X (Twitter) Character Counter (Live Count + 2026 Limits)

X’s 280-character limit hides several counting quirks. Every link is wrapped in the t.co shortener and billed at exactly 23 characters, whether the URL is 10 characters or 200 — so a post with a link really gives you 257 for words. Most characters count as one, but X counts many East Asian (CJK) characters as two, halving the effective limit for those scripts. Emoji generally count as two characters as well.

This counter counts plain characters, which is exact for ordinary text and slightly conservative for link-heavy posts. If the count says you are just over and a link is included, you probably still fit.

X Premium subscribers can publish posts up to 25,000 characters (as of June 2026), turning the platform into a long-form venue. But long posts appear collapsed in the timeline with a “Show more” link after the first few lines — readers still decide whether to expand based on your opening, exactly as they did at 280.

If you schedule posts through a tool, check which limit applies to your connected account: a 1,000-character draft posts fine from a Premium account and fails outright from a free one. There is no partial truncation — over-limit posts are rejected, not trimmed.

When an idea genuinely needs more space on a free account, the native answer is a thread: each post gets its own 280 characters, and the first post still has to earn the click into the rest. Numbering posts (1/5) costs characters but sets expectations.

Hashtags count toward the limit, and X’s own guidance has long been minimal — one or two at most, if any. Use the “exclude hashtags” toggle above to see what your message weighs without them. Writing once for X plus longer-limit networks is the classic cross-posting headache; SocialKit shows the per-network counts side by side so the X version gets trimmed deliberately, not by error message.