Facebook character counter

How to check a post, a bio and a comment

Facebook's three ceilings are further apart than any other platform's, so the first decision is which field you are writing for. After that, only one of them needs your attention.

1. 1Paste the text in and pick the surface, because the same paragraph is unremarkable in one of these fields and impossible in another.
2. 2Treat the post field as effectively unbounded and spend the attention you saved on the opening line instead.
3. 3Paste your profile intro into the bio surface: 101 characters, and the one Facebook field where you will genuinely run out.
4. 4Draft a long comment here before you write it in the box. The ceiling is 8,000 characters, and the field itself is unforgiving about the return key.
5. 5Re-check the count after adding emoji or an accented name, so the number you carry across is the reader's count rather than a byte count.
6. 6Copy it back in one paste. Part-typed, part-pasted text is where the stray invisible characters come from.

The numbers behind Facebook's three fields

The spread between these fields is the widest in social media: one you cannot fill, one you fill in a single sentence, and one in between that people hit more often than they expect.

• Post: 63,206 characters. Written for status updates nobody has ever produced, and useful mainly as reassurance that length is not your problem here.
• Bio: 101 characters. The short intro under your name on the profile, and the only field on this page worth counting to the character.
• Comment: 8,000 characters. Long comments are collapsed behind "See more".
• A pasted URL generates a preview card. Once the card has loaded you can delete the URL text and keep the card, which costs nothing and reads better.
• Any URL you leave in the text is charged at its full typed length; there is no shortener sitting in between.
• Tagging a friend or a Page charges the name you typed, and it renders as a link once the post goes up.
• Alt text on a photo is a separate field, and Facebook writes its own description if you leave it empty.
• Hashtags are ordinary characters in the post body, charged exactly like the words around them.
• A comment's ceiling is far below a post's, so text that would post fine can be refused as a reply.

Where the counting genuinely matters

Very little goes wrong with length on a Facebook post, which makes the real failures the quiet ones: the bio that will not take the sentence you wrote for it, and the comment refused after you typed it twice.

• A bio is 101 characters, which is one sentence. Counting it here beats discovering that halfway through typing it on a phone.
• An emoji costs one character here and two in any tool measuring code units, and at this length that difference is visible rather than academic.
• A name with a combining accent counts once as a reader sees it and twice as a code point counter sees it.
• Text pasted out of a chat thread can carry direction marks and zero-width characters. They are charged, and they are very hard to see.

When to close this tab

For most Facebook writing this page is a curiosity rather than a tool. The honest recommendation is to count the bio, glance at the comment, and never think about the post ceiling again.

• Use the counter for the bio, and for anything you are reusing across platforms where a Facebook-length draft will not fit.
• Cross-posting to X or Threads, count against those ceilings instead; whatever survives them will be accepted here.
• A post long enough to worry about is long enough to be something people open deliberately rather than something they scroll past.
• Length is the one thing Facebook will not stop you doing, which is exactly why it is worth stopping yourself.