Your message
Results
Encoding
GSM-7
Messages
0
Characters used
0
Left in this message
160
Per message
160
Fits in one message
How this counts
This is the standard GSM 03.38 rule. Carriers and SMS providers can handle some characters differently, for example by replacing accented letters, so the parts your provider bills may differ slightly.
SMS length rules
One GSM-7 message
160
characters
Each part of a longer GSM-7 message
153
characters per part
One UCS-2 message
70
characters
Each part of a longer UCS-2 message
67
characters per part
When a message is longer than one SMS, each part carries a small header so the phone can join them back together. That header takes the room of 7 GSM-7 characters or 3 UCS-2 characters, which is why the per-part numbers are lower.
Characters that count double
These are in GSM-7, but only through an escape code, so each one takes two of the 160 places:
- €
- [
- ]
- {
- }
- \
- ~
- ^
- |
What switches a message to UCS-2
Any character outside the GSM-7 alphabet: emoji, curly quotes, long dashes, most accented letters other than the few GSM-7 includes, and non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Arabic or Hindi. One such character changes the encoding of the whole message.
Marketing and alerts
Providers usually bill per message part. Check that a campaign text stays in one part before you send it to a list.
Text pasted from a document
Word processors turn straight quotes into curly ones and hyphens into dashes. One of those can more than halve the space per message; this page finds and replaces them.
Messages in other languages
See how many parts a message in Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or another non-Latin script will need, since these are always sent as UCS-2.
Sources
Limits last checked against these sources on 2026-10-19.
More tools
Related tools
Other counters for short text with a fixed limit.
Character Counter
Characters with and without spaces, words, sentences and paragraphs for any text.
X (Twitter) Character Counter
X weights emoji, CJK text and links differently. This counter applies those rules to the 280 limit.
Character Limits
Character limits for posts, bios and messages on the main platforms, with sources.