How many characters does an SMS contain?

image d'une montagne de chiffre avec le titre combien de caractères comporte un sms ?

It is always useful to know the character limit of an SMS, because beyond a certain threshold, a 2nd SMS is sent. If the SMS Partner platform displays the number of remaining characters and summarizes pricing before each campaign send, in other cases this can lead to unexpected additional costs.

What is the character limit of an SMS?

In theory, in virtually all cases in France and Europe, the limit of an SMS encoded in UTF-7 is 160 characters. For a marketing (or transactional) SMS sent from the SMS Partner platform, this limit drops to 149 characters because we comply with the legislation requiring the inclusion of the “STOP SMS“ mention for every advertising campaign send. However, for informational SMS messages, this mention is not mandatory and the limit therefore returns to 160 characters.

That is why your message should be as clear as possible while remaining concise, in order to reach your recipient effectively. A free service we offer to optimize your message is the creation of a short URL to shorten your website’s domain name and leave more space for the information you want to convey.

In summary:

Number of characters available for the message: 160 characters (without the stop)
Number of characters available for the header title: 11 characters (no special characters)
Number of characters available for the redirect URL: 20 characters (if short URL)
Number of characters available for the opt-out notice: 17 characters

So a marketing SMS with a short URL and including the STOP can contain up to 123 characters!

Looking for a tool to count the characters in your SMS messages?

Discover our character counter

Watch out for special characters!

The majority of our characters correspond to an encoding table that allows 160 characters in a single SMS. (26 letters of the alphabet in lower and upper case, digits, certain characters such as “%”, “@”, “ä”, etc.).

However, for technical reasons, some characters are not included in this same 7-bit character table. They are encoded in UTF-16 bits and therefore take up more space, limiting the SMS to 70 characters. Note that as soon as just one of these characters is used (“ç”, “œ”, “â”, “ë” being the most common), all characters will be encoded in 16 bits, including those normally encoded in 7 bits. Adding emoticons ?? is also available with this encoding (see the list of smileys)…

7-bit encoding table:

Also read on this topic: Costly Special Characters – UFC Que Choisir?

On SMS Partner, all special characters encoded in 16 bits are automatically replaced by 7-bit characters. We thus guarantee the sending of SMS messages in 160 characters under all circumstances. (you can find the replacement list in our FAQ).