Safe zones for Stories, Reels and full-screen ads

A full-screen vertical ad shares the screen with the app around it: the account name at the top, the caption and buttons at the bottom, icons down the side. A safe zone is the part of the frame those elements never cover. This guide gives Meta’s published margins in pixels, explains how TikTok publishes its own, and sets a default for every other format.

What a safe zone protects

A safe zone is not a border. The image still fills the whole frame, and the app draws its interface on top of it. What the safe zone protects is the information: everything a viewer has to read or recognize for the ad to work.

Meta’s help article on safe zones puts it this way. For 9:16 ads in Stories, Reels, Feed and Facebook in-stream reels, “keep the edges (top, bottom and sides) free of key creative elements”. The same article asks for the bottom 40% to stay free of text, logos and other key elements when a Reels ad includes a disclaimer.^[1]

Meta no longer limits how much text an image may carry: “There is no longer a limit on the amount of text that can exist in your ad image.”^[2] The safe zone is about where text goes, not how much of it there is.

Meta Stories and Reels: 14%, 35% and 6%

Meta’s Ads Guide gives the same margins on its Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories and Instagram Reels pages.^[3][4] The Instagram Reels video page says: “Consider leaving at least 14% of the top, 35% of the bottom, and 6% on each side.”^[5] On a 1080×1920 banner, that works out as follows.

The exact figures are 268.8 and 64.8 pixels, rounded up here so nothing lands on the line. What is left is a safe area of 950 by 978 pixels in the upper middle of the frame, close to a square. That is a useful way to think about a Story: the message gets a square, and the rest of the frame is atmosphere.

Because Meta states its margins as percentages, they scale with the file. Meta recommends 1440×2560 for Stories and Reels, and there the same rule gives about 358 pixels at the top, 896 at the bottom and 86 on each side.^[4][5]

1080 × 1920

TikTok: templates, not numbers

TikTok does not publish its safe zone as pixels or percentages. It offers downloadable template files (standard left-to-right, a version with an anchor, and right-to-left for Arabic) and explains that “the safe zone size is determined by the dimension (vertical, horizontal, or square), ad caption length” and more.^[6] A longer caption leaves a smaller safe zone.^[7]

In practice, that means three things:

1. Download the current standard template from TikTok’s help center before you design, not from a copy saved last year.
2. Write the caption first, and check the banner against the template at that caption length.
3. If the caption gets longer during approval, check the banner again.

Every other format: a default margin

Display banners, feed images and owned channels have no app interface drawn over them. They still need a margin, for three reasons: a platform may crop, a border or a rounded corner may clip, and text that touches the edge looks unfinished.

Sizewright keeps a default safe zone of 4.5% on each side, measured from the banner’s shorter edge. A 300×250 keeps about 11 pixels clear all round, and a 1080×1080 about 49. Some platforms add their own guidance:

• Performance Max: Google’s image asset page says “content needs to be in the center 80% of the image”.^[8]
• Pinterest: pins taller than 2:3 “might get cut off in people’s feeds”, so a standard pin is best kept at 1000×1500.^[9]
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn publishes no safe zone for its single image ads, so the default margin applies.^[10]

What goes inside, and what may run under

Inside the safe zone:

• the headline and subline
• the logo
• the button, with its full label
• the offer, the price and any date
• the legal line, if the banner has one

Free to run under the margins:

• the photo or illustration, including the edges of the subject
• background color, texture and gradient fields
• decorative shapes that carry no meaning

Faces and products are the gray area. They may run to the edge of the frame. But if the subject is the point of the ad, keep it away from the bottom 35%, where Meta’s caption and buttons sit.

1080 × 1920

How to check a banner

1. Overlay the zone. Put the margins on the canvas as a layer or guide while you design, not at the end.
2. Look at the real size. Open the file on a phone at 100%. A margin that looks generous on a desktop monitor is tight on a screen in your hand.
3. Preview in the platform. Meta Ads Manager has an ad preview section where you can see the ad across placements before you publish.^[11]
4. Recheck after copy changes. A longer headline or an extra line of subline can push text into the bottom zone.

How Sizewright handles it

In Sizewright, the safe zone is one of thirteen measured rules every banner is checked against. Meta’s 270, 672 and 65 pixels apply to the Meta 1080×1920 format; display banners, feed images and owned channels use the 4.5% default. The editor shows safe zone and grid overlays, and every save re-runs the measured rules. A banner that still breaks a rule stays in the set marked “needs attention”, with the reason, and is left out of exports.

See quality control for the full list of checks, and the Meta and TikTok spec pages for each platform’s current numbers.