Techniques for generalized pilot interference cancellation in a communications receiver. In an exemplary embodiment, a residual pilot is cancelled from a post-traffic cancellation signal following initial first-pass pilot cancellation. Residual pilot cancellation is achieved by adding the first-pass cancelled pilot as earlier stored in memory back to the post-traffic cancellation signal, and pilot filtering the resulting signal to generate an improved pilot interference estimate. In an alternative exemplary embodiment, an arbitrary number of iterations may be applied to generate the pilot interference estimate by successively storing each generated pilot interference estimate in memory.