Check your text message length, encoding type, and see how many SMS segments it will use.
Quick Templates
Characters
0
160 remaining in segment
SMS Segments
0
160 chars per segment
Encoding
Max 160 chars/SMS
Est. Cost
$0.0000
~$0.0075/segment (industry avg)
| Encoding | Single SMS | Multi-part (per segment) | Used For |
|---|---|---|---|
| GSM-7 | 160 characters | 153 characters | Standard Latin text, numbers, basic punctuation |
| Unicode (UCS-2) | 70 characters | 67 characters | Emojis, Chinese, Arabic, special symbols |
Standard letters (A-Z, a-z), numbers (0-9), and these symbols:
These characters use an escape sequence and count as 2:
A single emoji forces Unicode encoding, reducing your limit from 160 to 70 characters.
Curly quotes (“ ”) copied from Word or email force Unicode. Use straight quotes (" ") instead.
Long URLs eat up characters. Use bit.ly or similar services to shorten links.
Multi-part SMS costs more and may arrive out of order. Keep messages concise.
A single SMS can contain 160 characters using GSM-7 encoding (standard Latin text). If your message contains emojis, Chinese characters, Arabic, or other special symbols, it switches to Unicode encoding which limits each SMS to 70 characters.
When your message exceeds 160 characters (GSM-7) or 70 characters (Unicode), it's split into multiple segments. Each segment reserves some characters for a concatenation header that helps reassemble the message on the recipient's phone, reducing usable space to 153 or 67 characters per segment.
Emojis, Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and many special symbols force Unicode. Common culprits include curly quotes, em-dashes, and trademark symbols. Our tool highlights these characters so you can replace them.
Extended characters (^ { } \ [ ~ ] | €) don't force Unicode, but they count as 2 characters each because they require an escape sequence. This can affect your character count but won't reduce your per-SMS limit to 70.
Most carriers and SMS providers bill per segment. A 161-character GSM message would be split into 2 segments and billed as 2 SMS. This is why staying under 160 characters is cost-effective for bulk messaging.