# SMS character counter.

- Canonical URL: https://www.broadnet.me/developers/sms-counter
- Language: en
- Last updated: 2026-10-21
- Publisher: BroadNet (https://www.broadnet.me)
- Markdown version of the page above, generated from the rendered page.

Developer tool · client-side

Paste a message. See exactly how many segments it'll cost, which encoding the carrier will use, and which characters force the message into double-byte UCS-2.

85 characters

·

Try an example

Encoding

GSM-7 Single-byte alphabet

Length

85

Segments

1

Remaining

75

Single SMS fits 160 chars. Each part of a multipart SMS holds 153 (concatenation header eats 7).

How it works

## The 160 / 70 split (and why it costs you money).

SMS encoding is defined in **3GPP TS 23.038**. The short version: every message is encoded as either **GSM-7** (7-bit, 160 chars/segment) or **UCS-2** (16-bit, 70 chars/segment). One non-GSM-7 character anywhere in the message bumps the whole thing to UCS-2 — your character budget gets cut by more than half, and so does the maximum length before the carrier starts billing per segment.

### Characters that look harmless but force UCS-2

- **Smart / curly quotes** (“ ” ‘ ’) — auto-substituted by macOS, iOS, and most word processors. Use straight quotes (" ') instead.
- **Em-dashes — and ellipses …** — also auto-inserted by autocorrect. Use a hyphen-minus (-) and three dots (...).
- **Accented letters not in the GSM-7 extension table** — é ñ ü are fine; á í ó are not (without the extension). The counter above shows you exactly which one bit you.
- **Any emoji** — 😀 🎉 ✅ all force UCS-2.
- **Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean** — entire languages outside GSM-7. UCS-2 is the only option.

### Multipart math

When a message exceeds the single-segment limit, the carrier wraps it in a User-Data Header (UDH) so the receiving handset can stitch the parts back together. That header eats 7 characters of payload per part — which is why multipart drops to 153 (GSM-7) or 67 (UCS-2) chars per segment instead of 160 / 70.

Most carriers (and BroadNet) bill per segment. The counter above shows the segment count in real time — trim a few characters below the next boundary and you can drop a segment.

## Ready to send?

BroadNet ships a REST API, an SMPP bind, delivery-status webhooks and an official TypeScript SDK, with an OpenAPI 3.1 spec for every other language. Request test access and we reply within one business day.

[Request test access](https://www.broadnet.me/signup) [Developer hub](https://www.broadnet.me/developers)