Instagram Story Safe Zone: Exact pixel margins

 

On a 1080 x 1920 Instagram story, keep text, logos and faces out of the top 269 px, the bottom 672 px and 65 px on each side. That leaves a safe area of about 950 x 979 px in the middle. These margins come from Meta's current guidance for 9:16 ads in Stories and Reels: 14% of the top, 35% of the bottom and 6% of each side, with a taller clear area in the bottom-right corner.

Organic stories have less covering the bottom, so you can use more of the frame. The rest of this guide gives the numbers for both, explains why the guides ranking for this search disagree, and shows how to set the margins up as guides in your editor.

 

Safe zone in pixels

The percentages apply to any 9:16 story. Here they are converted for the two common canvas sizes.

1080 x 1920 px (standard story size):

• Top: 269 px (14%)
• Bottom: 672 px (35%)
• Left and right: 65 px each (6%)
• Bottom-right corner: 768 px high (40%) across the right 227 px (21%)
• Safe area: 950 x 979 px, minus the bottom-right corner

1440 x 2560 px (higher resolution export):

• Top: 358 px (14%)
• Bottom: 896 px (35%)
• Left and right: 86 px each (6%)
• Bottom-right corner: 1024 px high (40%) across the right 302 px (21%)
• Safe area: 1267 x 1306 px, minus the bottom-right corner

If your design runs as both an ad and an organic story, use these numbers. They are the strictest version.

 

Meta's diagram: the bottom-right corner

Meta's help article on the Safe Zone shows the margins on a diagram. Most guides copy the 14%, 35% and 6% figures from it and stop there. The same diagram also marks 40% on the right side of the bottom area and a width of 21% at the bottom right.

In practice, this means the right-hand 21% of the frame needs more room at the bottom than the rest: 40% instead of 35%. On a 1080 x 1920 story, keep anything placed to the right of x = 853 px above y = 1152 px. On Reels, this corner holds the like, comment and share buttons.

We did not find this corner in any of the ranking pages we checked.

Meta adds one more rule: if a Reels ad includes a disclaimer, leave the whole bottom 40% clear of text, logos and other key elements.

 

What covers each part of the story

Two things hide content near the edges: Instagram's interface and cropping on taller phones.

• Top: the progress bars, your profile photo and username, the posting time, and the menu and close buttons. Ads also show an "Ad" label here. Meta is replacing the older "Sponsored" label with "Ad".
• Bottom, organic stories: the "Send message" reply field and the like and share buttons.
• Bottom, ads: the call to action button (for example "Learn more").
• Sides: according to Meta, on screens taller than 9:16 it may zoom the creative to fill the screen, which crops the edges. Alternatively, it shows the creative at 9:16 with a black background filling the extra space.

 

Organic stories vs ads

Meta publishes safe zone percentages for ads only. We found no official figure from Instagram for organic stories.

For organic stories, many guides use a 20% bottom margin instead of 35%, which is 384 px on a 1080 x 1920 story. That figure is not from Meta. It is a common allowance for the reply field and buttons.

On 1080 x 1920, the organic version gives you a safe area of about 950 x 1267 px:

• Top: 269 px (14%)
• Bottom: 384 px (20%)
• Left and right: 65 px each (6%)

That is 288 px more vertical space than the ad version. If the story will only ever be posted organically, use it. If there is any chance it gets boosted or reused as an ad, design to the ad margins.

 

Why the guides you find disagree

We checked the pages that currently rank for Instagram story and Meta ad safe zone searches in October 2026 and found five different answers to the same question:

• 250 px top and 250 px bottom
• 250 px top and 340 px bottom
• 270 px top, 380 px bottom and 65 px sides
• 14% top, 35% bottom and 6% sides
• "the center 80% of the frame"

Three things explain most of the differences.

Different placements. Some pages give the organic figures, some give the ad figures, and few say which one they mean.

Older guidance. Earlier advice for Stories ads, widely attributed to Meta, was to leave about 14% (250 px) clear at the top and bottom. Guides from 2024 still give this figure. Meta's current help article applies one set of margins to all 9:16 ads in Stories, Reels, Feed and Facebook in-stream reels, with 35% at the bottom. The 250 px bottom margin is outdated for ads.

Rounding and arithmetic errors. 14% of 1920 px is 269 px, not 250 px. The older guidance rounded it down, and many pages copied the rounded figure. One ranking page lists the bottom margin as "20 percent (340 pixels)", but 20% of 1920 px is 384 px. The same page gives a safe area of 1080 x 1420 px, which matches neither of its own margins: 1920 minus 250 minus 340 is 1330 px.

The difference between 250 and 269 px is small. The difference between a 20% and a 35% bottom margin is 288 px, which is enough to put a headline or a price under the call to action button.

 

How to set up safe zone guides in your editor

1. Create your canvas at 1080 x 1920 px.
2. Add horizontal guides at y = 269 px and y = 1248 px (1920 minus 672). For organic-only stories, put the second guide at y = 1536 px instead.
3. Add vertical guides at x = 65 px and x = 1015 px.
4. For ads, add one more vertical guide at x = 853 px and one more horizontal guide at y = 1152 px. Keep the corner to the right of x = 853 and below y = 1152 empty.
5. Keep all text, logos, prices and faces inside the guides. Backgrounds and decorative images can run to the edges.
6. Before posting, check the result. For ads, turn on the Safe Zone guardrail in Meta Ads Manager, which shows the safe area as a yellow overlay on your creative. For organic stories, post to your Close Friends list first.

The same idea exists in print. A printed flyer also has a margin where text should not go, because the edge may be trimmed slightly off. Our guide to bleed in printing covers how printers handle the edges of a design.