Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communications are described. A wireless communication system may support techniques for correlation-based hardware sequences for layered decoding. In some cases, a user equipment (UE) may partition layers of a submatrix associated with a parity check decoding procedure into a first set of layers and a second set of layers. The UE may sort each set of layers into a respective set of layer orders (e.g., a first set of layer orders and a second set of layer orders) based on an associated set of correlation values. The UE may combine the first set of layer orders and the second set of layer orders to obtain a set of combined layer orders and may select a decoding schedule from a set of decoding schedules used for decoding each of the combined layer orders based on respective schedule lengths for the set of decoding schedules.