SMS character count estimate

SMS Character count

A standard SMS message can contain up to 160 characters. However, if the message includes any special characters—such as emojis, curly quotes (“ ”), symbols like €, or accented/non-English letters (e.g., é, ñ, 世)—the character limit drops to 70. This happens because the message switches to Unicode format, which requires more data per character.

If a message exceeds these limits, it will be split into multiple parts. For standard messages, each additional part is limited to 153 characters; for Unicode messages, the limit is 67 characters per part. This reduction is due to a few characters being reserved to join the parts together, ensuring the message is delivered as one continuous SMS rather than as separate messages.

These limitations apply to all web-based SMS platforms and are consistent across all SMS providers.

Character estimates

Our SMS templates provide dynamic fields like <client name> or <appointment time>. These placeholders are replaced with real details at the time of sending.

For example: <client name> might be replaced with Anne (4 characters) or Antonette-Marie (15 characters).

If your template is estimated at 160 characters and a long name is inserted at the time of sending, the final message to send to Antonette-Marire become 162 characters—just over the limit—and therefore 2 SMS credits instead of 1.

Because of this, character counts shown in the editor are estimates. Final message length can vary based on the actual data inserted for each recipient.

In most cases, we have overestimated character counts when inserting code (e.g. allowing 13 characters for client first name when in most cases, first names are not this long).