Text UtilitiesText CountersFree Tool
SMS Character Counter
Count SMS characters and message parts using real GSM-7 vs Unicode detection, not just a length check.
How to Use SMS Character Counter
- 1Paste your SMS message
- 2See character count, encoding type, and number of message parts
Frequently Asked Questions
GSM-7 is the standard SMS character set (basic Latin letters, digits, common punctuation) that fits 160 characters per single-part message. Any character outside that set — emoji, most accented letters, non-Latin scripts — forces the whole message into Unicode (UCS-2) encoding, which drops the limit to 70 characters per part.
SMS encoding applies to the entire message, not per-character — if even one character requires Unicode, the carrier sends the whole text as Unicode, cutting the per-part limit roughly in half.
Each part of a multi-part SMS reserves a few characters for the User Data Header that tells phones how to reassemble the parts in order, leaving less room for actual text.
It checks every character against the real GSM 03.38 character set (including the extended characters that cost 2 septets each, like € and {}[]) rather than assuming standard encoding just because the message is short.
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