Systems and methods for providing bandwidth adaptive reference signals are disclosed. In one embodiment, a wireless device receives a downlink signal from a base station in a cellular communication network on a corresponding downlink carrier, where a number of time domain units per frame in the downlink signal that carry reference symbols is determined based on, or is otherwise a function of, a system bandwidth of the downlink carrier. In addition, in some embodiments, a number of frequency domain units that carry reference symbols is also a function of the system bandwidth of the downlink carrier. The wireless device processes the reference symbols to provide one or more desired features such as, for example, synchronization, radio resource management measurements, channel estimation, or the like.