Character Limits for X, Instagram, LinkedIn, SMS and SEO (Cheat Sheet)
How many characters fit in a post on X, an Instagram caption, a LinkedIn post, a text message, a title tag or a meta description? Every useful limit, spaces included.
Write too much and your text gets cut off, truncated or rejected. Before you publish, know each platform’s limit — and whether spaces count. Here are the limits that matter most, with one simple rule: unless stated otherwise, spaces and punctuation count as characters.
Tip: paste your text into our character counter and open the Limits tab to see at a glance where it fits.
Social media
| Platform | Field | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| X (Twitter) | Post (standard account) | 280 characters |
| Caption | 2,200 characters | |
| Bio | 150 characters | |
| Post | 3,000 characters | |
| Headline | 220 characters | |
| Post | 63,206 characters | |
| YouTube | Video title | 100 characters |
| YouTube | Description | 5,000 characters |
Platforms change these limits regularly (X, for example, allows much longer posts for paid subscribers), so double-check when in doubt.
The limit is not the target
Instagram accepting 2,200 characters does not mean you should use them. On most networks, only the first lines show before “…more”. Put your main message in roughly the first 125 characters.
SEO: title tags and meta descriptions
Google truncates by display width (pixels), not by a fixed number of characters. In practice:
| Element | Recommended length |
|---|---|
title tag |
50–60 characters |
| Meta description | 120–160 characters |
| URL | As short as possible, keyword included |
Beyond that, text is cut off in search results. Wide letters (M, W) take more room than narrow ones (i, l), so 60 characters in capitals may already be truncated.
Text messages: 160 characters… or 70
A standard SMS holds 160 characters in the GSM alphabet. If your message contains any character outside that alphabet — an emoji, curly quotes, or many accented letters — it switches to Unicode and the limit drops to 70 characters.
Longer messages are split into segments of 153 characters (GSM) or 67 (Unicode). That matters for SMS campaigns billed per segment.
Writing, school and publishing
- Essays and applications often specify a limit “including spaces” or “excluding spaces”. The difference is about 15–20 % of the total, which is why our tool shows both.
- Online forms (cover letters, project summaries, grant applications) almost always count spaces.
- Translation is often quoted per word in English-speaking markets and per character in others.
Characters with or without spaces?
- With spaces: every letter, digit, punctuation mark and space counts. This is the rule for X, SMS and most forms.
- Without spaces: spaces (and usually line breaks) are removed — common in translation and some academic guidelines.
One trap: an emoji can be made of several technical characters. Our counter counts what you see — an emoji, an accented letter or a flag is one character.
And when you speak?
On stage, characters stop mattering — time does. For a speech or a video script, think in words per minute: about 130 wpm for a presentation. Our guide to how many words is a 5-minute speech covers the most common durations.