Apparatuses and methods for beam failure recovery under a unified transmission configuration indication (TCI) framework in a wireless communication system. A method for operating a user equipment (UE) includes receiving information associated with a control resource set (CORESET) configured for the UE and identifying, based on the information, a type of the CORESET configured for the UE. The method further includes determining, based at least in part on the identified type of the CORESET, a set of beam failure detection (BFD) reference signals (RSs) to use and monitoring for a beam failure instance (BFI) based on the set of BFD RSs.