Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communications are described. In some wireless systems, a base station centralized unit (CU) may communicate with a user equipment (UE) through a multi-hop backhaul architecture. This multi-hop backhaul connection may include a donor base station and any number of relay base stations connected via backhaul links. In some cases, the relay base stations or the UE may experience data congestion in a logical channel-specific buffer. The relay base stations or UE may implement backpressure signaling (e.g., in the medium access control (MAC) layer) to mitigate the congestion. A wireless device operating as a mobile termination (MT) endpoint may transmit a backpressure report message to a wireless device operating as a base station distributed unit (DU) endpoint for the logical channel. The base station DU may adjust a scheduling rate for data unit transmissions over the indicated logical channel based on the backpressure report.