SMS Character Counter

Written byOleh Soloninupdated 10 September 2026

Message text

Result

Segments1
EncodingGSM-7
Characters left80
Characters80
Billable length80
What changed the encodingevery character fits GSM-7

A Cyrillic SMS is half the length

Works out how many segments a message splits into, which encoding it uses, and how many characters remain.

A standard SMS holds 160 characters, but only from the basic GSM alphabet — Latin letters, digits and common punctuation. One character outside that set switches the whole message to UCS-2, where each character takes two bytes and the limit drops to 70.

Cyrillic is not in the basic alphabet, so Russian messages almost always run at 70 characters. And a single Russian letter in an English message is enough to turn one segment into three.

What this calculator shows

The number of segments and the encoding in use
How many characters remain before the next segment
Exactly which characters pushed the message out of GSM-7

What to keep in mind

Concatenated messages spend part of each segment on a header: 153 characters instead of 160, and 67 instead of 70.
Extended GSM characters — curly braces, tilde, the euro sign — take two positions each.

FAQs

How many characters fit in one SMS?

160 for Latin and 70 for Cyrillic. In concatenated messages, 153 and 67 per segment.

Why is a Russian SMS shorter?

Cyrillic is not in the basic GSM alphabet, so the message is encoded in UCS-2 at two bytes a character. Segment capacity more than halves.

What is GSM-7?

A seven-bit encoding of 128 basic characters: Latin letters, digits, common punctuation and a few Greek letters. It fits 160 characters per segment.

Do emoji count?

They count and they force UCS-2. Many emoji take two positions because they consist of a surrogate pair.

Worked example

An order notification

Input: 66 characters of Russian text

Output: 1 segment in UCS-2, with 4 characters left

Note: Four characters of headroom is one word. Add the name of a pickup point and a ten-thousand-recipient campaign suddenly costs twice as much.

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SMS Character Counter

Result

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