

1. Canvas is exactly 1080 × 1920.
2. Text and faces sit inside the centered 1080 × 1080 square.
3. Nothing important is in the right 180px if it is going to Reels, TikTok, or Shorts.
4. Video is H.264 MP4, 30fps, 8 to 12 Mbps, sRGB.
5. Cover frame reads well as a 4:5 center crop for the profile grid.
6. Captions are burned in or auto-captions are on, because most people watch muted.
7. Preview it. Our post preview tool shows how the frame and caption actually render per platform, which catches a buried CTA before your audience finds it for you.

Six of those take seconds. The seventh is the one that saves you a repost.

Design once, post everywhere

The reason to care about all this precision is that you only have to do it once. A single 1080 × 1920 export with a centered safe zone is a valid Instagram Story, a Reel, a TikTok, a Facebook Story, a Snap, a Short, and a video Pin.

What still changes per platform is the text around it. TikTok gives you a 4,000-character caption where the first line is all most people see. Instagram gives you 2,200. Each network wants different hashtags. If you are writing those from scratch five times, our caption writer drafts platform-specific versions from one idea, and the content repurposer handles the longer-form direction. The creator's guide to cross-platform posting covers what to adapt and what to leave identical.

Then there is the posting itself, which is where a good vertical workflow usually falls apart. Exporting one file and uploading it manually to six apps, each with its own caption box and its own upload quirks, is twenty minutes of tedium per post and the reason most people quietly stop cross-posting after a month.

Postlia takes one vertical video, one caption set, and publishes it to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Pinterest, and the rest of your connected accounts in a single pass, on a schedule you set. You can queue a week of Reels in one sitting and let them go out at the times that actually perform, which our best time to post on Instagram breakdown covers, or follow the step-by-step in how to schedule Instagram posts. There is a 7-day trial on the pricing page if you want to test it against a real week of posting.

The short version

Story dimensions are 1080 × 1920 (9:16) on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube Shorts, and Pinterest. The dimensions are the easy half. The half that decides whether your work is readable is the safe zone: keep text and faces in the centered 1080 × 1080 square, stay out of the right 180px on any format with an action rail, and remember TikTok takes 483px off the bottom. Export H.264 MP4 at 30fps and 8 to 12 Mbps in sRGB, check the crop in a preview, and one file will serve every platform you post to. Full specs for feed formats live in the social media image sizes cheat sheet.