The short answer
Make your reel 1080 × 1920 pixels, a 9:16 aspect ratio, at 30 frames a second or more. It can run up to 20 minutes, but Instagram only recommends reels of 3 minutes or less to people who don’t follow you.
- Size
- 1080 × 1920 px9:16, full screen
- Length
- Up to 20 minutes3 minutes or less to reach new people
- Cover
- 420 × 654 pxInstagram’s recommendation; the grid shows its middle as 3:4
- Minimum
- 720 px, 30 fpsAccepted ratios: 1.91:1 to 9:16
Reel size and aspect ratio
A reel can be any shape from 1.91:1 (wide) to 9:16 (tall), at 720 pixels or more and 30 frames a second or more. Only 9:16 fills a phone screen, so that’s the size to make. Every other shape leaves part of the screen empty, and the table shows how much.
| Shape | Ratio | Pixels | Screen it fills | How it plays as a reel |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vertical | 9:16 | 1080 × 1920 | 100% | Fills the screen. Use this. |
| Portrait | 4:5 | 1080 × 1350 | 70% | A 285 px band above and below. |
| Square | 1:1 | 1080 × 1080 | 56% | Almost half the screen empty. |
| Landscape | 16:9 | 1920 × 1080 | 32% | A thin band across the middle. |
Feed posts are different. A photo post can be as tall as 3:4 (1080 × 1440), and the classic portrait post is 4:5. If you have footage in another shape, the free photo and video resizer turns it into 9:16 in your browser, with nothing uploaded.
How long an Instagram reel can be
Up to 20 minutes, in one clip or several that add up to 20 minutes. But a reel over 3 minutes isn’t recommended to people who don’t follow you, and that’s the limit that decides your reach.
So there are two limits:
- 20 minutes is the most Instagram lets you post as a reel. Your followers can still see a long reel.
- 3 minutes is the most Instagram will show to people who don’t follow you yet, in Reels and Explore. That’s where new followers come from.
Under 3 minutes, there’s no right length. A reel should be as long as its idea and no longer, because what Instagram measures is how much of it people watch.
“The top three signals that matter most for ranking are watch time, likes and sends.”
To see which lengths work in your niche, look at what the creators you learn from post. A free reel transcript shows any reel’s length, word count and pace.
What about 90-minute videos?
On 26 October 2026, Instagram started testing Features: horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long, made to be watched on a TV as much as on a phone. The test is open to a small group of creators in the US, and Features don’t share ad revenue, as reported by TechCrunch and Variety.
Features are not reels. Nothing about reels changed: a reel is still vertical, still up to 20 minutes, and still has to be 3 minutes or less to be recommended to new people. If you’re in the test, Features are a home for full episodes, podcasts and long interviews, shot 16:9. Everyone else should keep making short vertical reels, and cut clips from their long videos into them.
Reel cover size and the profile grid
Instagram recommends a cover of 420 × 654 pixels, a 1:1.55 ratio, as a JPG or PNG. Most creators make the cover the same size as the reel, 1080 × 1920, by picking a frame or designing one at that size.
Your profile grid shows each post as a tall tile, widely reported as 3:4 since January 2025. On a 1080 × 1920 cover, that’s the middle 1080 × 1440: the top and bottom 240 pixels are cut off in the grid. Put the cover’s title and any face inside the middle.
Choose the cover before you tap Share: once a reel is posted, its cover can’t be changed.
The reel safe zone
Instagram draws its own buttons over your reel: the account name and caption at the bottom, the like, comment and share buttons on the right, and the camera and Reels tabs at the top. Keep your text and faces out of those areas.
The grid tile: the middle 1080 × 1440. For ads, Meta asks for more room: the top 14%, the bottom 35% and 6% on each side.
The one box that’s safe everywhere
Put the two maps together and there’s one area of a 1080 × 1920 reel that’s clear both in the feed and on your profile grid: 945 × 1230 pixels, starting 240 px from the top and 0 px from the left. Above it the grid cuts your cover; below 1470 px the caption covers it; right of 945 px, from 1000 px down, the buttons do. Keep hooks, titles and faces in that box and they survive both places.
Phones differ, so check a frame before you post. The free safe zone checker lays Instagram’s interface over your frame or video, names each line of text that’s covered, and shows the grid crop.
Footage in other shapes
You can turn anything into 9:16 in one of two ways, and each costs you something:
- Crop it. Cropping 16:9 footage to 9:16 at full height keeps a 608 × 1080 slice of a 1920 × 1080 frame: about a third of the picture, scaled up to 1080 wide. It looks best when the subject stays in the middle. 4:5 footage loses far less: cropping it keeps 759 of its 1080 pixels of width.
- Fit it. Fitting keeps the whole frame and fills the rest of the screen with a blurred copy or a colour. It suits screen recordings and slides, where cutting the edges would cut words.
If you film for both reels and a horizontal video, frame wide and keep the speaker in the middle third, so the vertical crop still works. The free resizer does both, crop and fit, without uploading your file anywhere.
Export settings for Instagram reels
- Resolution: 1080 × 1920.
- Frame rate: 30 frames a second or more. Keep the rate you shot at.
- Video: H.264, high profile, progressive (not interlaced), 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. Most editing apps’ “Instagram” or “social” preset already uses them.
- Audio: stereo, at 48 kHz or 96 kHz.
- Cover: a JPG or PNG.
Then turn on Upload at highest quality in the app: go to your profile, tap the menu at the top right, then Media quality, and switch on Upload at highest quality. It takes longer to upload. Without it, a reel posted on a slow connection can look soft.
Make reels that fit, every time
HandlePilot’s Reel Maker cuts your own footage into a 9:16 reel with captions, and plans and scripts the next one from what’s working in your niche.
Before you post: a one-minute check
- The file is 1080 × 1920, 30 fps or more.
- It’s 3 minutes or less, unless it’s only for your followers.
- Hooks, titles and faces sit inside the 945 × 1230 safe box.
- The cover’s title reads in the middle 3:4 of the frame.
- Upload at highest quality is switched on.