Updated February 2025
When composing your message, the characters used,as well as the length of the message, affect how many actual SMS credits are sent.
High Level Summary - "Just give me the highlights"
Using basic characters - Plain text SMS (see the full chart below):
- A plain text SMS message with up to 160 characters will send as a single message credit.
- Any message above 160 characters sends as a multi-part stitched message.
- Stitched messages on smartphones appear as one long message and are guaranteed to be delivered in the correct order even for standard handsets.
- Multi-part (stitched) messages get 157 characters per credit because 3 characters are spent stitching the messages together.
Can I Send Emojis? 👍🙌
- Yes you can, provided that the recipient network supports it.
If the recipient network doesn't support emojis, the emojis will be stripped out. - Using emoji changes the encoding of the message to Unicode SMS - emojis are counted as 2 Unicode characters each.
- Emojis can be copied and pasted into the message content field from an external source, or using the emoji keyboard on your mobile device.
- See this article for emojis on your pc or mac.
- In Unicode SMS - You can include up to 70 characters to send as a single message credit.
- Multi-part(stitched) messages with special characters each get 67 characters.
- See the chart for a SMS part/text credit breakdown
MMS Messages: 🖼️
- MMS messages count as 2 message credits
- An MMS message is any message with a media (jpg preferred) attachment
- A single MMS message can contain up to 1,600 characters.
- For handsets that do not support MMS, an SMS (all-text) message will be sent with a link to the attachment. SMS message charges based on character count may apply.
- MMS takes a little longer to deliver to subscribers because it's carrying a heavy load of images. MMS is not meant for quick "join us now" texts. But it's awesome for event notices with a registration link.
Check out Best practices for sending images in MMS
Why can't I find the "special characters in my text?"
*Note: When pasting text into the body of your message, some punctuation in certain fonts will cause your message to show as special characters (Unicode.)
To avoid this, we suggest typing your message within the mobileAxept ReachNow message content box or composing it in a notepad or other text document without formatting, and then pasting it in.
Note: long dashes (double-length dashes), quotation marks ("), and apostrophes (') may appear as normal to you, but show as Unicode. Adjust by removing them from the text and typing in from your keyboard.
The "Nitty-Gritty"
Supported Characters
Individual characters used in the message determine the type of encoding that will ultimately be used to send the SMS message. The API automatically detects the encoding required from the characters used, which allows us to support the delivery of SMS in any language.
Basic Character Set (GSM-7)
You can send up to 160 characters in a single SMS message if all characters in your message are part of the GSM 7-bit character set:
GSM 7 bit default alphabet and extension table
3GPP TS 23.038 / GSM 03.38
| x0 | x1 | x2 | x3 | x4 | x5 | x6 | x7 | x8 | x9 | xA | xB | xC | xD | xE | xF | |
| 0x | @ | £ | $ | ¥ | è | é | ù | ì | ò | Ç | LF | Ø | ø | CR | Å | å |
| 1x | Δ | _ | Φ | Γ | Λ | Ω | Π | Ψ | Σ | Θ | Ξ | ESC | Æ | æ | ß | É |
| 2x | SP | ! | “ | # | ¤ | % | & | ‘ | ( | ) | * | + | , | . | / | |
| 3x | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | : | ; | < | = | > | ? |
| 4x | ¡ | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O |
| 5x | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | Ä | Ö | Ñ | Ü | § |
| 6x | ¿ | a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o |
| 7x | p | q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z | ä | ö | ñ | ü | à |
| 1B 0x | FF | |||||||||||||||
| 1B 1x | ^ | |||||||||||||||
| 1B 2x | { | } | \ | |||||||||||||
| 1B 3x | [ | ~ | ] | |||||||||||||
| 1B 4x | | | |||||||||||||||
| 1B 5x | ||||||||||||||||
| 1B 6x | € | |||||||||||||||
| 1B 7x | ||||||||||||||||
LF is the Line Feed character
Extended Character Set
The following characters are also available, but they are counted as two characters in the SMS message rather than one:
| , ^ , € , { , } , [ , ] , ~ , \Other Characters - Unicode
If other characters are required for different languages, 16-bit Unicode (UCS-2) encoding will be used. When using UCS-2 encoding, each character will take 2 bytes, which means up to 70 characters can be sent per UCS-2 encoded SMS message.
Use of emojis will update your message to Unicode encoding.
Long Messages
The message body in a request can contain up to 2000 characters. Longer messages will be split and sent as multiple distinct SMS messages. In most cases, those messages will be re-assembled on the handset and displayed to the end-user as a single long message. You can use the tables below to determine the actual number of SMS messages your message will use depending on its length and encoding.
Multi-part message breakdowns:
| No. of SMS parts/text credits | Standard 7-bit Characters | Unicode Characters |
| 1 | 1 – 160 | 1 – 70 |
| 2 | 161 – 306 | 71 – 134 |
| 3 | 307 – 459 | 135 – 201 |
| 4 | 460 – 612 | 202 – 268 |
| 5 | 613 – 765 | 269 – 335 |
| 6 | 766 – 918 | 336 – 402 |
| 7 | 919 – 1071 | 403 – 469 |
| 8 | 1072 – 1224 | 470 – 536 |
Why do the character limits change for multi-part messages?
When your message is split into multiple parts, some characters get used up by invisible headers and footers, which are used to identify which part of the message is being sent (e.g. Part 1 of 2).