How many characters fit in a multilingual SMS?
English SMS fits 160 characters per part; Hindi, Tamil, and other regional scripts drop to 70 per part on UCS-2 encoding. This is an operator limit, not an SMSLocal restriction.
SMS messages are split into 'parts' by the operator. Each part is billed as a separate SMS. The part size depends on which character set you're using.
Part sizes
- GSM-7 (English + Latin) — 160 characters per part, 153 for messages with more than one part.
- Unicode UCS-2 (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Malayalam) — 70 chars per part, 67 for multipart.
- Mixed scripts — the entire message is encoded as Unicode, so even one Hindi character drops you to 70 per part.
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