Social Media Character Limits in 2026: X, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and SMS

The limits at a glance

Every network sets a ceiling on how much you can write in one place, and the ceiling is different for a post, a caption, a bio and a headline. The table lists the main ones. They were checked on 20 October 2026 against the platforms’ own help pages where those are public and against four 2026 cheat sheets where they are not. Where sources disagreed, the table uses the figure that is safe to rely on and the note says so.

Two figures deserve a second look. TikTok captions are reported as 2,200 characters by some sources and 4,000 by others, as the limit has been raised for some accounts, so plan for 2,200. And X’s higher limit for paid accounts is widely reported, but X’s own counting page only documents the 280 figure, so treat 25,000 as a secondary-source number.

Why the same text can fit on one platform and not another

A “character” sounds simple until you paste in an emoji, a link or a few words of Arabic. There are three common ways to count, and platforms do not agree on which to use.

• Characters as a reader sees them. The thumbs-up with a skin tone (👍🏽) is one character on screen. Bluesky counts this way, which is why 👍🏽 uses 1 of its 300.
• UTF-16 code units, the way JavaScript and many databases count. The same emoji is 4 units, because it is two symbols joined together and each needs two units.
• Weighted characters, the way X counts. Most Latin letters count 1, but emoji and characters from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and many other scripts count 2, and every link counts 23 no matter how long it is.

Here is the effect in practice. A post of 240 letters followed by a link of 71 characters is 312 characters when counted as typed, which looks far over the 280 limit. On X it counts as 240 + 1 + 23 = 264, so it fits. The reverse happens with emoji: 😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀 is 150 emoji but counts 300 on X, over the limit, while Bluesky counts it as 150 of 300.

The counter’s X meter applies X’s published rules, with one honest caveat: X’s documentation says Latin text, punctuation and common symbols count 1, and does not list every Unicode range. The tool uses the ranges from X’s open-source text-parsing configuration, so a rare symbol could differ by one.

Text messages: 160, 70, 153 and 67

SMS is the strictest. A single message has room for 140 bytes, and how many characters that holds depends on the alphabet. If every character is in the basic GSM-7 set (English letters, digits, common punctuation and a few accented letters such as é and ü) you get 160 characters. If even one character is outside it, the whole message switches to UCS-2 and the limit drops to 70.

Longer messages are split into parts and rejoined by the phone, and each part gives up a few characters to carry the joining data, which is why a part holds 153 or 67. A message of exactly 160 plain characters is 1 message; one more character makes it 2 parts. A short “Hi 😀” is 5 places in UCS-2, still 1 message, but 100 letters and one emoji is 102 places and needs 2 messages, where the 100 letters alone would have been one.

A few GSM-7 characters cost two places because they sit in an extension table: the euro sign, the square and curly brackets, the tilde, the caret, the vertical bar and the backslash. Eighty euro signs are 160 places and 1 parts. Many carriers charge per part, so a single smart quote or emoji pasted into a long reminder can double its cost. The counter shows which alphabet your text needs and lists the characters that forced the change.

Page titles, descriptions and ads

Search results are different: there is no hard limit, only what Google chooses to show. Google cuts titles and descriptions by width in pixels, not by character count, so a title of 60 narrow letters shows in full and 60 wide ones may be shortened. Roughly 60 characters for a title and 155 to 160 for a description is a sensible target, and the counter marks them as guides rather than limits. Google also rewrites titles and descriptions it thinks are not helpful, so a snippet you wrote is not guaranteed to be the one shown.

Paid search has real limits. A Google responsive search ad allows 30 characters in a headline and 90 in a description, and in languages with double-width characters, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, each character counts as two.

Writing inside a limit

1. Write for the shortest limit you will use and expand for the rest. A message that works at 280 characters can be padded for LinkedIn; the reverse means cutting.
2. Put the point first. Platforms fold long posts behind a “see more” link and search results cut from the end, so the first line does the most work.
3. Count where it will be posted. Paste the final text into the counter instead of trusting a word processor, which counts differently and may use curly quotes the platform handles as extra characters.
4. Leave a margin of a few characters if the text contains emoji, in case the platform counts them as two.
5. Re-check before a campaign. Limits move, as X, TikTok and Instagram have each changed theirs in recent years.

As a worked example, a caption of 2,100 characters has 100 to spare on Instagram and 900 on LinkedIn, but is 1,820 over on X and 2,000 over on a YouTube title. 1,820 over is the X result for that caption.

Common questions

Sources

Reviewed on 20 Oct 2026 against the published sources below. Laws and prices change, so check the current position before you rely on a figure.

• X Developer Platform: counting characters (280 limit, links count 23, emoji and CJK count 2)
• Metricool: character limit for each social network (checked 20 October 2026 against three other 2026 cheat sheets)
• Google Ads Help: responsive search ad limits (headlines 30, descriptions 90)
• Wikipedia: GSM 03.38, the default SMS alphabet
• Google Search Central: how Google generates titles and snippets in results

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