Aspects disclosed herein relate to effectively handling failure and retry mechanisms during pre-registration for an eHRPD optimized handover. In one example, a UE may be equipped to detect one or more instances of failure during a pre-registration procedure as part of an optimized handover process. The UE may further be equipped to perform one or more pre-registration retry processes based on the detected one or more instances of failure. In one aspect, the one or more instances of failure may include any combination of a permanent LTE connection failure, a temporary LTE connection failure, a session negotiation failure, a virtual connection failure when bringing up a data call, a link control protocol (LCP) failure, etc.