Digital communications systems employ Forward Error Correction (FEC) for robustness against fading, noise and interference. FEC is designed to support different code rates to meet different requirements. Different code rates may be achieved by performing puncturing or repetition operation. At the receiver the decoding may be performed on the baseline code rate to enable common decoder module. To enable this capability, the input to the decoder of the error correcting code must be initialized to zeros for the bit positions corresponding to bits that are not transmitted. For high throughput systems, it is not efficient to initialize particular bit positions to zero. A method and apparatus are disclosed for joint Rate Matching and deinterleaving that enable the decoder to begin the decoding operation on the received bits without explicitly initializing the punctured bit positions to zero.