Best fonts for captions and subtitles

Caption fonts have one job: be readable in under a second on a phone over moving footage. That rules out thin weights, scripts and anything condensed to the point of blurring. Bold, wide sans faces win, and a stroke or background box does more for legibility than any font choice.

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Fonts that work

• Montserrat ExtraBold or Black. The default look of a lot of short-form video.
• Poppins Bold. Rounder, friendlier, same readability.
• Anton and Bebas Neue. Tall, loud, good for a single word on screen; less good for full lines.
• Impact. Old, but on a phone at 60 px it still reads.
• Inter Bold or Arial Black. Neutral when the brand has its own personality elsewhere.

Fonts that fail

Anything below semibold weight, italic-only faces, script fonts, and typewriter fonts. They read fine on a monitor and vanish on a phone in daylight.

Size

On a 1080 x 1920 frame, 55 to 75 px. Go bigger for single-word captions, smaller for two-line captions.

Stroke and background

A dark stroke of 4 to 8 px, or a semi-transparent black box behind the text, keeps captions readable over bright footage. Pick one; both together look heavy.

Case

All caps reads faster at small sizes and matches the short-form style. Sentence case feels calmer for interviews and documentary edits.

Applying it in Premiere

Set the font once in Essential Graphics and save it as a Track Style. If you use a caption plugin, save the combination as a preset and the animation comes along.