What are the safe zones for YouTube Shorts?
The Shorts interface eats the top and bottom of your vertical frame. Put a caption in the wrong place and a quarter of your viewers never see it. Here is exactly where the safe band sits, and how to keep your text inside it.
By Thomas, founder of CutScore · Updated June 2026
Here is the trap. You edit your Short in a clean rectangle. No title, no channel name, no like button, no description, just your footage filling the whole frame. It looks great. So you drop your caption neatly along the bottom, where captions have lived since the dawn of subtitles, export, and post. Then you open the actual app and a third of that caption is sitting behind the title and your own channel handle.
I have done this. More than once. The edit looks finished because your editing canvas is honest and the Shorts player is not. YouTube paints its interface on top of your video after you upload, and that interface is greedy at the bottom and along the right edge. Your timeline never shows it to you, so the collision is invisible right up until it is live and permanent.
The fix is not complicated, it is just a habit. You design for the frame minus the furniture. Once you know roughly where the furniture sits, you keep your text out of it, and the problem disappears. So let us put numbers on the furniture.
Where the safe zone actually sits in a Short.
Think of the 1080×1920 frame as three bands. The middle one is yours for anything that has to be read. The top and bottom belong to YouTube. Here are the regions and what lives in each.
| Region of the frame | Rough size (of 1920px tall) | What sits there, and what to keep out |
|---|---|---|
| Top status band | top ≈ 130px | Progress bar and system status on some views. Keep no critical text right at the top edge. |
| Safe central band | ≈ 1080px middle | Your zone. Captions, key text, the subject's face and any on-screen call-out belong here. |
| Right action rail | right ≈ 200px | Like, comment, share, remix and the channel avatar. Keep important text out of the right edge. |
| Bottom title + meta band | bottom ≈ 530px | Channel name, title, description and CTA. Anything you park here will be partly covered. |
| Side margins | ≈ 60px each side | A small breathing margin so text never kisses the edge or gets cropped on odd screens. |
Checking text position by hand on every Short gets old fast. CutScore reads the file, finds your captions, and tells you which ones cross into the interface, with the timestamp and the fix.
Five things that keep your text clear.
1. Set guides at the start, not the end
Before you place a single word, drop two horizontal guides on your 1080×1920 canvas: one at about 130px from the top, one at about 530px from the bottom. Most editors let you save guide presets, so you do this once and forget it. Now your safe band is visible while you work, and you stop guessing. If your editor shows a "title-safe" or "9:16 safe area" overlay, turn it on, though be warned that the generic broadcast safe area is not tuned to the Shorts interface specifically.
2. Float captions higher than feels natural
Old habits put subtitles at the bottom. On a Short that bottom strip is the worst real estate you own, because the title, your handle and the description all stack there. Pull your captions up into the middle of the frame, roughly between 25 percent and 65 percent of the height. It feels too high in your editor. It looks correct in the app. Trust the app. This is one slice of where to place text in a video so it is not cut off, and Shorts is the strictest version of that problem.
3. Keep the right edge clear for the action rail
The like, comment, share and remix buttons stack down the right side, along with your channel avatar. They sit over the bottom-right quadrant, so any text or graphic that drifts into that corner gets a row of icons through it. Nudge logos, watermarks and end-card buttons toward the centre or the upper-left. A good gut check: if your most important on-screen element is in the bottom-right, move it. That corner is rented to YouTube.
4. Frame faces and subjects in the middle
Safe zones are not only about captions. If you are a talking head and your chin lands in the bottom title band, the title text will run across your jaw. Compose so the eyes sit in the upper-middle of the frame and the mouth stays well above the bottom 530px. Vertical framing is unforgiving, and the same instinct that keeps your text in the safe area keeps your face there too. If your framing already feels off in the edit, it will feel worse with an interface on top.
5. Preview on a phone, in the app, before you commit
This is the step everyone skips and everyone should do. Upload the Short as unlisted or private, open it on your actual phone in the YouTube app, and look at it with the full interface painted on. Then you see exactly what your viewers see: the real overlap, the real margins, the real cut-off. Watch the published version, not the file on your laptop, the same way you would check any video before you hit upload. Five minutes here saves a permanently clipped caption.
Here is a real CutScore coaching report: caption position, contrast, framing and the rest, scored, with timestamps and the exact fixes.
If you only fix three things.
Most safe-zone disasters come from these three. Sort them and your text survives the upload.
By guides, by phone, or in one pass.
With guides in your editor
Free and built in. Set horizontal guides at about 130px from the top and 530px from the bottom, then keep text inside. The catch: the guides are static, your captions move per clip, and a generic safe-area overlay is not tuned to the live Shorts interface. Good as a first pass.
On a real phone, in the app
The honest test. Post privately, open it in the YouTube app, and you see the true overlap on a real device. The cost is time: you do it after export, for every Short, and if it fails you go back to the timeline and round-trip again. Reliable, just slow.
With a coach in one pass
Hand the file to CutScore. It finds your on-screen text, checks it against the regions the Shorts interface covers, and returns a 0 to 100 score with the exact timestamp and fix for anything clipped. No round trips. See a sample report.
Frequently asked.
Catch the clipped caption before you post.
CutScore checks your Short against the Shorts interface and tells you exactly what is covered, with the timestamp and the fix. Join the waitlist for early access.
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