Free tool
Arabic SMS Character Counter
Paste a message to see how many SMS it is billed as. Arabic fits 70 characters in one SMS, not 160, and a single curly apostrophe can do the same to an English message.
هذه الأداة بالعربيةCounting an English SMS? Use the SMS character counterSwaps look-alikes such as curly quotes and long dashes for standard characters before counting.
Encoding details
All characters are GSM-7 compatible. Extended GSM-7 characters count as two units.
None detected
SMS billed: 1,000 — Carriers bill every segment as one SMS.
Why an Arabic SMS costs more than an English one
Every SMS carries 140 bytes of text. The standard alphabet, GSM-7, packs each Latin character into 7 bits, which is how you get 160 characters. Arabic letters aren’t in that alphabet, so the message switches to UCS-2, where every character takes 16 bits. 140 bytes at 16 bits is 70 characters.
Once a message runs past one SMS, each part gives up 6 bytes to a header that tells the phone how to stitch the parts back together. That leaves 153 characters per part in GSM-7 and 67 in UCS-2. Carriers bill every part as a full SMS.
So a 120-character Arabic order confirmation is 2 SMS. Sent to 10,000 customers, that is 20,000 SMS on the invoice, not 10,000.
| Encoding | Used for | One SMS | Per part, once split |
|---|---|---|---|
| GSM-7 | Plain English and Latin text | 160 | 153 |
| UCS-2 (Unicode) | Arabic, emoji, curly quotes | 70 | 67 |
Frequently asked questions
How many characters fit in one Arabic SMS?
70. Past 70, the message splits into parts of up to 67 characters each, and every part is billed as one SMS. A 140-character Arabic message is 3 SMS, not 2.
Why does my English message count as Unicode?
One character outside the GSM-7 alphabet switches the whole message to Unicode. The usual culprits are curly apostrophes and quotes pasted from Word or typed on an iPhone, long dashes, non-breaking spaces and emoji. Turn on Smart Encoding to swap them for standard characters, or check the Non-GSM characters list to see which ones to remove.
Do emoji count as one character?
No. Most emoji take two of the 70 slots in a Unicode SMS, and some, like flags and skin tones, take four or more. One emoji in an English message also switches it from 160 to 70 characters.
Do spaces, line breaks and numbers count?
Yes. Every space and every line break is a character. Western digits (0–9) are in GSM-7; Eastern Arabic digits (٠–٩) are not, but an Arabic message is already Unicode, so they cost the same there.
Do the characters ^ { } [ ] ~ \ | and € count as one?
In a GSM-7 message they count as two, because each is sent as an escape code plus the character. In a Unicode message they count as one.
Is this the same count my SMS provider uses?
It uses the segmenting library from Twilio’s open-source Message Segment Calculator, which follows the GSM 03.38 and SMS concatenation rules carriers use. A provider can still add its own rules, such as a cap on the number of parts, so check your provider’s documentation for limits.
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