TikTok Video Size

A 16:9 clip carries 1920 pixels of width. A phone in portrait has about 1080, so the extra width has nowhere to go and the app draws black bars above and below rather than crop the picture. The result is a horizontal band occupying roughly the middle third of the screen, which is the opposite of what the format is built for.

The cost of the wrong shape is not a warning from TikTok. It is reach. A letterboxed clip is small in the feed, needs a beat to be understood, and the recommendation system measures how long people stay. Matching 9:16 before upload is the cheaper fix, and it is one export away for anything shot vertically in the first place.

One division gives the unit and one multiplication gives the height. Working it out explicitly is how a file that is a few percent out gets caught before upload instead of after.

1. Start from the width. 1080 px is the width TikTok treats as native.
2. Divide the width by 9: 1080 ÷ 9 = 120 px per unit.
3. Multiply by 16 to reach the height: 120 × 16 = 1920 px.
4. Compare the height you actually have against 1920. Drift beyond about 5% means the export is not 9:16.
5. Keep text clear of the right-hand 120 px and the bottom 320 px, export at 1080 × 1920, and hold the file under your device's cap.

Worked example

A 4K vertical clip from a phone is often 2160 × 3840 — the same 9:16 shape at twice the pixels and four times the file size. Dropping it to 1080 × 1920 costs nothing visible, because TikTok renders the feed at 1080 wide and would perform that reduction itself. On Android, where the app's cap sits near 72 MB, that rescale is frequently the difference between a clip that uploads and one that does not.

No TikTok video is shown bare. The username, the caption, the scrolling sound credit and the progress bar sit across the foot of the frame, and the like, comment, share and profile buttons run up the right-hand side. The Following and For You switch occupies the top left.

The button column is the part people underestimate. It is roughly 120 pixels wide on a 1080-wide canvas and reaches much further up the screen than the caption does, so anything arranged down the right-hand edge — a vertical logo, a film strip of text — ends up underneath it on somebody else's phone.

• Keep anything that must be read out of the right-hand 120 px, and clear of the bottom 320 px.
• The bottom band is the busiest area on the screen: caption, buttons and progress bar overlap there, and a longer caption pushes its way further up.
• Leave the left margin clear for a short distance down. The hook line begins there, and a long one wraps underneath itself.
• Burn subtitles in near the vertical centre rather than at the foot of the frame, for exactly this reason.

TikTok and Instagram Stories share the 9:16 canvas, so one master file serves both. What changes is the interface drawn over it — TikTok's buttons sit on the right, Instagram's controls run along the top and bottom.

• Instagram: Story size
• YouTube: Thumbnail size
• X: Header size
• Pinterest: Pin size
• LinkedIn: Profile banner size
• Instagram: Feed post size
• YouTube: Channel banner size
• X: Post image size
• Facebook: Page cover size

Every size here is one placement on one platform. The platform sizes index lists the rest, and each ratio guide explains the maths behind the shape itself.