Certain aspects of the present disclosure generally relate to techniques for compactly describing lifted low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. A method by a transmitting device generally includes selecting a first lifting size value and a first set of lifting values; generating a first lifted LDPC code by applying the first set of lifting values to interconnect edges in copies of a parity check matrix (PCM) having a first number of variable nodes and a second number of check nodes; determining a second set of lifting values for generating a second lifted LDPC code for a second lifting size value based on the first lifted PCM and the first set of lifting values; encoding a set of information bits based the first lifted LDPC code or the second lifted LDPC code to produce a code word; and transmitting the code word.