Instagram story size

1080 × 1920, a 9:16 vertical. The dimensions are the easy part — what catches people is that roughly the top 14 percent and bottom 20 percent are covered by Instagram’s own interface.

A story is never shown clean. Your profile picture and name sit across the top, the reply bar across the bottom, and on a Reel the caption and the like, comment and share buttons cover the bottom right as well. Anything you need read has to live in the middle band — roughly the central two-thirds. The other thing worth knowing is that stories and Reels use the same canvas but not the same safe area: a Reel loses more at the bottom and a chunk of the right-hand side too, so a story reposted as a Reel often has its caption sitting underneath the buttons.