Limits
Character limits, A to Z
Forty limits in one place — SMS, meta descriptions, bios, ad headlines, personal statements — with a note on which are hard caps and which are only advice.
Character limits are enforced by machines with opinions. Two fields that both say “280 characters” may be counting different things, and the only limit that matters is the one implemented by the system you are submitting to. What follows is a reference to the common ones, with a note on which are hard caps and which are advice.
All figures verified 28 July 2026. Platform limits change without notice.
Social platforms
| Field | Limit | Enforced? | Practical target |
|---|---|---|---|
| X / Twitter post | 280 weighted units | Hard | Under 240, for quoting |
| X / Twitter bio | 160 | Hard | — |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 | Hard | First 125 before “more” |
| Instagram bio | 150 | Hard | — |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 | Hard | First 210 before “see more” |
| LinkedIn headline | 220 | Hard | Front-load the first 60 |
| LinkedIn About | 2,600 | Hard | First 265 shown |
| Facebook post | 63,206 | Hard | Under 80 for engagement |
| YouTube title | 100 | Hard | Under 60 to avoid truncation |
| YouTube description | 5,000 | Hard | First 157 shown in search |
| TikTok caption | 2,200 | Hard | Under 150 |
| Pinterest description | 500 | Hard | Under 200 |
| Reddit title | 300 | Hard | Under 100 |
| Threads post | 500 | Hard | — |
Search and web
| Field | Limit | Enforced? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Title tag | ~60 | Soft | Truncated by pixel width, around 580px |
| Meta description | ~155 | Soft | Truncated by pixel width; often rewritten anyway |
| URL slug | no cap | Soft | Under 60 for legibility |
| Image alt text | no cap | Soft | Under 125; screen readers may cut |
| H1 heading | no cap | Soft | Under 70 |
| Open Graph title | ~60 | Soft | Varies by platform preview |
| Open Graph description | ~200 | Soft | Varies by platform preview |
Messaging and email
| Field | Limit | Enforced? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| SMS, GSM-7 | 160 | Hard | 153 per segment when concatenated |
| SMS, UCS-2 | 70 | Hard | 67 per segment; triggered by one non-GSM character |
| Email subject line | ~78 recommended | Soft | Mobile clients cut around 35–45 |
| Email preheader | ~100 | Soft | Client-dependent |
| Email address, local part | 64 | Hard | RFC 5321 |
| Email address, total | 254 | Hard | RFC 5321 |
| Push notification title | ~50 | Hard | OS-dependent |
| Push notification body | ~150 | Hard | OS-dependent |
Stores, ads and forms
| Field | Limit | Enforced? |
|---|---|---|
| Google Ads headline | 30 (each of three) | Hard |
| Google Ads description | 90 (each of two) | Hard |
| App Store app name | 30 | Hard |
| App Store subtitle | 30 | Hard |
| App Store description | 4,000 | Hard |
| Google Play title | 30 | Hard |
| Google Play short description | 80 | Hard |
| Amazon product title | 200 | Hard |
| Etsy listing title | 140 | Hard |
| UCAS personal statement | 4,000 characters / 47 lines | Hard |
| Common App essay | 650 words | Hard |
Three things that break character counts
1. Weighted counting
X does not count characters; it counts weighted units. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters weigh 1. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Hebrew characters weigh 2. Every URL, however long, is counted as exactly 23 units after link shortening. A post that reads as 250 characters may be over the limit or comfortably under it depending on which of these it contains.
2. Encoding
The SMS case is the one that catches people most often, and it is entirely invisible. Type an apostrophe on a phone keyboard and you probably typed U+2019, the curly one, which is not in the GSM-7 character set. That single character drops the capacity of your message from 160 to 70 and can turn a one-segment send into three. If you send SMS at volume, the cheapest optimisation available is a find-and-replace on curly quotes.
3. Pixels, not characters
Search result truncation is a width problem, not a length problem. A title of 60 narrow characters fits where 55 wide ones do not. This is why every “ideal title length” figure is approximate, and why a title in capitals is cut earlier than the same title in sentence case.
How to use the counter for this
Paste the text into the character counter and read the headline figure, which includes spaces — that is what every limit on this page uses. The “no spaces” figure below it is there for translation and transcription pricing, which is the main place the other convention survives.
Then, if the limit genuinely matters, paste into the real field before you commit. Our count is what a person would count. Theirs is what their code counts, and on emoji, URLs and CJK text those two are not the same number.
Common questions
How many characters is a tweet?
280 weighted units on the free tier of X. Most Latin characters weigh 1, but CJK characters weigh 2, and every URL is counted as a fixed 23 units regardless of its actual length.
What is the ideal meta description length?
About 155 characters. Google truncates by pixel width rather than character count, so a description in wide letters is cut sooner. Nothing is penalised for being long; it is simply not shown.
How many characters can an SMS hold?
160 in GSM-7 encoding. A single character outside that set — a curly apostrophe, an em dash, an emoji — switches the whole message to UCS-2, which holds 70. Longer messages are split into segments of 153 or 67.
Are these limits counted with or without spaces?
With spaces, in every case on this page. Spaces are ordinary characters to every platform listed here. The without-spaces figure matters mainly in translation pricing.
Does an emoji count as one character in a limit?
It depends on the platform and it is often more than one. Many systems count UTF-16 code units, which makes most emoji 2 and some composite emoji 7 or more. If you are close to a limit and using emoji, test in the real field.
How often do these limits change?
Platform limits change without announcement, sometimes several times a year. Every figure here carries the date it was last verified, and the page is reviewed quarterly.