YouTube Shorts Length and Size: The Current Limits

Most Shorts advice still says 60 seconds. That was the limit until October 2024, and the number stuck. This guide sets out the current length and shape rules from YouTube's own pages, and adds what our own data shows about how long Shorts run today.

How long a Short can be

YouTube Help says you can create Shorts up to three minutes long. For standard channels, videos uploaded on or after October 15, 2024 with a square or vertical aspect ratio, up to three minutes, are categorized as Shorts and can be monetized in the Shorts revenue-sharing model from the Shorts feed. Videos uploaded before that date remain long-form, and keep long-form monetization on the watch page. YouTube Help gives later dates for Official Artist Channels: videos uploaded on or after December 8, 2025.

The announcement on YouTube's blog, dated October 3, 2024, says the same in shorter form: starting October 15, you can upload Shorts up to 3 minutes long, and the change applies to videos that are square or taller in aspect ratio.

What shape and size a Short needs

Two statements set the shape. YouTube Help says a video with a square or vertical aspect ratio, up to three minutes, is categorized as a Short. The blog says square or taller. A video that is wider than it is tall, up to three minutes, is a regular video.

Resolution is covered by one line on YouTube's Shorts page: you can upload Shorts at a maximum resolution of 1080p. YouTube Help does not give a recommended pixel size for Shorts, and its general page on resolution says only that other aspect ratios play, with the player adapting to them. For 9:16 vertical video on a computer browser, it says YouTube may add padding around the video.

The upload limits that apply to every video, 256 GB or 12 hours for a verified account, are in our video size, resolution and length guide. A three-minute Short at 1080p is far below them.

How long Shorts really run

To see what creators actually publish, we used the sample from our Shorts vs long-form article: 115 channels drawn at random from the ones our site tracks, which lean toward popular or looked-up channels, and each channel's latest 50 uploads, 5,690 videos with a usable duration, read through the YouTube Data API on September 25, 2026.

The API has no field that says a video is a Short. The videos page in Google's documentation mentions Shorts only in a note on view counting. So we asked YouTube directly on September 26, 2026. For each of the 3,326 videos of 3 minutes or less, we requested its youtube.com/shorts/ address. YouTube serves the Shorts page for a Short and redirects a regular video to its watch page. That is a behavior we observed, not a documented feature, and YouTube could change it.

3,058 of the 3,326 were Shorts, which is 53.7% of all 5,690 uploads. The other 268 were regular videos.

The median Short ran 33 seconds. 727 Shorts, or 23.8%, were longer than 60 seconds, and 56 of the 93 channels that had posted a Short in their last 50 uploads had at least one of those. One of those 727 was uploaded before October 15, 2024.

The 60-second rule still fits most Shorts: 2,331 of the 2,360 videos of 60 seconds or less were Shorts, or 98.8%. It fails for the middle band. Of 966 videos between 61 and 180 seconds, 727 (75.3%) were Shorts and 239 were regular videos. A length cut at 60 seconds files a quarter of all Shorts under long-form, and a cut at 3 minutes files 239 regular videos under Shorts. Neither is exact, because only the shape and the upload date decide.

Does a longer Short get more views? Not in this sample. In the 31 channels that had at least three Shorts on each side of 60 seconds, the longer Shorts had the higher median views in 17 channels and the lower or equal in 14. That is too even to say either way, and these are popular channels, so treat it as a sign that length alone did not decide the views.

1. 01

   Shoot or export vertical or square

   9:16 at 1080p wide is 1080 x 1920. Square at 1080p is 1080 x 1080.

2. 02

   Keep it to 3 minutes or less

   Longer than that and it is a regular video, whatever the shape.

3. 03

   Stay at 1080p or below

   YouTube Help gives 1080p as the maximum resolution for Shorts.

4. 04

   Keep the title to 100 characters

   That is the limit YouTube Help gives on the Shorts details screen.

5. 05

   Check how your tools count Shorts

   Some tools still cut at 60 seconds. Our Channel Audit does.

What this means for tools that split by length

Our Channel Audit counts videos of 60 seconds or less as Shorts, so it can file a 90-second Short under long-form. Our Monetization Checker treats anything up to 3 minutes as possibly a Short and does not read those for ads, because Shorts ads run between videos and no single video shows an ad marker. Both are heuristics, since a public tool cannot see a video's shape, and the Data API gives only the duration.

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