SMS Character Limit
Check a text message against the SMS limits. A single emoji, or even a curly apostrophe, can cut the limit from 160 characters to 70, so read on before you send in bulk.
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Character breakdown
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SMS limits at a glance
| Where | Limit | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Single message, standard characters (GSM-7) | 160 characters | Vonage API: SMS concatenation and encoding |
| Single message with emoji or other Unicode (UCS-2) | 70 characters | Vonage API: SMS concatenation and encoding |
| Each part of a long message (GSM-7) | 153 characters | Twilio Docs: How long can a message be? |
| Each part of a long message (UCS-2) | 67 characters | Twilio Docs: How long can a message be? |
Every limit is taken from the platform’s own help or developer pages, last checked on 4 October 2026. Platforms change these without notice, so if a figure looks wrong, the linked page is the one to trust.
160 or 70: it depends on the characters
A single SMS can carry 140 bytes. Messages that use only the standard GSM-7 character set (English letters, digits and common punctuation) pack each character into 7 bits, which fits 160 characters. If the message contains even one character outside that set, such as an emoji, a Chinese character or many accented letters, the whole message switches to UCS-2, which uses 16 bits per character and fits only 70.
A few GSM-7 characters cost two: € { } [ ] ~ \ | and ^ each take an escape character plus the character itself.
Long messages split into parts
A longer message is sent as several SMS that the phone joins back together. Each part loses a few characters to the information that tells the phone how to join them, so a part carries 153 GSM-7 characters or 67 UCS-2 characters. Senders that pay per part pay for every one.
| Message | Parts |
|---|---|
| 160 plain characters | 1 |
| 161 plain characters | 2 (153 + 8) |
| 70 characters including one emoji | 1 |
| 71 characters including one emoji | 2 (67 + 4) |
The hidden character that halves your limit
Text pasted from a word processor often contains curly quotes and apostrophes (’ “ ”) and long dashes (—), none of which are in GSM-7. One curly apostrophe in “we’re” is enough to drop the whole message to the 70-character limit. Run bulk messages through the text cleaner with “Convert smart quotes and dashes” switched on to turn them back into plain ones.
Limits on other platforms
For anything else, the character counter counts with and without spaces.
Frequently asked questions
How many characters can one text message have?
Why did my 100-character message send as two texts?
How many characters fit in each part of a long text?
Does this counter work out SMS parts for me?
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