Where Captions Go: The YouTube Shorts Safe Zone

On a phone, a vertical video is never shown alone. Buttons run down one side, the channel name and description sit along the bottom, and anything you put underneath them is lost. If you have been searching for the YouTube Shorts safe zone for captions, here is the honest answer: YouTube does not publish one in pixels. This post sets out what YouTube does say, the margins Meta does publish for Reels, and where that puts your captions in a 1080 x 1920 frame.

What YouTube actually publishes

YouTube's help page on uploading Shorts asks for a video up to three minutes long with a square or vertical aspect ratio. The fuller picture is in Google's guidance for Shorts ads, which describes the same screen:

• Vertical is the shape. Google says vertical videos with a 9:16 aspect ratio are best suited to Shorts, and that horizontal videos are shown with blurred bands above and below.
• There is a panel on the right. It holds the like, dislike, comment and share buttons.
• Text runs along the bottom. For ads, that is the channel name and description, and longer descriptions are cut off after a line on mobile.

Neither page gives a safe zone as numbers: no percentages, no pixel boundaries. Anyone quoting an official YouTube Shorts safe zone in pixels should be able to link it, and we could not find one.

The margins that are published

Meta does publish numbers, in its ads guide for Instagram Reels. It recommends a 9:16 video and suggests keeping at least 14% of the top, 35% of the bottom and 6% of each side free of text, logos and other important elements, so they are not cropped or covered by the profile icon or the call to action.

Those figures are written for Reels ads, not for YouTube. But the two screens are built the same way, with controls down one side and text along the bottom, so Meta's margins make a sensible conservative layout for both. If your captions clear Meta's margins, they clear the interface on Reels as Meta describes it, and they stay away from the right-hand panel and the bottom text that Google describes on Shorts.

The safe area in pixels

At 1080 x 1920, the size of a vertical Short or Reel, Meta's percentages work out like this:

• Top margin: 14% of 1920 is about 269 pixels.
• Bottom margin: 35% of 1920 is 672 pixels, so keep text above the line 1,248 pixels down from the top.
• Side margins: 6% of 1080 is about 65 pixels on each side.

That leaves a safe area roughly 950 pixels wide and 979 pixels tall, starting 269 pixels from the top. The bottom margin is the big one: more than a third of the frame is given over to the interface.

Where captions should sit inside it

Inside the safe area there is still a better and a worse place.

• Low in the safe area, not low in the frame. Captions read best in the lower part of the safe area, just above that two-thirds line, where the eye expects them and the face is usually above.
• Clear of the face. On a talking-head Short the eyes and mouth do a lot of the work. If the subject sits low in frame, move the captions up rather than over the chin.
• Short lines. A short cue never runs wide enough to reach the side panel. Captions generated in flshy are cut to five words at most, which keeps lines narrow.
• Centred. With buttons on one side, a centred line keeps the most distance from them.

Setting it up in flshy

All of this runs free in flshy, in the browser, with your footage staying on your machine.

1. Cut the clip to length first. Captions sit on their own track and are not moved by a silence cut, so caption once the edit is settled.
2. Generate the captions. Open Captions, generate them on your device, then press the button under the transcript that reads Add 24 as Editable Text, or whatever your count is. The full run is in add captions to a video.
3. Reframe to 1080 x 1920. In the AI tab, open the Advanced group and expand Auto Reframe, choose the YouTube Shorts preset, and run it. The detail is in turn a landscape video vertical.
4. Move the captions into the safe area. Reframing changes the shape of the canvas, so check where the captions landed. Use the Properties tab in the Captions panel to move the caption anchor up, above the two-thirds line and clear of the face.
5. Scrub and check. Play through the clip and watch the captions against the subject, especially wherever the crop moves.
6. Export. H.264 MP4 up to 4K, with the captions burned in and no watermark.

One frame for Shorts and Reels

Because the layout uses Meta's published margins, the same export works on Reels as Meta describes it and leaves comfortable room on Shorts. For TikTok we could not verify the platform's own guidance, so check it before relying on these numbers there.

If the footage started life as a longer landscape video, turning long videos into original YouTube Shorts covers the edit before the captions, and burned-in captions vs closed captions covers why captions in the picture are usually the right call for a feed. For Reels in particular, see captions and overlays for Instagram Reels.