A user equipment (UE) can transmit a beam failure recovery request using contention-based physical random access channel (PRACH) resources to supplement and/or replace non-contention-based resources for transmitting the beam failure recovery request. The UE can reduce beam recovery latency by informing its intention for beam failure recovery by transmitting a beam failure recovery request during the random access channel (RACH) procedure. The base station may dedicate a set of RACH resources that can be used for both transmitting regular contention-based RACH messages and beam failure recovery request.