Survey Design & Character Limits
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Designing a Survey
| Item | Design Limit |
|---|---|
| Survey Title | 250 characters |
| Page Title | 100 characters |
| Page Description | 4000 characters |
| Question Text | 4000 characters |
| Text | 4000 characters |
| Custom Error Messages (required questions) | 250 characters |
| Custom Variable Name | 50 characters |
| Custom Variable Label | 255 characters |
| Matrix/Rating Scale questions (row choices) | 250 characters |
| Matrix/Rating Scale questions (column choices) | 100 characters |
| Multiple Choice questions | 200 answer choices |
| Checkboxes questions | 200 answer choices |
| Dropdown questions | 500 answer choices |
| Ranking questions | 250 answer choices |
| Multiple Textboxes questions | 200 answer choices |
| Matrix of Dropdown Menus questions | 9 columns 200 rows 200 answer choices per menu |
| Matrix/Rating Scale questions | 16 columns 100 rows |
| Questions | 100 questions per page 5000 questions per survey |
| Pages | 400 pages per survey |
Please note these are the hard limits for survey designs. You might reach practical limits sooner or have issues loading your survey around 200+ pages or 1000+ questions if (1) you're using a lot of complex logic (2) you use a lot of text formatting, images, or videos or (3) the speed of your network connection, CPU, or RAM isn't strong. We suggest breaking down large surveys into two or more smaller surveys.
What counts towards character limits?
When you add formatting to your text—like creating a link, bolding text, or changing the font color—HTML tags are added, which count toward any character limits.
Taking a Survey
Respondents may encounter limits while taking a survey, based on how the survey creator decided to validate open-ended fields. In addition to defining character limits for some question types, survey creators can also choose to require respondents to answer the question within a certain range or limit.
If you're a respondent, contact the author of the survey if an error message on a question is preventing you from completing the survey.
TIP! Customize the Error Message. If you set a specific range or limit on the number of required answer choices, customize the error message to be specific about these requirements. This will ensure that the respondents know what they did wrong so that they can successfully advance through the survey.