Methods and apparatus for indicating a base station's amount of ranging traffic to a mobile station (MS) and for selecting a base station (BS) for performing ranging based on the ranging traffic indication are provided. This notification may occur via a ranging loading parameter, such as a ranging loading factor (RLF) indicating the ratio of used ranging slots to available ranging slots, transmitted as a new TLV (Type-Length-Value) within the Uplink Channel Descriptor (UCD) of a (potential) serving BS or in the UCD of a Neighbor Advertisement (MOB_NBR-ADV) message for a neighbor BS. By selecting a BS with a certain level of unused ranging slots, the MS may exponentially decrease the ranging overhead (i.e., the average waiting time for the ranging procedures) when compared to a conventional MS that does not consider a BS's ranging overload when trying to perform ranging with the BS.