A single SMS message technically supports up to 160 characters for English letters, or up to 70 if the message contains one or more Unicode characters (such as emoji or Chinese characters). However, modern phones and mobile networks support message concatenation, which enables longer messages to be sent.
- As soon as your text becomes a multi-part message, the character limit changes to 153 characters per part. More data is required to create a sequence of messages, so the count decreases from 160 to 153. Those seven characters get used for invisible headers and footers. You will get charged per part; in other words, one part is one SMS credit.
What is the length of SMS in Arabic?
Most non-Latin languages are encoded in Unicode. For example, the Arabic SMS character length is limited to 70.
- Like standard messages, once you go beyond 70 characters, they become segmented into multiple parts. Each part can then be up to 67 characters long, as it takes up extra data to create a sequence of messages. Note that as soon as one technical symbol gets added to your message content, it will get deemed a Unicode text message.
When you compose an SMS message, in our portal, it will indicate you how many SMS it will require to be sent. This will be the most accurate way to understand the numbers.