Character Limits by Platform: How to Fit Your Message Every Time
Every platform cuts your text at a different point. SMS splits at 160 characters. Gmail subjects truncate around 60. LinkedIn previews your post at 210 before hiding the rest. Knowing the exact limits before you write saves the edit after.
Most people discover a character limit the hard way — after writing, after formatting, after the message looks exactly right. Then the platform splits it into two texts, cuts the subject line mid-word, or hides everything important behind a "see more" click. The fix is knowing the limit before you start, not after.
This is a reference post. The limits below are the ones that matter most for everyday professional and personal communication. Keep it bookmarked.
SMS and Text Messages
A single SMS is 160 characters using standard GSM encoding. This is a technical limit set by the protocol, not a platform choice. Exceed it and most carriers automatically split the message into multiple parts — which may arrive out of order, look fragmented, or incur additional charges depending on the plan.
If your message includes any Unicode characters — emoji, accented letters, certain punctuation — the limit drops to 70 characters per segment, because Unicode uses a different encoding that takes more space per character. A single emoji can turn a 155-character message into a two-part text.
For business SMS or any message where delivery and appearance matter, staying under 160 characters in plain text is the reliable target. Use the character counter to check before sending — especially for messages drafted in a word processor where character counts are rarely visible.
Email has two distinct character limits that affect how your message appears before it is even opened.
Subject line: most email clients display between 40 and 60 characters before truncating. Gmail on desktop shows around 70 characters; on mobile it drops to 30–40. The safe target for a subject line that displays fully across most clients and devices is 50 characters or fewer. Subject lines written at 80 or 90 characters are not shorter emails — they are subject lines that most recipients never read in full.
Preview text: the snippet of body text that appears beneath the subject line in an inbox is typically 90 to 140 characters on desktop and 40 to 50 characters on mobile. This text is often more influential on open rates than the subject line itself, because it extends the pitch. Writing the first sentence of every email as if it might be the only thing the recipient reads is a habit that pays off consistently.
Gmail Specific
Gmail imposes no hard limit on email body length, but the interface clips messages that exceed 102 KB of HTML content, showing a "Message clipped" notice with a link to view the full email. For plain-text emails this is rarely a concern. For HTML newsletters with heavy inline styling, it becomes relevant.
Gmail also truncates long subject lines in search results and notification previews more aggressively than in the inbox — keeping subjects under 50 characters ensures consistent display across every Gmail surface.
WhatsApp allows up to 65,536 characters per message — effectively no practical limit for conversation. The constraint on WhatsApp is not technical but behavioral: long messages in a chat context are rarely read in full. If a WhatsApp message requires more than three or four short paragraphs, it is usually better sent as a document or email.
WhatsApp Status updates are limited to 700 characters.
LinkedIn has several distinct limits depending on where the text appears.
Feed posts are truncated after approximately 210 characters on mobile and 700 characters on desktop before a "see more" prompt appears. The first 210 characters are the only ones guaranteed to be seen without a click — which makes the opening sentence of any LinkedIn post the most important one by a significant margin.
Article headlines are capped at 150 characters. Article body has no practical limit.
Connection request notes are limited to 300 characters — a constraint that forces the kind of brevity and specificity that makes connection requests more likely to be accepted.
About section allows up to 2,600 characters. As covered in our earlier post on writing a LinkedIn About section, most effective profiles use considerably less than the maximum — somewhere between 150 and 300 words is the range that gets read in full.
Twitter / X
X (formerly Twitter) allows 280 characters per post for standard accounts. Verified accounts on paid plans can post up to 25,000 characters, though the feed preview still truncates at 280.
URLs count as 23 characters regardless of their actual length, because X uses its own URL shortener. Images, videos, and polls do not consume character count. Replies and quote posts follow the same 280-character limit as original posts.
Instagram captions allow up to 2,200 characters, but the feed view truncates after approximately 125 characters before a "more" link. The first sentence or two carry all the weight. Hashtags and mentions count toward the character total.
Instagram bio is capped at 150 characters — a limit that applies equally to the profile name and the bio text combined, making brevity and precision essential for anyone using the bio as a discovery or conversion surface.
Quick Reference
| Platform / Field | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| SMS (GSM) | 160 chars | 70 chars per segment with Unicode/emoji |
| Email subject | ~50 chars | Safe display limit across clients and devices |
| Email preview text | 90–140 chars | 40–50 chars on mobile |
| WhatsApp message | 65,536 chars | Status: 700 chars |
| LinkedIn post (mobile) | ~210 chars | 700 chars on desktop before "see more" |
| LinkedIn About | 2,600 chars | Effective range: 150–300 words |
| LinkedIn connection note | 300 chars | — |
| X / Twitter post | 280 chars | URLs count as 23 chars |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 chars | Truncated at ~125 chars in feed |
| Instagram bio | 150 chars | — |
| Google Ads headline | 30 chars | Three headlines per ad |
| Google Ads description | 90 chars | — |
| SEO title tag | 50–60 chars | Pixel-based; 55 chars is reliable target |
| SEO meta description | 150–160 chars | ~120 chars on mobile |
How to Check Before You Send
The most reliable workflow is to draft the text first, then measure it against the relevant limit before pasting it into the platform. Writing directly inside a platform's input field — especially on mobile — makes it easy to lose track of count and difficult to edit once the limit is hit.
Paste your draft into the character counter, set a custom limit for the platform you are targeting using the Limits panel, and edit until the number is green. For SMS specifically, it is worth checking whether the text contains any Unicode characters that would trigger the lower 70-character-per-segment limit — plain ASCII is always safer for messages where delivery reliability matters.
Character limits exist because attention is limited. Every platform that truncates your text is making a judgment about how much a reader will engage with before deciding to move on. Writing to the limit — rather than against it — is how you ensure the most important part of your message is always the part that gets read.
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