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// Social Media

Character Counter online

Count characters and check real-time limits for X, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, SMS and more — updated 2026

Character Counter logo
by
CHUNKY
MUNSTER
// Type or paste your text
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// Platform limits

How to Use character-counter

  1. Type or paste your text into the input area.
  2. Character counts update in real time — no need to click anything.
  3. Switch between platform tabs (X/Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, SMS) to see limit status.
  4. The colour indicator turns amber at 80% of a platform's limit and red when you exceed it.

Every text input channel has character limits — 280 for X/Twitter, 2,200 for Instagram captions, 3,000 for LinkedIn posts, 1,500 for TikTok, and 160 for a standard SMS. This counter tracks all of them simultaneously with live visual feedback, so you can write once and know exactly what fits where.

Platform Character Limits Reference (2026)

X (Twitter): 280 characters for standard accounts, 25,000 for Premium subscribers. Instagram: 2,200 characters for feed captions, 300 for comments. LinkedIn: 3,000 for personal posts, 700 for company updates. Threads: 500. TikTok: 2,200. Facebook: 63,206 (effectively no practical limit). SMS: 160 GSM-7 characters; if you use extended characters (emojis, accented letters), the message uses UCS-2 encoding and the limit drops to 70 per segment. This counter distinguishes GSM-7 from Unicode SMS automatically.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Twitter/X count all characters the same?

No. URLs are always counted as 23 characters regardless of actual length. Emojis count as 2 characters (they are encoded as surrogate pairs in the Twitter API). Mentions and hashtags count normally.

Why does my SMS split into multiple messages?

Standard SMS is 160 GSM-7 characters. Using emojis, special symbols, or certain accented characters switches the encoding to UCS-2, which supports Unicode but reduces the per-segment limit to 70. Long SMS messages are split into segments of 153 (GSM-7) or 67 (UCS-2) when using concatenated SMS.

What is the Instagram caption character limit?

Instagram captions can be up to 2,200 characters. Only the first 125 characters show without a "more" tap in the feed. Instagram also truncates hashtags at the end at various points in the algorithm — keeping captions concise often improves engagement.

Does the counter handle emoji correctly?

Yes. Emoji are multi-byte Unicode characters — some are represented by multiple code points (emoji sequences with zero-width joiners). The counter uses JavaScript's spread operator over the string to count by Unicode code points, not by UTF-16 code units.

See also the Word Count tool, the Truncate Text tool, and the Word Wrap utility.