How long can a YouTube Short be?

YouTube treats any vertical or square video up to three minutes as a Short. That limit was raised from sixty seconds, and many older articles and tutorials still quote the old figure. A horizontal video of the same length is uploaded as a normal long-form video and does not appear in the Shorts feed. You do not need to add #shorts to the title or description for YouTube to recognise one; the shape and length are enough.

The longer limit is useful for a few formats: a full recipe, a complete before-and-after of a repair, a short explainer that genuinely needs ninety seconds. It is not a reason to make every Short longer. In a swipe feed, each extra second is another chance for the viewer to leave, and a Short that loses most of its audience halfway through tends to be shown to fewer people. The usual advice holds: make it as long as the idea needs and no longer.

There is one practical catch with longer Shorts. YouTube has said that Shorts over one minute with an active Content ID claim can be blocked, which in practice means music or clips you do not have rights to. If you use a popular song from YouTube's Shorts audio picker, keep the Short under a minute, or use music you are licensed to use. For businesses in Islamabad making product or service Shorts, original voice-over with quiet library music avoids the issue entirely.