There are 2 kinds of SMS:
- Standard message - contains only characters from the GSM Basic Character Set (see table below)
- Unicode message - If a message contains any characters that aren’t in the GSM 03.38 basic character set, the message type will be treated as unicode.
Long Messages
A standard SMS message has a maximum of 160 characters including spaces, carriage returns, line feeds etc.
It is possible to send longer messages, however please be aware that exceeding 160 characters will constitute a ‘second’ message.
The end user will see this as 1 long (concatenated) 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 message-part as the phone requires 7 characters to tell it that a message-part is part 1 of 2, part 2 of 2 etc.
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
GSM Basic Character Set
Note: Line breaks/carriage returns count as 2 characters.
GSM Extended Character set
The following characters are also available, but they are counted as two characters in the SMS message rather than one:
| , ^ , € , { , } , [ , ] , ~ , \
Do spaces count as characters?
Yes, spaces do count as characters.