Tokens per character

A common rule of thumb is one token per four characters of English text. Enter a character count to estimate tokens.

250
estimated tokens
188
words
1,000
characters
3
paragraphs
1
pages

Approximate for English prose (about 1.33 tokens per word, 4 characters per token). Counts vary by tokenizer and language. For an exact GPT count, paste your text into the counter.

The four-characters-per-token rule

A widely used estimate is one token per four characters of English text, including spaces. It is convenient because character count is trivial to measure, but it is only an average: dense code or non-English scripts can run closer to two or three characters per token, using more tokens than the rule suggests.

FAQ

Is four characters per token exact?

No, it is an average for English. For an exact count, paste the text into the token counter, which uses the real GPT tokenizer.

Current model pricing

ModelProviderInputCachedOutputContextVerified
Qwen3.8 Max Alibaba $2 $0.25 $6 1 000k 2026-08-03
Claude Haiku 4.5 (latest) Anthropic $1 $0.1 $5 200k 2025-10-15
Claude Opus 4.8 Anthropic $5 $0.5 $25 1 000k 2026-05-28
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Anthropic $3 $0.3 $15 1 000k 2026-03-13
DeepSeek Chat DeepSeek $0.14 $0.0028 $0.28 1 000k 2026-02-28
Gemini 2.5 Flash Google $0.3 $0.03 $2.5 1 048,576k 2025-06-17
Gemini 3.5 Flash Google $1.5 $0.15 $9 1 048,576k 2026-05-19
Mistral Medium (latest) Mistral $1.5 n/a $7.5 262,144k 2026-04-29
Kimi K3 Moonshot AI $3 $0.3 $15 1 048,576k 2026-07-16
GPT-4.1 mini OpenAI $0.4 $0.1 $1.6 1 047,576k 2025-04-14
GPT-4o OpenAI $2.5 $1.25 $10 128k 2024-08-06
GPT-5.5 OpenAI $5 $0.5 $30 1 050k 2026-04-23
Grok 4.5 xAI $2 $0.3 $6 500k 2026-07-08
GLM-5.2 Zhipu AI $1.4 $0.26 $4.4 1 000k 2026-06-13

Prices per 1M tokens (USD). Each model links to its official source. Seed values pending re-verification. See the methodology.