What aspect ratio should your video be? A platform-by-platform guide for 2026

Use 9:16 vertical for full-screen mobile placements (TikTok, Instagram Reels and Stories, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels), 4:5 for feed placements like Facebook Feed and LinkedIn video ads, and 16:9 horizontal for YouTube long-form, your website, and anything watched on a TV or laptop. Square 1:1 is now a fallback rather than a default. If one shoot has to feed all of them, decide the crop before you film, not in the edit.

Aspect ratio is the shape of the frame, written as width to height. It sounds like an export setting, but it is really a pre-production decision: it changes where you put the subject, where on-screen text can go, and whether a single shoot can cover every platform. This guide gives the current official specs for each major platform, the safe zones to keep clear, and a simple rule for shooting once and cropping for all of them.

Same height, four shapes. On a phone held upright, the 9:16 frame is the only one that fills the screen.

What aspect ratio does each platform use?

Every major platform now treats 9:16 as the native shape for its full-screen video feed, and most accept a range of other ratios with bars or cropping. The table below lists the recommended ratio and resolution from each platform's own help pages, current as of October 2026. Where a platform accepts more than it recommends, the notes say so, and where it names no preferred ratio at all, the ratio column is our pick.

Two patterns stand out. First, vertical has won the full-screen feeds: every platform on this list either runs a 9:16 feed or recommends 9:16 somewhere. Second, the in-between feed placements have settled on 4:5 rather than square, because a 4:5 frame takes up more of a phone screen while still sitting inside a scrolling feed. For more on how the three short-form feeds differ beyond their shape, see Reels vs. TikTok vs. Shorts.

Is 9:16 vertical always the best choice?

For placements that fill a phone screen, yes. Vertical video fills the screen, carries more of your message per glance, and is what the platforms' own testing rewards. Meta's split tests of Reels campaigns found that 9:16 video with sound and key messages inside the safe zone beat still images by a wide margin:

But "vertical everywhere" is wrong for two jobs. Long-form YouTube is still a 16:9 world, and it is increasingly watched on the biggest screen in the house: YouTube says viewers watch over one billion hours of YouTube on their TVs every day. And your website hero, product page, and sales deck are mostly viewed on laptops. A vertical video embedded on a desktop page is a narrow strip with empty space either side.

Instagram's own shift is a good summary of where things have landed. When it moved the profile grid from squares to taller rectangles in January 2025, Instagram's head explained why:

"I know some of you really like your squares, and square photos are kind of the heritage of Instagram, but at this point most of what's uploaded ... are vertical in their orientation, so portrait versus landscape or square, and it just is a bummer to overly crop them." — Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, via Engadget

What are safe zones in vertical video?

Safe zones are the parts of a 9:16 frame that the app's interface will not cover. On full-screen feeds, the account name and follow button sit at the top, and the caption, call-to-action button, and like and share icons sit along the bottom and right edge. Anything you put there, a headline, a price, a logo, can end up hidden. Meta gives the most specific published numbers for Reels:

The practical habit: design every vertical cut to Meta's Reels zone by default, then check TikTok's overlay template before you post there. And plan it before the shoot, not after. If the talent stands low in the frame or the product sits at the bottom edge, no amount of editing will move them into the safe area.

Can you shoot once and crop for every aspect ratio?

Yes, if you plan the crop before you film. Capture at a higher resolution than your largest deliverable, keep the subject and any important action in the center of the frame, and you can cut every other ratio out of the same footage. The direction of the crop decides how you shoot:

• If vertical is the main deliverable, shoot 9:16 at 1080 x 1920 or higher. A 4:5 crop (1080 x 1350) and a 1:1 crop (1080 x 1080) come out of it with no loss. You cannot get a usable 16:9 out of vertical footage, though: the crop is only 1080 pixels wide and 608 tall.
• If you need 16:9 and vertical, shoot 16:9 in 4K (3840 x 2160) with the subject centered. A 9:16 crop from 4K is 1215 x 2160, enough for a 1080 x 1920 export. From 1080p footage the same crop is only 608 x 1080, which has to be upscaled and looks soft.
• For the one or two hero shots, shoot both orientations. A product reveal composed for the wide frame rarely survives a center crop gracefully. Turning the camera for one extra take costs a minute on set.

Framing is where the plan lives. If you know a 16:9 shot will also be cut to 9:16, keep the subject inside the center third of the frame and frame it a little looser than usual, so the vertical crop still lands on a clean medium. The guide to camera shot types covers how shot size behaves on a phone screen, and how to repurpose video content covers turning one shoot into a set of platform cuts.

How do you put aspect ratios into a video brief?

List every aspect ratio as its own deliverable, with its platform, length, and resolution, and add one capture note that tells the crew how the ratios will be cut from the footage. "Social versions" is not a deliverable. "30-second 4:5 for LinkedIn ads at 1080 x 1350" is.

Here is a prompt you can paste into PlanThatVideo, and the deliverables section of the brief it turns into.

Notice that the capture note does more work than any of the deliverable rows. It is the line that turns four ratios into one shoot instead of four, and it only works because it is written down before shoot day. Everything else in the brief, from the objective to the single message, is covered in how to write a video brief.

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