How to use this character counter
- Paste or type your text into the box above.
- Enter the limit you are writing to, if you have one.
- Watch the remaining count. It turns into an over-limit warning when you exceed it.
- Use the breakdown to see where the characters are going, spaces alone are often a fifth of the total.
- Trim and re-check until you are comfortably inside the limit.
What this counter shows
- Characters counted both with and without spaces, since limits are defined either way.
- A live countdown against any limit you set, with a clear over-limit warning.
- A breakdown into letters, digits, spaces and punctuation.
- Word count alongside, for when a brief specifies both.
- Instant updates with no button and no page reload.
- Complete privacy. Nothing is sent anywhere or stored.
Where character limits actually bite
Word limits are advisory in a lot of contexts. Character limits usually are not. They are enforced by a database column, an API, or a platform that simply refuses your input. Being one character over is the same as being a hundred over, which makes counting precisely worth the effort.
They also show up where you would not expect. Product titles on marketplaces, SMS messages, form fields on government portals, database columns behind an internal tool, video descriptions, alt text guidance, and almost every field a social platform exposes.
Limits worth memorising
- 160: a single SMS. Beyond it the message splits and may cost more to send.
- 280: a post on X.
- 60: roughly where search engines truncate a page title.
- 160: the usual advice for a meta description.
- 125: a practical maximum for alt text before screen readers become tiring.
- 2,200: an Instagram caption, though only the first two lines show by default.
With spaces or without?
Both figures matter and they are used in different places. Translators, transcribers and copywriters are frequently paid per thousand characters, and whether the rate includes spaces makes a real difference to the invoice. A typical English text is about 17 per cent spaces.
Platform limits almost always count spaces, because they are counting what gets stored. Academic character limits vary and are worth checking against the guidance rather than assuming. This tool shows both continuously so you never have to work out which one somebody meant.
The awkward truth about emoji
Characters are counted as JavaScript code units, which is the same way most web systems count them. That works cleanly for ordinary text and gets strange with emoji. A simple smiley counts as two, and a flag or a family emoji built from several joined code points can count as four, seven or more.
This is not a quirk of this tool. It is how the underlying platforms count too, which is why an emoji-heavy tweet runs out of room faster than the visible characters suggest. If a limit matters and your text contains emoji, count with them in place rather than adding them afterwards.
Getting under the limit
The reliable order is: remove qualifiers, then remove restatements, then shorten phrases. "In order to" becomes "to" and saves nine characters. "At this point in time" becomes "now". Passive constructions almost always cost more characters than active ones.
If pasted text is longer than it should be because of hidden formatting, the text cleaner strips invisible characters and double spaces that quietly eat into a limit. For word-based limits, the word counter is the tool you want, and everything here runs locally so nothing is ever uploaded.