Systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for multi-destination TCP communications using bit indexed explicit replication (BIER). In some examples, a system can generate a TCP packet associated with a TCP session involving a set of destination devices, and encode an array of bits into the TCP packet to yield a TCP multicast packet. The array of bits can define the destination devices as destinations for the multicast packet. The system can transmit the TCP multicast packet towards the destination devices through a BIER domain. The system can receive acknowledgements from a first subset of the destination devices. Based on the acknowledgements, the system can determine that the first subset of the destination devices received the multicast packet and a second subset of the destination devices did not receive the multicast packet. The system can then retransmit the multicast packet to the second subset of the destination devices.