Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communications are described. In some systems, a user equipment (UE) may transmit feedback to a base station indicating phase values for sub-bands in a bandwidth part (BWP). The base station may use the phase feedback to perform precoding on a set of beams. To support a reduced payload overhead for the feedback, the UE may implement differential phase feedback. For example, the UE may divide the BWP into a number of sub-band groups and may generate, for each sub-band group of each beam, a first set of bits indicating an absolute phase value for a first sub-band of the sub-band group. The UE may additionally generate a second set of bits indicating differential phase values for the other sub-bands of each sub-band group. The UE may report the first and second sets of bits for the beams to the base station for precoding.