Methods are proposed herein to perform rate matching for polar codes via circular buffering of the polar encoded bits. Embodiments are directed to methods of operation of a transmitting node in a wireless system including performing polar encoding of a set of information bits in accordance with a polar sequence of length N B to thereby generate N B coded bits. The method can further include interleaving the coded bits to thereby provide an interleaved coded bit sequence, and storing the interleaved coded bit sequence into a circular buffer of length N B . According to certain embodiments, the method can further include extracting N coded bits for transmission from the circular buffer. N can be greater than, equal to, or less than N B .