Methods are proposed herein to perform rate matching for polar codes via circular buffering of the polar encoded bits. Embodiments are directed to methods of operation of a transmitting node in a wireless system including performing polar encoding of a set of information bits in accordance with a polar sequence of length NB to thereby generate NB coded bits. The method can further include interleaving the coded bits to thereby provide an interleaved coded bit sequence, and storing the interleaved coded bit sequence into a circular buffer of length NB. According to certain embodiments, the method can further include extracting N coded bits for transmission from the circular buffer. N can be greater than, equal to, or less than NB.