Methods and systems are provided for enabling adaptive per-antenna rate control based on network conditions for a wireless communication device (WCD). The WCD and a radio access network (RAN) may form a communication link that has multiple data streams, each data stream received by a different antenna of the WCD. Each data stream may have a different encoding, and thus a different data rate. Additionally, each encoding may have an associated signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirement to decode. The more complicated an encoding, the higher the data rate the encoding supports. However, more complicated encodings also need a higher SINR to decode. By first decoding a data stream with a low-complexity encoding, the data can be subtracted from a data stream having a more complicated encoding. Therefore, the SINR of the data stream having a more complicated encoding may be increased, and increase the likelihood of it being decodable.