An adaptive power control method for a CDMA mobile radio telephone system is disclosed which operates similarly to a fixed increment and decrement power control method in the portion where the slope of the channel signal due to a fading effect is steep when the transmission power of a mobile station is adjusted. In the portion where the slope of the channel signal is gentle, like the peak portion of the channel signal, the granular noise can be improved by using the Jayant's equations. In accordance with the present invention, the fading effect in the mobile radio channel can be efficiently compensated without giving much load to a forward link since a mobile station determines the variation of the backward channel signal by using the statistical characteristics of a power control command (1 bit) transmitted from a base station. Further, an amount of interferences among a plurality of users can be reduced because the variation (variance) of a receiving power at the base station caused by the fading effect in each mobile station is made small. Thus, the overall performance of the system can be significantly improved in accordance with the present invention.