In one of many possible embodiments, a system for optimizing bit utilization in data encoding is provided. The exemplary system includes a data processing subsystem configured to identify a total number of unique characters within a set of data, which number represents an original base of representation of the set of data. The data processing subsystem is further configured to convert the set of data to a base of representation that is higher than the original base of representation and then encode the base-converted data with a fixed-length encoding scheme.