--- title: "Caption safe zone checker for Reels, TikTok & Shorts | Speecho" description: "Free safe zone checker: drop a frame or a vertical video, paste your SRT, and see which captions the interface will cover. Meta's published margins, an honest answer for TikTok, and a 1080x1920 overlay to download." canonical: "https://speecho.app/tools/caption-safe-zone-checker/" language: "en" publisher: "Speecho" --- Free tools # Caption safe zone checker Drop a frame or a vertical video, paste your subtitles, and see **which captions the interface will sit on top of**. Meta publishes real margins. TikTok publishes none, so you can overlay a screenshot from your own phone instead. Nothing is uploaded. Updated September 2026 > Interactive tool: it runs in the browser at ## What is actually published, and what is guesswork Meta gives percentages rather than pixels, and the same ones for Reels and Stories: roughly 14% of the top, 35% of the bottom and 6% of each side clear of text and logos. On a 1080 x 1920 canvas that is about 269 px at the top, 672 px at the bottom and 65 px each side, leaving a usable box around 950 x 979. The 340 px bottom margin you will find in older guides is a Stories-era figure - 17.7% - and against the current 35% it is simply wrong. TikTok refuses to give numbers, saying the safe zone depends on the format and shrinks as the caption grows. So this tool has no TikTok preset: overlay a screenshot from your own phone instead. The rule that survives all of it is to keep captions in the middle third of the frame and check before you publish. The whole story, with sources, is in [the post on captions for Reels and TikTok](https://speecho.app/blog/add-subtitles-to-reels-and-tiktok/); once the position is right, the [readability checker](https://speecho.app/tools/subtitle-readability-checker/) tells you whether anyone can read them at that speed. ## Questions **What is the TikTok safe zone in pixels?** Nobody outside TikTok knows. TikTok publishes overlay templates for advertisers instead of numbers and states that the zone changes with the format and the caption length. Researching this we found five confidently stated third-party figures for 1080 x 1920 with bottom margins ranging from 120 px to 484 px. Screenshot the app yourself and overlay it - that is the only measurement that matches your phone. **Why 35% and not 340 px?** 340 px is 17.7% of 1920 and comes from the Instagram Stories era. Meta’s current Ads Guide asks for 35% of the bottom, which is 672 px on the same canvas. If your captions were placed against the old number they are almost certainly inside the covered strip now. **What about phones taller than 9:16?** Meta says it may zoom the creative to fill the screen, which can crop areas outside the safe zone, or letterbox it. So treat the margins as a guideline that fails safe, not a guarantee, and leave yourself room. **Where should captions actually sit?** In the middle third of the frame vertically, well inside the sides. That clears the interface on both platforms in practice, survives the zoom behaviour, and keeps the text near the centre of the screen where people are already looking.