The Unicode Consortium opened public beta review for Unicode 18.0 on May 26, 2026. It adds 13,047 new characters — four historical scripts, three currency symbols, and a draft slate of 9 new emoji. Here's everything confirmed, and what's still pending before the September 2026 final release.
On May 26, 2026, the Unicode Consortium opened the public beta review for Unicode 18.0, following February 2026's alpha review. The draft repertoire adds 13,047 characters, bringing the total encoded repertoire to 172,848 characters once finalized.
About 90% of that growth is historical writing systems, not new emoji, spread across four new scripts: Small Seal (11,328 ideographs, an ancient Chinese seal-script form), Jurchen (914 characters, the historic ideographic script used in northeastern China during the Jin and Ming dynasties), Proto-Cuneiform (323 numeric characters, among the earliest writing systems in human history), and Chisoi (40 characters, a modern script used for the Kurmali language in northeast India).
The rest of the release is what most people will actually notice: three new currency symbols (Maldivian rufiyaa, Omani rial, and UAE dirham), 72 historical mathematical symbols, 73 musical symbols, and a draft slate of 9 new emoji.
"Beta" and "final" are different milestones, and "final" and "on your device" are two more after that. Here's the full sequence and where it currently sits.
| Milestone | Date | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Alpha review opened | Feb 10, 2026 | ✅ Done |
| Beta review opened | May 26, 2026 | ✅ Done |
| Public feedback window | Through Jul 7, 2026 | ✅ Closed |
| Unicode 18.0 final release | Expected September 2026 | 🔄 Pending |
| Emoji 18.0 final approval | Expected September 2026 | 🔄 Pending |
| Platform / keyboard adoption | Not yet scheduled | ⏳ Not started |
This table reflects publicly reported status as of this page's last update, not a live check against the Unicode Consortium's own tracker. The character repertoire is considered "stable" at beta — characters could still be modified or removed, but that would need strong justification this late in the process.
Every character in this release follows the same two-step path our other Check pages already track: the Unicode Consortium finalizing a character, and a platform actually shipping support for it. We're already tracking that exact gap for one release-specific example — see where the UAE dirham symbol stands on that path — and for last year's release in our Unicode 17.0 new emoji rollout tracker, updated platform by platform as support ships.
The same logic applies to the three new currency symbols in this release — browse the ones you can already type at currency symbols — and to any character your keyboard doesn't have a dedicated key for, which our alt codes page covers as the copy-paste workaround in the meantime.
Unicode 18.0 is expected to publish as final in September 2026, alongside its emoji companion release, Emoji 18.0. The scripts and symbols above are largely locked in at this stage; the one part of this release still worth watching closely is the 9-emoji draft slate — Cracking Face, Pickle, Meteor, and the rest — which we've broken out symbol by symbol, including which ones are winning the public vote, in a companion entry. We'll update this page once Unicode 18.0 itself finalizes.
Browse symbol and emoji collections, or look up one character's full identity — codepoint, meaning, and device support.
Open the Unicode Library →Timeline and repertoire figures per the Unicode Consortium's official beta review announcement and unicode.org/versions/Unicode18.0.0, with additional context from symbl.cc's coverage of the release.