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TikTok's safe zone: four template downloads, not one number

TikTok ships four safe-zone templates, not one figure. The standard one, measured: 12.5% top, 34.4% bottom, 11.1% each side, plus a right-hand column.

TikTok publishes no single safe-zone size. Its in-feed spec page says the zone depends on the ad's dimension, caption length and any additional formats used, and ships four template downloads instead: standard and with-anchor, each in a left-to-right and an Arabic version. The standard template, for a vertical ad with no anchor, is one fixed geometry on a 720 × 1280 frame: 160 px clear at the top, 440 px at the bottom, 80 px each side, and a column down the right from 560 px, drawn to scale on the TikTok in-feed page. Design against the template that matches your ad, not a bare pixel figure.

Search for TikTok ad safe zones and you'll find confident numbers. Keep 150px clear at the top. No — 160px. Side margins of 60px. Or 80px. The safe area is 960 × 1330. Or 880 × 1440.

Those all come from published articles, and they contradict each other by more than rounding: following one and checking against another would leave your headline in a different place.

Here's what TikTok's in-feed spec page says the safe zone is:

The safe zone size is determined by the dimension (vertical, horizontal, or square), ad caption length, and any additional formats used.

There is no one number for every ad, and the figures above sort cleanly against TikTok's files: 160 and 80 match its standard template, drawn on a 720 × 1280 frame; 60 matches its with-anchor template, drawn on 540 × 960 (the same 11.1% of the width); 150, 960 × 1330 and 880 × 1440 match no TikTok file. At 1080 × 1920 the standard template is 240 and 120 px. A pixel count without its frame is only true at one size.

Why doesn't TikTok publish one safe-zone size?

Think about what sits on top of a TikTok ad. The caption, the account name, the CTA button, the sound attribution, the interaction rail. The caption is the problem: it's user-supplied text, and a longer caption occupies more vertical space. On Spark Ads, TikTok will display up to four lines of caption, emoji included.

TikTok's with-anchor template (files dated 2021) makes that concrete: it ships four versions of each frame, one per caption line count, and on the vertical frame the bottom band grows from 42% to 53% of the height between one line and four. The standard template is one frame and states no caption length, so treat it as TikTok's rule for a plain vertical ad and the anchor set as the proof that captions move the bottom edge.

So TikTok ships downloadable safe-zone template files instead of one figure. The Auction In-Feed Ads page links four: a standard set and a with-anchor set, each in a left-to-right and an Arabic version, because the interface mirrors in RTL markets and so does the column it covers. TikTok's instruction is to use the standard file unless the ad carries an anchor; the 1:1 and 16:9 frames exist only in the with-anchor set.

Use the templates. Download the set, pick the file for your market and for whether you run an anchor, and with the anchor set pick the caption-length variant.

The specs TikTok does publish

Each of these is one figure, all from the same Auction In-Feed page, which is a video spec sheet. Static images run in the feed too, but as Carousel Ads, which TikTok describes as "an ad format that supports images for TikTok-in-feed ads" and specs on a separate page, drawn up on our carousel page: 2 to 35 JPG or PNG images, at 1200 × 628 horizontal, 640 × 640 square or 720 × 1280 vertical, a suggested 100 KB or less per image, and a required music track. Don't mix those numbers into the video table below.

Non-Spark ads
Aspect ratios9:16 (recommended), 16:9, 1:1
Minimum resolution540 × 960 · 960 × 540 · 640 × 640
File types.mp4, .mov, .mpeg, .3gp, .avi
DurationUp to 10 minutes
File size≤ 500 MB
Bitrate≥ 516 kbps

Spark Ads (the format that runs an organic post as an ad) take .mp4 or .mov according to the in-feed page. TikTok's Spark Ads page says there are no restrictions on duration and, further down the same page, that there is a 10-minute maximum on videos that can be sparked; the in-feed page also says no restriction. Plan for ten minutes.

Two things people get wrong here.

540 × 960 is a floor, not a recommendation. TikTok publishes a minimum resolution and a recommended ratio, which is a different thing from Meta, who recommends a specific resolution. Plenty of guides report 1080 × 1920 as TikTok's "recommended" spec. TikTok doesn't say that. 1080 × 1920 is still what you should export, because it matches modern phone screens and gives compression something to work with. That is practice; TikTok doesn't publish it.

Ten minutes is only a ceiling. It tells you what the uploader accepts. It belongs in the same mental bucket as Meta's 30 MB file cap: a limit, not a target.

The text you don't control

This is the part that catches people moving over from Meta.

On non-Spark in-feed ads, the caption is displayed in white, in a uniform font that can't be customised, and supports no clickable links, no @ mentions and no hashtags. You supply a string and TikTok renders it, its way, over your creative.

Account name is capped at 10 characters for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, or 20 characters in other languages. That limit matters if your brand name is long and you're running in multiple markets.

Don't put anything in your creative that duplicates the caption, because you control neither its length nor its styling, and its length is exactly what determines how much of your frame it eats.

How this differs from Meta

Most teams arrive here from Meta. The differences:

  • Meta publishes percentages: the top 14%, the bottom 35% and 6% of each side of a 9:16 frame, plus the bottom 40% of the right-hand 21% on its help diagram. They don't change with caption length. TikTok ships template files instead: the standard one is a single fixed geometry with a column down the right, and only its with-anchor set (files dated 2021) changes with the number of caption lines.
  • Meta recommends a resolution. TikTok's in-feed page gives a minimum and recommends a ratio.
  • Meta's headline is yours to style. TikTok's caption is not.

What carries over: on both, the safe area is an L rather than a box, because a column down the right cuts into its lower part (from 44% of the height on TikTok's standard template, from 60% on Meta's diagram). It's smaller than you expect, and a 9:16 ad is not a 4:5 ad on a taller canvas. Composing for the frame rather than cropping into it matters even more here, because you have less room to be wrong in.

Designing a TikTok in-feed ad

  1. Download TikTok's safe-zone template (or start from the standard one drawn to scale on our in-feed page) and check it against the variant that matches your ad. That page's downloads are 720 × 1280, the frame the standard template is drawn on; its percentages carry over to the 1080 × 1920 you export in step 3, where they are 240 px top, 660 px bottom and 120 px each side. A pixel figure from an article is only true at the canvas it was measured on. To see where the standard template's bands fall on your own export, drop it into the free safe zone checker.
  2. Pick your caption length before you design if you run an anchor. The with-anchor templates come per caption line count; the standard template states none.
  3. Export 1080 × 1920 even though the published minimum is 540 × 960.
  4. Don't restate the caption inside the creative.
  5. Check the account-name limit if you run in CJK markets.
  6. Use the Arabic template for RTL markets. The interface mirrors, and so should the composition.
  7. Leave time for review. TikTok's pages say most ads are reviewed within 24 hours, give no ceiling for a first review, and allow up to 24 hours for an edit. The quotes, and what review checks, are in TikTok's ad review, explained.

Meta's ad sizes have the same problem: spec sheets republish numbers without checking them. Here, half of the circulating numbers match a label on one of TikTok's template files, printed without the frame it was drawn on; the other half match no TikTok file.

Sources

TikTok revises these pages without notice, so open the source before relying on any figure above.

Terrads composes each placement for its own frame, including 9:16.