Where to Put Captions on TikTok, Reels, Shorts and LinkedIn

The most common captioning mistake has nothing to do with transcription accuracy. It is putting perfectly good captions in the part of the frame that the platform covers with its own interface — the username, the video caption, the hashtags, the like and share buttons.

You export a video that looks right in your editor, upload it, and half your text is sitting behind a row of icons. This guide is about avoiding that, on each of the platforms that matter, and it ends with the specific number to set in the captioning tool.

The one thing every vertical platform has in common

TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels and LinkedIn all take a 9:16 vertical video — 1080 x 1920 pixels is the standard — and all of them draw their interface on top of it. The video is not letterboxed into a smaller safe area; it plays full-bleed and the UI overlays it.

That interface consistently occupies three regions: a strip at the top for navigation and status, a column down the right-hand side for the action buttons, and — the one that matters most for captions — a substantial band across the bottom for the account name, the post caption and the audio credit.

Why you should distrust exact pixel numbers (including ours)

Search for safe-zone dimensions and you will find confident, precise, and mutually contradictory numbers. For TikTok's bottom band alone, widely-cited guides variously specify 270, 334, 400 and 484 pixels on a 1920-pixel-tall frame. They cannot all be right.

They are not lying so much as measuring different things. The safe area genuinely differs between organic posts and ads, between ad placements, between app versions, and between phones — a device with a tall display and gesture navigation reserves different space than a shorter one. Anyone quoting a single authoritative pixel value is quoting a snapshot.

So rather than give you a false-precision number that will be wrong next quarter, here is the durable version: the bottom 20-25% of a vertical frame is contested space on every major platform. Keep captions above it and you are safe essentially everywhere, without needing to track each app's redesigns.

Platform by platform

TikTok

The most crowded of the five. The bottom band carries the username, the post caption (which expands when tapped, covering more of the frame), hashtags, and a scrolling audio credit. The right column of action buttons is also the tallest here. TikTok is the platform to design for: clear TikTok's UI and you have cleared everyone else's.

Instagram Reels

Similar in structure to TikTok, with a comparably tall bottom band. Reels is also the platform where the post caption most often runs to multiple lines, so leave headroom. If you are choosing a visual style as well as a position, we cover that separately in caption styles for Instagram Reels.

YouTube Shorts

Slightly more forgiving at the bottom than TikTok, but it adds a complication the others do not have: a Short can also be viewed on a desktop browser and on a TV, where the layout is completely different. Captions positioned for the phone still work in those contexts, which is another argument for staying well clear of the edges.

Facebook Reels

Structurally close to Instagram Reels, unsurprisingly. The practical difference is audience: Facebook video reaches a broader demographic, which makes legibility — size and contrast, not just position — worth more attention than it gets.

LinkedIn

The outlier. LinkedIn video is frequently watched in a scrolling feed rather than full-screen, so your video may be displayed in a smaller frame with less overlay. The bottom band is less aggressive than TikTok's. The bigger risk on LinkedIn is that people watch on a laptop at desk-size, where captions sized for a phone screen look oversized and shouty.

What to actually set

In MakeCaption the relevant control is Height above bottom, expressed as a percentage of your video's height rather than in pixels. Percentages matter here: a 150-pixel offset means something completely different on a 1920-tall export than on a 1280-tall one, whereas 20% means the same thing on both.

• TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels — 22-25%. Clears the busiest bottom bands with room for a two-line post caption.
• YouTube Shorts — 20%. Slightly more room at the bottom, and safer for desktop and TV playback.
• LinkedIn — 15%. Less overlay to avoid; going too high wastes usable frame.
• Not sure, or posting the same cut everywhere — 25%. The safe default. Costs you a little vertical space and removes the problem entirely.

The preview in the tool reflects the exported position, so you can check placement before rendering rather than after uploading.

Placement is not the only thing that hides captions

Two related failures put text out of reach even when the position is right. The first is contrast: white captions over a bright background disappear regardless of where they sit, which is what outlines and background capsules exist to fix. The second is size — text sized comfortably on a laptop preview can be unreadable on the phone where it will actually be watched. We go into both in choosing fonts for video captions.

And placement is a presentation choice, not an accessibility one. Positioning captions well does not make them accurate; only reading them does. Automatic transcription needs a human pass before publishing, which matters both for your viewers and, if you publish commercially, for your obligations under accessibility law.

The short version

• Every vertical platform overlays its own UI on your video; the bottom band is the dangerous one.
• Published pixel dimensions disagree because the safe area genuinely varies by placement, app version and device.
• Keeping captions above the bottom 25% is robust across all five platforms without tracking redesigns.
• Use a percentage-based offset, not a fixed pixel value, so placement survives a change of export resolution.
• Check the preview before rendering — it is cheaper than discovering the problem after upload.