Meta Video Ad Specs: Instagram Reels, Safe Zones

Meta video ad specs differ by placement across Instagram and Facebook. Instagram Feed takes 4:5 at a recommended 1,440 x 1,800 pixels, and Instagram Reels takes 9:16 at 1,440 x 2,560. Facebook Feed matches Instagram Feed at 4:5 and 1,440 x 1,800. All three accept MP4 or MOV up to 4 GB. On Reels and Stories, keep text and logos out of the top 14%, the bottom 35%, and 6% down each side, or the interface will cover them. Primary text limits differ sharply by placement: 44 characters on Reels against 125 on Instagram Feed. Checked against Meta's own ads guide in August 2026.

Most Instagram and Facebook spec sheets are copied from each other and two years stale, which is how "1080 x 1920" ended up treated as gospel when Meta's own guide now asks for considerably more. Below is what Meta currently publishes for both apps, pulled from its ads guide rather than from a roundup, along with the three rules that actually cost advertisers money when they get them wrong.

What are the Instagram and Meta video ad specs?

Meta's ads guide currently publishes video specifications for Facebook Feed, Instagram Feed, and Instagram Reels. Here is the complete set side by side.

The technical requirements are the same across all three: H.264 compression, square pixels, a fixed frame rate, progressive scan, and stereo AAC audio at 128 kbps or better. Instagram Feed also allows a 1% tolerance on aspect ratio, which is why a file that is a few pixels off still uploads without complaint.

The number worth pausing on is the resolution. Meta asks for 1,440 pixels on the short edge, not 1,080. Plenty of teams still export at 1080 x 1920 because that is what every older guide says, and the file will upload and run. It just gets compressed from a smaller source than Meta would like, and the difference is visible on a modern phone screen where text overlays and product detail are exactly what you need to stay crisp.

What is the Meta ad safe zone?

For Stories and Reels, Meta asks you to keep text, logos, and any critical visual element out of the top 14%, the bottom 35%, and 6% down each side of the frame. Everything outside that central band is liable to be covered by the profile icon, the caption, and the call-to-action button that Meta layers over your creative.

That bottom 35% is the one that causes real damage, and it is worth converting to pixels. On a 1,440 x 2,560 Reels asset, 35% is roughly the bottom 896 pixels. Burned-in captions almost always sit in the lower third of the frame, because that is where editors habitually put them and where they sit in organic content. Run that same file as an ad and Meta's interface lands directly on top of the words. The ad still serves, nothing gets rejected, and your subtitles are simply unreadable for the entire flight.

The fix is to design captions into the middle of the frame rather than the lower third. It looks slightly unusual in the editor and correct in the feed, which is the only place it matters. If you are producing Instagram Reels ads at volume, set the safe-zone guides once in your template and stop thinking about it.

What size should a Meta video ad be?

It depends which placement you care about most, and the honest answer is that no single file is optimal everywhere. Meta wants 4:5 in the feeds and 9:16 in Reels and Stories, and those are genuinely different shapes rather than a crop apart.

If you have to pick one, pick 9:16. Vertical is the native shape for Reels and Stories, which is where creator-style video performs, and Meta will letterbox or crop it into feed placements without rejecting it. Going the other way is worse: a 4:5 file placed into Reels leaves visible bars on a fullscreen surface, which reads as an ad before a viewer has processed a single word.

The stronger approach, if production allows, is to export both. One 9:16 master for Reels and Stories, one 4:5 version for the feeds, with the captions repositioned rather than simply rescaled. This is the same one-asset-many-channels problem that shows up everywhere in content production, and the general habit of reshaping a single asset for every channel it has to run on applies just as well to paid creative as it does to organic posts. What you should not do is upload a horizontal file and let Meta figure it out.

How long can a Meta video ad be?

Far longer than you will ever want. Facebook Feed accepts up to 241 minutes, Instagram Feed up to 60 minutes, and Instagram Reels up to 15 minutes. Those ceilings tell you nothing useful about what to make.

The number that matters is the minimum width rule on Reels, because it is the one spec that changes based on a creative decision. A Reels ad under 30 seconds needs at least 250 pixels of width. At 30 seconds or longer, the minimum doubles to 500. Anyone exporting small proxy files for a quick test can trip this without understanding why a longer cut suddenly fails to upload while the shorter one went through fine. For what length actually performs rather than what Meta permits, we worked through the platform data in how long a video ad should be.

How many characters is Meta primary text?

This is where a single caption written for all placements quietly breaks. Facebook Feed shows 50 to 150 characters of primary text, Instagram Feed shows 125, and Instagram Reels shows just 44. Instagram Feed also caps hashtags at 30.

Forty-four characters is about seven words. If you write one 140-character primary text and let it run across every placement, the Reels version truncates to a fragment, and the fragment is the version most of your creator-style inventory will actually serve against. Write the short one first, then expand it for the feeds, rather than writing long and hoping the truncation lands somewhere sensible.

This is also why burned-in captions matter more on Meta than the primary text field does. The words inside the video are the ones every viewer sees at full length, on every placement, with the sound off.

Do you need a different video for every placement?

No, but you need at least two, and you need to decide deliberately rather than letting Meta decide for you. A 9:16 master plus a 4:5 feed version covers the meaningful surfaces. Beyond that, the returns drop off quickly.

What you should avoid is relying on automatic cropping to fill the gap. Meta will happily reformat your asset to fit a placement it was not built for, and the result usually pushes something important, a face, a product, a caption line, into a corner or out of frame entirely. That is the same trade-off Google's platforms make with auto-derived assets, which we cover in the Demand Gen video specs guide, and the conclusion is identical on both platforms: upload real creative per shape and switch the automatic enhancements off.

What Meta no longer publishes

One practical note, because it explains why older guides cite specs you can no longer find. Meta has consolidated its ads guide. Dedicated video spec pages for Instagram Stories and Facebook Reels no longer exist at their old URLs, and the video specifications now published cover Facebook Feed, Instagram Feed, and Instagram Reels.

In practice that is less of a loss than it sounds. Stories and Reels share the same vertical 9:16 shape and the same safe-zone rules, so the Reels specification is the one to build against for both. But if you are chasing a Stories-specific number from a 2024 article and cannot find Meta's page for it, that is why: the page is gone, not hidden.

The three mistakes worth fixing first

If you only change three things after reading this, make them these. Export at 1,440 on the short edge instead of 1,080, so Meta compresses from the source it actually asks for. Move burned-in captions out of the bottom 35% of vertical creative, because that is where the interface sits and where subtitles go to die. And write primary text to the 44-character Reels limit before expanding it for the feeds, rather than the other way around.

None of that is difficult. It is just easy to skip when the ad uploads without an error, which is exactly what makes these errors expensive: nothing tells you the creative is compromised, the campaign simply underperforms and the diagnosis lands on targeting or bidding instead of on a caption sitting under a button.

Getting the specs right is the floor, not the strategy. Once the file is correct, the variable that still decides the outcome is what the ad says and who says it. If producing enough correctly-sized vertical creative to test properly is the constraint, AdsGen turns a product URL into native 9:16 UGC video ads with the hook written and captions burned in inside the safe zone, so the batch is ready to upload rather than ready to reformat. If you are still choosing a tool, our guide to choosing an AI UGC ad generator lays out the criteria that matter.

If the same creative also runs on TikTok, do not assume one preset covers both. TikTok takes the opposite approach to almost every rule on this page: it asks for a minimum of 540 x 960 rather than 1,440 on the short edge, it publishes no fixed safe zone percentages at all (only downloadable template files, and the zone shrinks as your caption gets longer), and its minimum bitrate changes depending on whether you buy on auction or reservation. The TikTok ad specs set out where the two platforms genuinely conflict.

LinkedIn conflicts with Meta in the opposite direction, and it is the one worth checking before you reuse a master file. Where Meta asks for 1,440 px on the short edge, LinkedIn caps width and height at 1,920 px and limits 9:16 vertical to 1080 x 1920, so a Reels-spec export is over the maximum on both axes at once. The LinkedIn video ad specs cover that ceiling and the copy limits that go with it.