By utilizing an additional counter and monitoring the maximum state metric at each stage, only forward progressing modulo wrap-arounds will occur and these can be counted. After decoding this count information, it can be used with the initial and final state metric values from the decoder to compute the desired full path metric. The method only requires monitoring state metric wrap-arounds moving in one direction and hence only needs to increment the extra counter as opposed to having to do likewise in the opposite direction. In another embodiment, the method can handle both forward and backward progressions by incrementing and decrementing a counter.