A method and apparatus for estimating a signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) are disclosed. A received signal includes signal energy on multiple basis functions. Desired signal energy in the received signal is transformed onto a first basis function with constant polarity. The desired signal energy is estimated by coherently averaging signal energy on the first basis function. A noise power is estimated by averaging signal energy on each basis function other than the first basis function and accumulating the averaged signal energy from the basis function other than the first basis function and scaling the accumulated signal energy to account for a noise estimate from the first basis function. An SIR is estimated by dividing the desired signal energy by the noise power.