How long can a WhatsApp Status video be?
Updated 2026-08-05
WhatsApp’s documented limit for a Status video is 90 seconds. What you actually get may be 30, 47 or 90 — the limit rolled out unevenly, and community reports through 2025 describe all three in circulation at the same time. Anything longer than your cap is trimmed to the opening seconds, not split into a second entry.
So the useful answer is not a number, it is a habit: check where your own composer stops, and build the clip to fit that rather than to fit an article.
The limit, by date
| When | Limit | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Until 2024 | 30 seconds | The long-standing Status video cap, and still the number most articles and app listings repeat. |
| 2024 | 60 seconds | The first increase. Coverage from this period is the reason so many how-to pages still say “up to a minute”. |
| From around April 2025 | 90 seconds | WhatsApp’s help pages state videos can be up to 90 seconds. Tech press in several languages reported the change independently, and a competitor’s own Spanish page describes the same 30 → 60 → 90 progression. |
| June–August 2025 | 30, 47 and 90 | Threads on r/whatsapp report the limit going back down to 30, others landing on 47, and others reaching 90 — same weeks, same app. One poster ties the shorter cap to files over 10 MB. |
| Today | 90 documented | 90 seconds is the figure WhatsApp publishes. Our own research has not confirmed the stable cap on current iPhone builds, so we treat 90 as documented and 30 as the number that always works. |
The iPhone caveat, stated plainly
Most of the evidence for 90 seconds comes from WhatsApp’s help pages, from press coverage of the rollout, and from Android beta reporting. We have not verified the stable iOS cap on a current build ourselves, and we are not going to write “90 seconds on iPhone” as though we had.
What that uncertainty means in practice is simple. Treat 30 seconds as the floor that works on every build, including whichever version your viewers are running, and treat anything above it as a bonus you have confirmed on your own phone.
How to find your own limit in about a minute
- Open Status with a long video — In WhatsApp, start a Status entry and pick a clip that is clearly longer than 90 seconds.
- Watch where the trimmer stops — The composer opens on a trim bar with the selection already capped. The width of that selection is your limit today — 0:30, 0:47, 1:30 or something else.
- Re-check after an app update — The cap travels with the app version and the rollout, so it can change under you without any announcement. Two phones in the same room can disagree.
What happens when you go over
WhatsApp trims. It keeps the first N seconds and shares only that; it does not create a second Status entry, and it does not ask whether you would rather split the clip. The pages describing this are explicit that only the opening portion is posted.
This is why the “my Status cut off my video” complaints outnumber the “what is the limit” questions. The limit is invisible until it has already eaten the ending — usually the part that made the video worth posting.
The other consequence is that the limit applies per entry, not per day. Three 30-second entries posted back to back give viewers 90 seconds of video with no cap involved at all — which is exactly why splitting a long clip into ordered parts works on every version of the app, whatever your cap turns out to be.
Where VividStatus fits
VividStatus is an iPhone app that prepares photos and videos for WhatsApp Status: it fits them to the exact 9:16 frame, splits longer clips into ordered parts sized to what your WhatsApp actually accepts, and hands them to WhatsApp in one tap — entirely on device, with no watermark, no ads and no account.
It cannot raise your limit — nothing installed on your phone can. What it can do is stop the limit deciding which half of your video your friends get to see.
Status length questions
Why does my friend get 90 seconds when I get 30?
Because the limit travels with the app version and the rollout, not with your account. Different builds, different regions and — per one report — different file sizes have produced different caps at the same moment. Checking your own composer is faster than reasoning about why.
Does the limit apply to photo Status entries too?
Photos are not length-limited the way videos are; a photo entry is shown for a few seconds in the viewer regardless. What both share is the 24-hour expiry — every Status entry, photo or video, disappears a day after you post it.
Does WhatsApp tell me it trimmed my video?
Not in any way people notice. The composer simply opens with the selection already capped, so the footage past the cap is gone before you have decided anything. That silence is the actual problem with the limit.
Can an app raise the Status limit?
No, and be suspicious of any that says it can. WhatsApp decides what it accepts and re-encodes what you upload. What an app can honestly do is fit your video to the limit you have — by trimming it, or by splitting it into parts that each land under the cap.
Is 30 seconds still safe to plan around?
Yes. It is the one length no build in circulation rejects, which is why VividStatus ships with 30-second parts by default. It is a floor, not a ceiling: parts are sized to the cap that applies to your export, so if your composer gives you more, you can use it.