Certain aspects of the present disclosure generally relate to wireless communications and, more particularly, to methods and apparatus for rate-matching a stream of bits encoded using polar codes. An exemplary method generally includes determining a target coding rate, RT, for transmitting a group of K information bits, based on a first coding rate, R1, corresponding to a first target block error rate (BLER) for a first transmission of a first redundancy version (RV) of the packet and a second coding rate, R2, corresponding to a second target BLER for a last transmission of a last RV of the packet; determining a circular buffer size, N, of a circular buffer for use in transmitting the first RV and the last RV of the packet; generating encoded information bits from the K information bits using a polar code having a mother code size of N; writing the encoded information bits to the circular buffer; determining a maximum number of retransmissions, based on a latency requirement for the packet; generating different RVs from the encoded information bits in the circular buffer, each RV based on a corresponding target BLER; and transmitting the first RV via a wireless medium.