A new radio (NR) bit prioritization procedure that may be executed by a UE and a base station is disclosed, resulting in transmission and reception of modulation symbols having prioritized bits. For example, a transmitter may encode a code block using low-density parity-check code to generate a stream of encoded bits. The transmitter may arrange the encoded bits in one or more modulation symbols according to a relative priority of the encoded bits. The highest priority bits may be located in the most significant bits of the modulation symbol, and therefore be less likely to experience errors. A receiver may receive the modulation symbols and reorder the encoded bits according to the coding scheme based on the relative priority prior to decoding the encoded bits. The prioritization of the bits within the modulation symbols may provide improved block error rates over sequential mapping of encoded bits to symbols.