Methods, systems, and devices are described for managing power of a user equipment (UE). A UE modem may determine the state of charge of the battery to determine that the battery is in one of two or more charge state levels, and may invoke one or more modem power saving modes based on the charge state level. Power saving modes may include, for example, reducing a number of available receive chains in a UE, initiating a time delay between one or more frequency scan requests performed by the UE, reducing a rate of neighbor search requests performed by the UE, providing a buffer status report (BSR) parameter that indicates a reduced amount of buffer data relative to an actual amount of buffer data for the UE, and/or adjusting a maximum transmit power level for an uplink channel.