The Unicode Private Use Area: Custom Characters for Special Needs

Unicode reserves certain ranges of code points as the Private Use Area (PUA) — regions where organizations and individuals can assign their own characters without conflict with the standard. These code points will never be assigned by the Unicode Consortium, making them safe for custom applications, corporate logos, and specialized symbols.

The Three PUA Ranges

The BMP Private Use Area spans U+E000–U+F8FF (6,400 code points). The Supplementary Private Use Area-A covers U+F0000–U+FFFFF (65,534 code points), and Supplementary Private Use Area-B covers U+100000–U+10FFFD (65,534 code points). Together they provide more than 130,000 assignable code points for private use.

Common Uses

The most widespread use of the PUA is in icon fonts. Font Awesome, Material Icons, and many other icon libraries place their icons in the BMP PUA so they can be referenced by code point in CSS. Apple's system fonts use PUA code points for proprietary symbols like the Apple logo (U+F8FF in the BMP PUA — though this is a well-known Apple-specific assignment). Game consoles and embedded systems also use PUA for custom symbols.

Interoperability Limitations

PUA characters have no standard meaning. A PUA code point that renders as a lock icon in one font will render as a different glyph in another font, or as a replacement character (□) in a font with no PUA mappings. This makes PUA text non-portable. When sharing text outside your controlled environment, avoid PUA characters or convert them to their intended Unicode equivalents.

PUA in This Site

Browse PUA code points in our Unicode blocks reference by navigating to the Private Use Area block. Individual characters are shown in our character browser, where you can see their encoding in UTF-8 and other formats even though they lack standard names or properties.