Free tool
SMS length checker
Paste or type your message to see how many characters it uses, which encoding it needs and how many SMS parts you will pay for.
- 0characters
- 1SMS parts
- 0left in this part
- GSM-7encoding
How SMS length works
A single SMS can hold 160 characters using the standard GSM-7 character set, which covers English letters, numbers and common punctuation. Longer messages are split into parts of 153 characters, because each part needs a little space to tell the phone how to join them back together.
If your message contains any character outside GSM-7, such as an emoji, curly quotation marks or Chinese and Tamil script, the whole message switches to Unicode. A Unicode SMS holds only 70 characters, or 67 per part when split.
A few characters, including ^ { } [ ] ~ | € \, are in GSM-7 but count as two characters each.
Want more tips? Read How to write an SMS customers actually read.