Methods and apparatuses for uplink multi-beam operation. A method for operating a user equipment (UE) includes receiving, from a base station, an aperiodic reference signal (RS) trigger and, at a later time instant, an uplink (UL) beam indication. The method further includes decoding the aperiodic RS trigger and decoding the UL beam indication. The method includes determining, from the UL beam indication, a transmit spatial filter applied to a signal to be transmitted on a physical uplink shared channel (PUSCH) or a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH) and transmitting, to the base station, the signal on the PUSCH or the PUCCH. The transmit spatial filter corresponds to a reference RS. The UL beam indication includes a state of a transmit configuration associated with the reference RS.