Interior ministry to raise disaster alert text limit to 157 characters

The interior ministry said Thursday it will raise the length limit for public safety text messages from 90 to 157 characters and widen the pool of sending agencies to include public institutions, starting Oct. 30.

The change will let alerts carry the location of a disaster, the danger involved and what people should do, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said. Under the 90-character cap, agencies had to shorten such details or split one warning into several messages. Emergency and urgent disaster messages will stay at 90 characters, a limit the ministry kept to account for older handsets.

The ministry had held off on the expansion because some older mobile phones might not receive 157-character messages. It ran a trial with local governments nationwide for about a year from October 2025, and about 48 percent of all messages sent during that period went out at the longer length, with no complaints from recipients about delivery.

The ministry is also making permanent a screening feature that checks outgoing alerts against earlier messages for similar or duplicate content. In trial use, the number of disaster messages sent fell about 20 percent from the same period a year earlier, from 11,433 to 9,173.

"With this improvement, we expect to give the public more detailed information on disaster situations and what to do, and to reduce unnecessary repeated sending," said Park Hyung-bae, head of the ministry's safety prevention policy office. "We will continue to improve the disaster message delivery system from the public's point of view."