Techniques for controlling transmit power for a data transmission sent on multiple data channels, which may be intermittently active, are described. Each data channel is monitored for activity (e.g., based on an error correction code, received signaling information, received block energy, and so on) and deemed to be dormant or not dormant (e.g., based on the amount of elapsed time since activity was last detected on the data channel). A signal quality (SIR) target may be maintained for each non-dormant data channel and updated based on the status of received data blocks for the data channel. A final SIR target, used for power control of the data transmission, may be set to the highest SIR target among the SIR targets for the non-dormant data channels. The final SIR target may also be updated directly based on the status of received data blocks for the non-dormant data channels.