Certain aspects of the present disclosure provide techniques for narrowband transmissions with finer granularity of reserved resources. A method that may be performed by a user equipment (UE) includes receiving a configuration indicating first resource elements (REs) reserved from being used for narrowband Internet of things (NB-IoT) transmissions in a subframe; determining second REs, in the subframe, for narrowband reference signals (NRSs), based on the configuration; and processing the NRSs on the second REs in the subframe.