Free tool
SMS Character Counter
Paste a message to see how many SMS it is billed as. A standard SMS holds 160 characters, but one emoji, curly apostrophe or long dash switches it to Unicode and drops that to 70.
Writing in Arabic? Use the Arabic SMS 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 160 characters, and when it drops to 70
Every SMS carries 140 bytes of text. The standard alphabet, GSM-7, packs each character into 7 bits, which is how you get 160 characters. Any character outside that alphabet switches the whole message to UCS-2 (Unicode), where every character takes 16 bits: 70 characters.
The characters that do it are rarely the ones you notice. A curly apostrophe from Word or an iPhone keyboard, a long dash, a non-breaking space or a single emoji is enough. Turn on Smart Encoding above to see what the message costs with those swapped for plain 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 Unicode, and carriers bill every part as a full SMS.
| Encoding | Triggered by | One SMS | Per part, once split |
|---|---|---|---|
| GSM-7 | Plain English and Latin text | 160 | 153 |
| UCS-2 (Unicode) | Any emoji, curly quote, long dash, Arabic | 70 | 67 |
Frequently asked questions
How many characters are in one SMS?
160 in standard GSM-7 text. Past 160, the message splits into parts of up to 153 characters, and each part is billed as one SMS, so a 161-character message costs 2.
Why did my message drop to 70 characters?
One character outside GSM-7 switched it to Unicode. The usual culprits are curly apostrophes and quotes, long dashes, ellipses typed as one character, non-breaking spaces and emoji. The Non-GSM characters list shows exactly which ones, and Smart Encoding shows the count with them replaced.
Which characters count as two?
In a GSM-7 message, ^ { } [ ] ~ \ | and € each count as two, because they are sent as an escape code plus the character. Most emoji also take two slots in a Unicode message.
Does a link count towards the limit?
Yes, every character of it. A full product URL can use half an SMS on its own, which is why marketing SMS use short links.
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.
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