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If you run a contracting business in Texas, California, Florida, Arizona or almost any US metro, a good share of your missed calls come from people who would rather text in Spanish. According to the US Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey, 44.9 million people age 5 and older speak Spanish at home, and 58.9% of them speak English "very well" (USAFacts). That second number is why bilingual texts are often the safest default: they work for both groups.
This page gives you 31 ready-to-use missed call text back messages in Spanish and in English + Spanish. You can also build your own in our free missed call text generator, which now has a Spanish and a bilingual mode and counts segments as you edit.
TL;DR: About 44.9 million people in the US speak Spanish at home, so a Spanish or bilingual missed call text can be the difference between a reply and a lost job. Watch the accents. é, ñ, ü, ¿ and ¡ are in the standard SMS alphabet (GSM-7), but á, í, ó and ú are not, and just one of them switches the whole text to UCS-2, cutting the limit from 160 to 70 characters per segment. The 31 templates below avoid those four letters without misspelling anything, and every one fits in one segment with a typical business name. Have a native speaker review them before use, and treat replies like BAJA or ALTO as opt-outs.
Why accents change the cost of a text
US carriers bill and deliver texts in segments. A text written only with characters from the standard GSM-7 alphabet gets 160 characters per segment (153 per part once it's split). If the text contains even one character outside that alphabet, the whole message switches to UCS-2: 70 characters per segment (67 per part once split). Spanish is mostly safe, with four important exceptions:
| Character | In the GSM-7 alphabet? | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| é É | Yes | No change |
| ñ Ñ | Yes | No change |
| ü Ü | Yes | No change |
| ¿ ¡ | Yes | No change |
| á í ó ú | No | Whole text switches to UCS-2 (70 per segment) |
| Á Í Ó Ú | No | Whole text switches to UCS-2 (70 per segment) |
The alphabet is defined in the 3GPP standard TS 23.038. That standard also describes optional Spanish "national language" tables, but don't count on carriers using them: plan for the basic alphabet.
Here's the difference in practice, counted with the same encoder our generator uses:
| Version | Text | Encoding | Characters | Segments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fully accented | Hola, somos Rivera Services. Está cerrado ahora, pero recibimos su llamada. ¿Cuándo le conviene que le llamemos? Responda STOP para no recibir más mensajes. | UCS-2 | 156 | 3 |
| Accent-safe | Hola, somos Rivera Services. Ya cerramos, pero vimos su llamada. ¿A qué hora le conviene que le llamemos? Responda STOP para darse de baja. | GSM-7 | 139 | 1 |
Same message, a third of the segments. If you send a few hundred missed call texts a month, that adds up, and multi-part texts are more likely to arrive out of order on older phones.
Get the full guide
This is a shortened version. Read the full guide with all scripts on Peace Call.
Originally published at getpeacecall.com.
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