How many characters can I send in an SMS?

Updated 1 year ago

This link helps you calculate how many characters you can send in an SMS: http://smscharactercount.com

A message can be classified as 2 types:

Standard message - contains characters from the GSM Basic Character Set (see below)
Unicode message - If a message contains any characters that aren’t in the GSM 03.38 basic character set, the message type will be treated as unicode. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38).

Long Messages

A standard SMS message has a maximum of 160 characters. Longer messages are definitely possible, however please be aware that exceeding 160 characters will constitute a ‘second’ message. The end user will see this as 1 long message on their handset.

When a message is longer than 160 characters, this is referred to as a multi-part message as it contains multiple messages (or multiple-parts). The total SMS limit then becomes 153 characters per ‘part’ as the 7 characters are used up by invisible headers and footers which denote which part of the message is being sent (i.e. Part 1 of 2). For example: If a message is longer than 6 message parts, it will be truncated (see below).

Standard English Characters:

1 – 160 characters = 1 Message

161 – 306 characters = 2 Messages

307 – 459 characters = 3 Messages

460 – 612 characters = 4 Messages

613 – 765 characters = 5 Messages

766 – 918 characters = 6 Messages

919 – 1071 characters = 7 Messages

1072 – 1224 characters = 8 Messages

Non-GSM (Unicode) characters:

1 – 70 characters = 1 Message

71 – 134 characters = 2 Messages

135 – 201 characters = 3 Messages

202 – 268 characters = 4 Messages

269 – 335 characters = 5 Messages

336 – 402 characters = 6 Messages

403 – 469 characters = 7 Messages

470 – 536 characters = 8 Messages

GSM Basic Character Set

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38

Note: Line breaks/carriage returns count as 2 characters.

Can I send Emojis?

Yes you can, provided that the recipient network supports it. If the recipient network doesn't support them, they will be stripped out.

Emojis are counted as 2 unicode characters each. As soon as you add an emoji to a message, the whole message is treated as a unicode message (see unicode character count tables above)

Can I force only GSM characters?

Yes you can. Open the Unicode SMS Settings and select 'Force non-unicode'

Do you support non-english characters?

Yes, we support any characters with utf-8 character encoding. You can use any characters you want in all parts of our system (API, dashboard etc.).

You can enable this to your account: https://help.clicksend.com/article/mueq678bcy-do-you-support-non-english-characters