SMS character limit: how many characters fit in a text?
Checked:
SMS character limit: One SMS holds 160 characters when the text uses only the basic SMS alphabet (GSM-7), or 70 characters when it contains even one character outside it, such as an emoji or a Polish ł. Longer messages split into parts of 153 or 67 characters, and the recipient’s phone joins them back into one text.
Example
One emoji, twice the parts
“Hi Anna, your appointment is tomorrow at 10:00 at 5 Linden Street. Reply YES to confirm or NO to cancel.” is 104 characters and fits in one SMS. Add a 👍 at the end and the whole message switches to UCS-2: the limit drops to 70 and it goes out as two parts of up to 67 characters.
The limits in one table
The phone or gateway picks the encoding from the text. A single character outside GSM-7 moves the whole message to UCS-2.
| Encoding | When | One SMS | Each part of a longer message |
|---|---|---|---|
| GSM-7 | plain Latin letters, digits, basic punctuation | 160 characters | 153 characters |
| UCS-2 | any emoji, Cyrillic, or letters such as ł, ś, ą | 70 characters | 67 characters |
Why do emoji and some letters shorten a text?
The GSM-7 alphabet from 3GPP TS 23.038 has 128 characters: Latin letters, digits, punctuation and a few accented letters from Western European languages, such as é, ü and ñ. Anything else, including every emoji, needs UCS-2, where each character takes 2 bytes instead of 7 bits, so the same space holds 70 characters instead of 160.
Some GSM-7 characters count double: €, [, ], {, }, \, ^, ~ and |. They are sent with an extra escape character, so each takes 2 of the 160 places.
Why is a part 153 characters, not 160?
Each part of a long message carries a short header that tells the recipient’s phone how many parts there are and in what order to join them. The header takes the room of 7 GSM-7 characters or 3 UCS-2 characters. The recipient sees one text, but the carrier counts every part as a separate SMS.
How smsportal.app handles it
The send form in the dashboard shows the character and segment count under the text before you press Send. The phone app splits a long text into parts and sends them as one multipart message, so the recipient gets the whole thing. smsportal.app sends your text as written and does not swap characters for you.
Sources
- Twilio: How long can a message be?
- Telnyx: Message encoding (GSM-7, extended characters, UCS-2)
- 3GPP TS 23.038: SMS alphabets and character sets