Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communication are described for polar coding with rate matching. A transmitter may construct input channels into a polar encoder to provide an information bit vector that does not include punctured or shortened bits. One or more transmission capacity factors may be used in identifying the information bit vector, which may be mapped to one or more of a codeword length of the polar code or a number of transmitted bits in each codeword. A number of different rate matching schemes may be available for transmissions, and may be selected based on one or more polar coding parameters. In some cases, mapping techniques may be used in two or more different rate matching schemes.