Certain aspects of the present disclosure provide techniques for configuring hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) soft combining for a subset of HARQ processes supported by a user equipment (UE). A method performed by the UE generally includes transmitting capability information indicating a capability of the UE to perform hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) soft combining and receiving, based on the capability information, configuration information from the BS configuring the UE to perform soft combining on only a subset of a set of HARQ processes.