When you send a text/SMS message for your business, you are typically charged per segment. Knowing how many segments is important to understand the length and type of message you want to send to your clients. Read below to learn how the characters in your text/SMS message split into segments…OR…you can go to our SMS Segment Estimator tool further down this page to see how your message would be split.
What is the history behind SMS message length?
SMS is a standardized communication protocol that enables devices to exchange short text messages and was defined as part of the GSM protocol. Originally it was designed to “fit in between” existing signaling protocols which is why SMS length is limited to 160 seven-bit characters.
There are 2 types of SMS messages:
Standard message – contains characters from the GSM Basic Character Set.
Unicode message – If a message contains any characters that aren’t in the GSM basic character set, the message type will be treated as unicode. (To read more about GSM & Unicode go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38)
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 Unicode characters and will shorten your character length per message.
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